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Thrive Like a Mother Podcast
I'm Ebony and I'm a girl mama of three beautiful souls. I'm learning how navigate trauma healing while building the life I never dreamed was possible. I'm a survivor of childhood abuse and for the longest time, I believed that if anyone knew my story, I wouldn't be worthy of love. Many years later and now I know that it far from the truth.
On the Thrive Like a Mother podcast, I'll share the resources and tools I've used to gain a healthier mindset while healing from my trauma. Here we're about honesty and transparency. Because at the root of it all, my purpose in creating this podcast is so that you know you are not alone in your journey.
There may be laughter, there may be tears, we'll do it all by linking arms and learning to thrive together.
Thrive Like a Mother Podcast
[A Mama's Quiet Moments] Daring to dream bigger and do things differently
Inspired during my first month of maternity leave, I invite you into my world as I reflect on the significance of creating a life that supports me being more present in my family and children's lives. I share my plans of creating purpose driven stream of income by honing in on the power of my intuition, and using journaling as a way to process my emotions for clarity and growth.
In this episode, my hope is to encourage other millennial mamas to reflect on their own paths, daring to align their lives with their biggest dreams and do things differently.
Thank you so much for listening in! If anything in this episode resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you left a review or shared it with a friend or on social media.
And don't forget to tag me so I can personally thank you for helping me get the word out.
Follow and chat with me on Instagram:
Podcast account - @thrivelikeamother.podcast
Personal account - @thrive.empowered
Sending you light and love always!
Hello, loves, and welcome to part two of this Thrive Like a Mother mini-series , A Mama's Quiet Moments. And this one I'm really excited about because I am specifically talking to my millennial mamas, who are also deciding to do things differently in their lives. ADeciding to do things differently in their lives, and not just in their lives but in parenthood and motherhood, just trying to approach conversations and the way that we are raising our kids in a different way and also asking differently for ourselves, just daring to dream bigger than we ever have. And so this conversation is just really close to my heart because I feel like here, with my third little one, I am really really feeling that pull, that push to dream bigger and want to do things in such a majorly different way than I was taught, than what I saw, and so that's what today's quiet moments. We're doing it a little bit differently, today here I'm going to talk to you first and then I'm going to share the voice clip. This one I think I was just a few, actually it was about almost a month after Henry was born. He wasn't a month old yet, but he was pretty, pretty, dang close, and so, as I was reflecting in this voice memo, I talk about me just chatting with another mama and just having this realization of wanting to do things differently as far as the way I wanted to work and the way I wanted to be able to show up for my family. And so this big, this big thought it's not something that I had an example of.
Ebony Fleming:Right I was sitting here on maternity leave a month and realizing that maternity leave was only for such a limited amount of time. Of course I've been through maternity leave before, but I don't think it hit me as hard as it did with Henry. I started to think about things and process that I really wanted to not only hold on to Henry as long as I could, but also be able to show up for my girls. You know, as much as I could, without having kind of that necessity in the background, to show up for a corporate job where things are a little bit more stricter, needing to be on meetings, not really having as much control of your schedule. I will say I'm very grateful I am in a position where I have a little bit more flexibility than I've had in the past, but there's still that notion I'm working for someone else's company, someone else's goals, and with that comes time constraints. And so I decided really during this time as I was talking to her y'all will hear this in the voice memo I decided right at that point that I was going to do things differently. I felt like, just because the examples I had seen felt comfortable, I knew what those looked like, I had modeled those honestly in the past.
Ebony Fleming:It didn't mean for me that I had to stay in that lane forever. We're always in a place, y'all, where we can decide to change, decide to try different things out, especially in parenthood. There is no manual or rule book that says here's how you raise your kids. There's nothing like that out there. And so, especially in this world where we are, our kids are growing up much differently than we did back, you know, 30, 20 something years ago. We have to look at things differently because they have I mean I mean we all have access now to things at a much earlier age than maybe we did.
