How Did I Get Here?

I think every big idea starts with a great story. MotherFlustered started in 2017 as a big idea that has taken years to come together and the only way to really understand it is to hear the great story that surrounds it.

Content cred to Google for the screen shot definition of great.

For a minute, we have to travel a lot further back in time than the year 2017 to get to really get an idea about the beginning of the story. I have been described as a geriatric millennial. Rude, by the way. I was born in 1980. Somehow, I think the years in which I did my growing up really helps set the tone and illustrate who I am and the trajectory of my life.

My formative years were spent with Sesame Street, Mr. Rodgers, Lambchop and some zany scientist named Beakman, all of which I contribute fueling my constant strive to feed my curiosity. We traveled some to remote areas of the woods in Colorado and North Wisconsin which helped ignite my infatuation with the natural world. I read National Geographic, wanted to be Jane Goodall and marry David Attenborough when I grew up. I was even promised a chimpanzee for my 10th birthday due to my obsession, which turned out to be virtually impossible for the promise-r to follow through with due to the leagalities of the situation.

For me, the 90’s were dominated by erratic, self-guiding navigation of my teenaged years soundtracked by Nirvana, the Foo, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, STP (Stone Temple Pilots for the non-geriatric millennial crowd), Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age and others. Those years are pretty hazy due to the overwhelming quantity of alcohol that flooded the majority of them but I do remember feeling lost, trapped and uncomfortable which probably helps explain the playlist.

I was married and divorced by the time I graduated high school, a wife again and a mom by 21, a widow at 22…. All of which only compounded all of the lost, trapped and uncomfortable feelings I had been accumulating. The rest of my twenties and up through my mid-thirties were spent doing all the chaotic and unsustainable things meant to satiate the desires of the damaged, self- preservative monster living inside of me that I had developed as a coping mechanism out of years of ignored and glossed-over trauma and damage. What I didn’t recognize was that all of these coping mechanisms and techniques meant to satisfy the insatiable needs of that monster were actually doing further damage.

My late thirties, and the spawning of MotherFlustered, began a period of what I can only describe as some sort of awakening. I dried up, became aware of the benefits of self-reflection, and took responsibility for healing the unresolved traumas that I had spent a lifetime collecting as if they were some sort of valuable trinket. For the first time in my life, I started realizing my own boundaries, the repercussions of not protecting them, the strength of my values and the difference it makes in my happiness when I allow myself to live closer to and more in harmony with them. Let me explain.

In 2018, my life hit this wiggle in the road that derailed everything, at least that is how I perceived it. We had moved, I had a significant injury that lead to the discovery of a cancer scare that resulted in a traumatic surgery with a rough recovery all in a very short amount of time. I was effectively knocked off the delicate balancing act I had been maintaining until this point.

I did what I do in times of high stress. Retreat. I sunk back into myself, surrounding myself in a cave of self-pity. It was a new low for me and it felt stupid because I had lived through so much in my life up to this point and the fact that I felt so broken made me think, “Why in the world is this what breaks me?!?” Little did I know that I wasn’t quite broken yet.

With everything that 2018 dealt in my hand, I had lost touch with an important lesson I had learned in my years of being a stay-at-home mom. The lesson that I must to have something that gives me a sense of purpose outside of my SAHM duties. For a while in my early to mid-thirties, I filled this drive for purpose with different direct sales endeavors and I learned a lot about small business marketing and self-promotion, how to make friends and nurture relationships, how to express myself and not worry so much about the nay-sayers, how to learn new skills and the importance of continued learning. All of it worked okay until it didn’t anymore.

My glass-half-full, positive attitude that I had worn like a mask to hide all of the pain trapped inside of me was nowhere to be found. It had been replaced with a mind that had become trapped in a traffic jam of self-destructive thoughts that made me feel worthless and resulted in me being paralyzed in fear. Fear of screwing up, being noticed, not being noticed, having no direction, no purpose. I wondered, “What is the the point?”

Nothing seemed to work, especially once the pandemic hit, and so I did less and less. There was absolutely zero sense of purpose. The cave that I had secluded myself in had become a hole that I saw quickly becoming something of a grave. I was lost and had become a danger to myself in a way that terrified me.

I did start picking up books to fill my time though, and started reconnecting with the importance of learning. I read on stoicism, druidry, taoism. Authors like Brooke Castillo, Ryan Holiday, Joshua Fields Ryan and Ryan Nicodemus, many other self-help types of books books on psychology, nutrition, naturopathy, etc. My mind began to open up to realization that habits and coping mechanisms I had developed out of long gone traumas were disrupting my peace of mind, my relationships, my daily operations capacity, my life’s potential. What the books were teaching me helped but I was still feeling stuck in my hole of despair.

Enter professional therapy for the first time in my life. Catrina, my therapist, didn’t really say a lot but she let me talk. A lot. I told her about the journey my reading was taking on, how my desire to help people had spawned the idea of a business all my own, I told her about all darkest thoughts which I had never spoken out loud and she didn’t recoil in disgust which was the reaction I expected if I were to ever speak about any of it 0ut loud. She offered encouragement to pursue my dreams and complimented my ideas. Things that I thought I shouldn’t need but, damn if it didn’t feel good to hear. The negativity in my head had been so loud for so long that the positive reinforcement that I should have had for my own dreams and ideas was nonexistent. So, I am working on it. Daily.

I had the realization during those years of utilizing my personality to benefit someone else’s sales company that it could be possible to utilize my personality and my ideas to create something that I could directly benefit from. Something that would be entirely for me. Not someone else. Now is the perfect time to work the baby steps to make that big idea a reality.

In order to get to this point, the official launch of MotherFlustered, five years after its conception, I know that none of it would have been possible without every one of the experiences I have had the opportunity to live through. Life is full of ups and downs. There would be no appreciation for the glorious moments without the experience of the miserable, horrible or terrifying ones. MotherFlustered is meant to be one of the glorious moments. The preverbal lemonade out of all the lemons.

I received the advice on the road to launch of MotherFlustered and it was to design the voice of MotherFlustered as that of my own, giving advice to my younger self. 🤯 This blew my mind.

I was struggling though with who my audience might would be, with what my message would be, my values… not personally, I had finally reached a point in my life that I had started living far closer to my values than I ever had before. But, MotherFlustered is a business and my mind was trying to draw a clear line between MotherFlustered and Brandi Vermillion. Trying to make MotherFlustered be something completely new and separate. An invented extension of myself that had never existed before.

That “Give advice to your younger self,” piece of insight that just happened to come along and fall into my lap couldn’t have been any better timed. It was like the universe knew just when I would be able to really hear it. To take it in and implement it in a way that would effect my life with positive change and maybe even the lives of others.

Through parenting my inner child, “giving advice to my younger self” and healing the long-gone traumas of my past, I get to share those lessons with the hope that my sharing will create hope for you. That is MotherFlustered.