Today, I am beyond excited and proud as my bold, beautiful, confident, empathetic, energetic, friendly first born turns FIVE!
I know that most parents say that having a child gave their life new meaning, clearer focus and the realisation that they needed to leave a legacy and Eden was the reason why we started the HR Consultancy and gave it her name, but there’s more.
This year on the day of her birth (and for the last week or so) has brought back so many emotions and revealed to me how far I’ve come both personally and professionally.
This is SO not the blog post that I had planned for today!
You see it took five years for my husband and I to have a pregnancy that ended successfully. Five years of waiting, and hoping, and excitement, then disappointment. We very nearly gave up trying.
For a while I couldn’t keep the faith and stopped seeing all the great things around me. My family, friends, career success … I could only focus on the one thing we didn’t have and I didn’t really share our struggle. To be honest I was not fun to be around.
So one day, when I was asked “How are you?” instead of my standard “fine”, I shared my pain and frustration with a wonderful wise woman, who arranged for a group of very wise women to listen and share with me.
I learnt about resilience. The importance of keeping positive, counting my blessings and not my letting disappointment stop me in my tracks. I learnt that either we can let the things that happen to us make or break us, or we can take life’s lessons, both negative and positive, and realise that it’s not the things that happen to us that makes the difference, but how we deal with them that determines our success.
And once, I started seeing things differently and stopped putting my life on hold, while waiting for the results of some fertility tests, we found out that we were pregnant with Eden.
I’m grateful for the lessons that I learnt through that period of my life because I wouldn’t have taken the step to start the business or overcome hurdles and persevered with building the business, had I not learnt to be resilient. Timing is everything!
So today, my first born is 5 and I am so grateful for the 10 years of lessons that she has taught me.