Ebony Fleming:I grew up not really having access to internet, I think, until I got to college, or really the beginning stages maybe around like middle school or high school, is when I started to have some semblance of access to internet and even still I wasn't really using it to like its fullest. I was, you on MySpace trying to have connections with my friends and things, and now, like these kids at the tap of a finger, have access to so much stuff. And so we have to think about doing things differently. There are different conversations that need to be had, different connections that we need to have, now with our kids more than ever. And thinking like through that, it helped me realize that like, yeah, this feeling is uncomfortable, not knowing, like that fear of the unknown, not knowing exactly how I'm going to show up for my kids or have these conversations, fearing sometimes that I "could do things differently.
Ebony Fleming:Because sometimes it's not really about if you can or not. You always can, right, you always have the choice. It's really the fear of am I going to be successful? And for me, I decided that you know what? I don't have to be a perfect mom all the time, but I do want to be their mom, I want to be the one that they come to when they have questions. And if I don't know, I want to be brave enough to say baby, I don't know, let's figure it out together, because that truly is how life is we don't all know everything. So I really felt this pull. Instead of holding on to that, am I going to be successful at being able to show up for my kids in the way that I want? You know, having that imposter syndrome when really all they want is for me to be their mama and be the best that I can be.
Ebony Fleming:Once I kind of got past and processed those emotions and I will say they still come up every once in a while, especially as we hit certain parts of, like their childhood that maybe you know I hadn't processed from my own childhood. You know the way things used to be. There's some navigation that needs to happen, right, and so I realized that, not only in me wanting to do things differently, not only was that something I wanted to take on, but I wanted to take it on because I want it bigger, more for my, for my babies. And I think, as you hear this voice memo, you'll understand that you really have to like when you're deciding... When you're when you're dreaming, right, when you're dreaming and deciding to take steps towards that dream, no matter the fear that you have, the uncomfortable feelings. Really, guys, try to focus on the reason why you want to do those things differently. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do things in a different way. There's nothing wrong with wanting to do things in a different way. There's nothing wrong with dreaming bigger than you ever have before.
Ebony Fleming:Like write, write those dreams down, say them out loud to yourself, to someone that you trust, and focus again on the reason like why? Why am I wanting to do this? And for me, it comes down to my babies. I want more for them. I want to be able to show up more for them. I want them to know that they always have access to me. And for me and my situation, that is not staying in corporate life for the rest of my life. I want to be there now, like when they are doing their kindergarten plays and all these things that are coming up in their lives. I want to be there and I want to make sure I'm making the choices in my life, making these decisions that support me in doing that. And so do it y'all. Dare to dream bigger, dare to do things differently and know that things may get a little bit uncomfortable. Things may come up for you yourself that may trigger you and make you think about your own childhood and the way that it was, and that's okay, that's okay.
Ebony Fleming:Another thing I bring up in this memo is journaling. Right, and I really took a different take on it. It doesn't always have to be pen and paper y'all. As you see from this, I had relied very heavily on voice memos and even tapping into the technology that we have. We have so many journal apps that are available, even just a simple notes app on your phone or your computer using the notepad just to get those thoughts out. Because if you let those dreams and those thoughts just sit up there and bounce around in your head, sometimes they might just bounce so much that you get so scared to even take an inkling of a step of action on it, of a step of action on it. So I'm going to hop into it now. Here it is y'all, and I hope you enjoy.
Ebony Fleming:Okay, so at some point this is going to become an episode. I have a lot of these. I think I'm going to call them my heart note episodes on here that are starting to build up.
Ebony Fleming:I've been journaling a lot, a lot, and when I say journaling, I mean using the journal app on my phone, because sitting down right now with a pen to paper is a little bit harder, but I'm able to still like sit and get my thoughts out with my phone in my hand. I can, you know, I can type, I can text, I can journal that way. But anyway, that's not what I came on this app for. I was messaging one of my very close friends back just a second ago, back just a second ago, and I'm telling her, like all the updates and things um, we do voice memos back and forth. So I'm, I'm speaking out loud, telling her the updates and things, and at some point it veers off into me realizing that Henry will be a month old tomorrow and it's already been. It's already been a whole month that he's been on this earth, which also signified for me oh my gosh. That also means I only have about a month and a half of maternity leave left and then I will need to go back to work. And I had this visceral reaction, this visceral reaction, just emotion, come through that I haven't felt before. So let me give you the breakdown right.
