Mistakes, failures, setbacks… and moving forward
There’s an old song about regrets that says, “Mistakes and failures—yes, I’ve had a few, but too few to mention.” Well… I’m going to mention a few. A lot of what I know now—most of the wisdom and the wins—came straight out of what someone else might call mistakes, failures, or setbacks. They showed up in every part of my life, and they taught me resilience along the way.
I got married for the first time at 18, with a very romantic idea of what marriage was supposed to look like. “Naïve” doesn’t even cover it. I was a reader, and back then my shelves were basically all romance novels—so that tells you a lot right there. That same year I had my first child, a beautiful little boy. When I look back from my 80-year-old-self point of view, I feel incredibly lucky that he grew up to be a grounded, caring man—honestly, more than any mother could hope for. I’d love to take full credit, but the truth is I didn’t have the maturity yet to show up for him the way he deserved. I learned as I went, and I grew up right alongside him. I had two more children at 20 and 22, and by 23 I had three kids—each kind, each caring, and each deserving more than I was able to give at the time. Then at 26, my marriage fell apart. That failure taught me some hard lessons, but it also built my resilience, lit a fire in me to keep learning and succeeding, and brought out leadership traits—though back then, I called it surviving.
At 27, I moved away—just me and the kids—and the lessons kept coming. My resilience grew, and “independence” stopped being just a word and became my day-to-day life. At 28, I got married again and started a whole new chapter. I’d love to say it was easy, but it wasn’t. The man I married had been through a divorce too, and he carried the kind of emotional wounds that don’t just disappear. There were plenty of moments when walking away would’ve been the simplest choice. But the resilience I’d earned from earlier mistakes became my anchor, and this stubborn determination not to fail stayed right beside me. I kept moving forward even when it didn’t make much sense. Through counseling—personal, family, and marriage—I learned to live with my decisions and accept the outcomes. And I can honestly say now: it was worth the hard work, and even the heartache.
The truth is, you don’t grow—personally or professionally—in a vacuum. The choices I made didn’t just affect me. They affected my kids, my husband, my mother, my friends—and they shaped the person I became. And, I like who I am now. Do I wish I’d done some things differently? Absolutely. But then I have to ask myself: who would I be if I had?