Meeting the Mentor

The Wise Ones Who See

 

I didn’t grow up learning how to trust people.
I learned to survive silence.
To carry secrets in my bones.
To believe that loyalty meant swallowing pain whole
and never telling a soul.

​

My father was an alcoholic,
volatile and wounded.
My mother, devout and quiet,
kept her suffering hidden behind tight smiles
and long-suffering love.
That was the model:
Endure.
Stay loyal.
Don’t speak of what happens behind closed doors.

​

So I kept my world small.
My sisters were my circle —
and I believed that should be enough.
But they were living the same mythology:
safety in silence,
faith in appearances.

​

And so, there was no room for new voices.
No space for other ways of being to enter.
No mirrors that reflected back who I could become.

​

Until… a client —
a wise soul with eyes like soft lanterns —
opened a space I didn’t know I needed.

​

She was the first I told.
The first vault.
The first woman I let hold my truth
without judgment, without rescue.
I collapsed into her calm
while wrestling with the unbearable choice
of staying or leaving.
She didn’t fix it —
she simply listened.
And somehow, that was enough.

​

Another mentor came in the form of a counselor —
neutral and steady —
offering books like sacred seeds:
   Boundaries.
   Adult Children of Alcoholics.
   My Husband’s Secret War.

​

Each one tried to plant itself
in the hardened soil of my survival,
but I was still gripping too tightly
to the life I thought I had to control.

​

The wisdom was true.
But I wasn’t ready to let it in fully.

​

And still… the soil was softening.

​

Another woman entered — a client turned friend —
who had also walked the path I feared.
She too had three children,
had borne the weight of being the provider,
had left an unhappy marriage
and found joy on the other side.

​

She became a living prophecy:
a possibility I had never seen embodied.

​

These women were not many,
but they were enough.
Enough to begin loosening the grip
on the old story.

​

Most of the women around me were still performing,
still surviving,
still dressing up pain in perfection.

​

But these few —
these sacred midwives —
began to show me something else.

​

That perhaps…
life could be different.
That perhaps…
I was not alone.
That perhaps…
I could become more than the roles I had been handed.