Ebony Fleming:I watched my mama, you know, raise me and I would watch her work and work a lot. She was working, she was doing her master's, she was doing all the things right and I've done that. I've done that with Olivia. I worked and went to school. Same thing with Jade, I worked and did my master's. I've done the things. And you know, you can always model like what you see your parents do, right. It's kind of like not that you have to, but you know sometimes it will happen because it's what you've seen, it's what you know. And so I've done those things. I've worked and had my girls and felt powerful and like a badass and always knew that my first priority was still always them, even before the work and the school. It was still always them at the top.
Ebony Fleming:But I am, with Henry here, seeing different, and I think that's because of the space that I'm in now, where I'm starting to build this sacred community, where I'm starting to create things that will create passive streams of income into our family, so that I will still be able to support the way I've been supporting monetarily, because of course, that still is important. We've still got bills to pay right. And so, thinking about how my maternity leave is running out, I'm thinking about the days that we've already had in this month and how much I've loved the ease of it and the flow of it and the pace, and how it doesn't feel forced and how I'm still able to work on the things that I love and not feel like anxiety or pressure. And it made me realize and I was literally speaking this into the voicemail to her I said I don't want to go back Now. Granted, I already had known this before. Right, I created my exit plan for corporate quite a while back, when I was still pregnant with him. I knew that that was the path that I would eventually take.
Ebony Fleming:Family. Not going back immediately may not be what needs to happen, but I can, without a doubt, now say that I feel the gut pull, I feel like the intuition that this is like my path, that my path eventually will lead to not working corporate again, because it, you know, it will allow me to live with this ease that I've had. This one month that has gone by so fast with him, this one month that has shown me, you know, what I want for the rest of basically our lives, like I want to be here for my kids. I want to be able to pop out and um, go to Olivia's school plays or whatever is whatever is coming up, or pop in um to Jade when she's doing her pre-k stuff coming up, which I realize is now only in just a year she'll be in pre-k. So it, if anything, this month has shown me with Henry, it's shown me the life that I want every day, until they are old enough to not need me as much anymore, but I can still pop up on them if I want to. I want that life, I want that ease, and it made me. It made me emotional, but also grateful for realizing it, and grateful for realizing that it's possible and that it's not something that's without, that's not within reach, right? Because it is possible for me to make that dream happen, to make that dream a reality.
Ebony Fleming:Deep breath... Henry just totally took that deep breath with us. Yeah, that's all I've got for you, guys. I am always sending you so much light and love and, if anything, I hope this episode it might as well be a podcast episode at this point, guys. If anything, I hope that this episode just reminds you to feel what you need to feel, even if it's a little scary, and really work through and process those feelings like why am I feeling this way? Because it may help you come to some realizations that you maybe didn't even know you had, which, granted, I knew, I knew a hundred percent that I wasn't going to stay in corporate forever. You know, I've I've known that for a few years now, although you know I haven't known it all my life, but I've known it for a while. And this month of maternity leave, just of reflecting and everything has solidified that for me. So feel what you need to feel because it will create and... it will help you solidify the dreams and the path that you are on, and that you're on the right path, or it will help you realize a shift that you may need to make in your path. Yeah, those are my tips for you.
Ebony Fleming:And journal, y'all, reflect, even if you can't get down a pen and paper. Use your notes app, use the journal app that's now on the iphone, um, and I'm sure there are tons of other ways that you can journal, even this. Use your voice memos, you know. Talk it out. Anyway, y'all, send y'all light and love and see you next time.
Ebony Fleming:Thank you so much for listening. Loves, if anything in today's episode resonated with you, share it with your bestie or on social media and don't forget to tag me so we can chat about it or on social media, and don't forget to tag me so we can chat about it. As always, I'm sending you light and love, and remember you are worthy, you are enough and you deserve to thrive. Talk to you soon.
