My husband was smashing through an interior wall in the house he had bought for me. It was loud, unexpected, and by the time he was finished there was a hole large enough to fit a curved sofa through. Not just any sofa, either. It was a large, ornate crescent-shaped sofa that I had decided belonged in the sitting area of our second-floor primary bedroom, even though there was absolutely no reasonable way to get it up the stairs.

He got on a ladder and asked a neighbor friend to help him hoist it up through the opening. The two of them were a lot of manpower, but apparently not enough for that ridiculous sofa. My husband isn’t one to give up, especially when it comes to me, so naturally he went to Home Depot and rented a lift. Between him, the neighbor, and the lift, the couch finally made it into the bedroom. Did I mention it was champagne cream? Somehow, after all of that, there wasn’t a speck of dirt on it.

That sofa had actually been one of a pair I bought at the same auction where I found the chandelier I wrote about in another story. The other one is sitting in my current living room now, which makes it feel less like furniture and more like some strange surviving piece of a past life.

Its match was still in the old house when we turned over the keys to the realtor years later. I have no idea what the next people did with it. Maybe they sold it, maybe they trashed it, maybe they dragged it outside for some very strange lawn photos before donating it. It could still be there, for all I know. My style is hard to replicate.

By then, after everything we had been through in those four years, I didn’t care about the sofa anymore. I told my husband to leave it. I wasn’t going to ask him to go through all of that again just to get it back out.

This part is harder to write because I don’t really miss the things. I do miss the house sometimes, but even if someone handed me the keys tomorrow, I wouldn’t be the woman who lived there before. It was the last place I saw my dad alive.

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My husband got hired today, and I don’t think I realized how badly I needed some good news until it actually arrived.

If the offer had come with a sign-on bonus, I probably would’ve cried on the spot. I don’t say that to sound ungrateful for what we were given today. I’m incredibly grateful. I say it because getting a job and getting out from under everything that accumulated while you were waiting for one are two very different things.

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I’m dreaming again. This time it’s my ex-fiancee from 27 years ago. I’m looking for him in a crowd. In the dream, I still love him so much, but feel rejected by him, and at some point inside I feel the ache inside to beg him…”why don’t you love me anymore?”. But I don’t. It’s hard to remember enough to describe it in words. I can only say that in the dream state, I could feel that love that I had for him, and the pain of that loss. He would be in one room, then gone. It was like chasing a ghost.

I don’t know if the dream was just an old feeling resurfacing for some reason? I don’t miss him actively or think of him at all. Well, I guess the unconscious part of me did last night, and still loved him on that side of wonderland. I guess it was a sad dream to be looking for someone and they kept disappearing only because they don’t love you anymore.

It’s amazing how real that can feel. It’s like my brain said, here’s a selection from 1999. Enjoy!

Nineteen ninety-nine was a different version of me.

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There came a point when the weight of life stopped feeling like something I was carrying because it’s no longer something I can put down.

It settled into my mind before my feet even touch the floor each morning. I wake up already thinking about the thing that’s hanging over my head. If it isn’t today’s problem, it’s the one waiting next week, and the week after that. The calendar is already full. My mind keeps returning to it, no matter how hard I try to think about something else.

I’m tired, but it’s nothing sleep can repair.

It’s the kind of tired that comes from carrying worry all day and then carrying it through the night. I dream about it, or about themes that resemble something in waking life. I wake up sweating, and I never really rest, because my mind never does.

I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb now. Airplane mode. Silent. Whatever it takes to keep it quiet. The sound of a notification makes my stomach tighten. Someone knocking at the door startle…

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At forty-eight, I’ve been so many different women that sometimes I have to stop and remember they were all me. It honestly feels like I’ve lived several different lives.

I’ve lived long enough to realize that identity isn’t something you find once and keep forever. It changes. Sometimes it changes because you choose it. Other times, life chooses for you.

This is part one of a series about how my perfectly ordered world unraveled and the uncomfortable reality of who I became afterward. It’s my attempt to look back at the women I have been, not because I want to become any of them again, but because each one handed something to the next. Some arrived through joy. Others came through loss. All of them are still part of who I have become.

It can be deeply unsettling when the life you carefully planned begins to come apart. For years, I believed that if I made good decisions and built a secure life, I could trust it to hold.

After a broken engagement in my early twenties, my identity shifted into party girl. Party girl loved to dance in bars, and sometimes on them, go out with girls from work, stay out until whenever I felt like it, then go to work only a few hours later and be completely fine, already planning the next night out.

That state of mind and lifestyle shifted drastically not long after I met my first husband. I married him at twenty-eight, old enough to believe I understood the decision I was making and young enough to assume the life I was building would continue in the direction I had chosen.

I started to believe life was linear. Get married, have children, grow old together.

I became a wife, then almost immediately a mother, and for years those roles were woven so tightly into my identity that I didn’t know where I ended and they began. My life centered around my children, my home, and my husband.

I was checking the most predictable box on the list of what a successful, stable life was supposed to look like. Being married then meant I was the caretaker and organizer. I wore that identity well.

I brought my children to playgroups, the library, doctor visits, and school. I kept the house clean, planned and made dinners, managed our routines, and built my days around what everyone needed from me. That was my role. My identity centered around being a mom.

If someone asked what I did, or said, “Tell me about yourself,” the story I told about myself was always the same: “I’m a stay-at-home mom and wife.”

That was the whole story I knew how to tell, until the life I had built ended and took that version of me with it.

When the marriage ended, I didn’t only lose the future I thought I was building. I had to figure out who I was without the version of myself who believed she would remain married.

No one prepares you for how strange it feels when the identity you’ve lived inside for years disappears. Nothing about me changed overnight. I was still their mother. I still packed lunches, folded laundry, paid bills, and drove the children wherever they needed to go. The days kept asking the same things of me, even though I no longer felt like the same person inside them.

Then I would catch the words forming in my mind, my husband, and have to stop myself. Correct myself. Swallow the ache of it.

That woman no longer existed, though nearly everything she had been responsible for was still waiting for me each morning.

The children kept asking for him. Each time, I had to look at their faces and feel the loss all over again. I was already trying to understand what had happened to my own life while also watching them grieve the only version of our family they had ever known.

By then, I was a completely different person from the woman I had been before marriage and motherhood. I had become a mother of two. I had built a home and a daily life around a family I believed would remain intact. The separation wasn’t something I expected, so of course I wasn’t prepared. It felt like a death. A shattered dream. Another version of me left in the past.

My children were my world, so I built my life around them and moved forward. There wasn’t time to completely fall apart. They still needed meals, rides, clean clothes, reassurance, and some reason to believe we were going to be okay, even when I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

Though I was still a mother, the wife part of me died, honestly, probably earlier than the actual divorce. That identity was gone. I had to rebuild.

I had been the woman who believed marriages lasted. Then I became the divorced woman.

By then, the party girl was long gone. I didn’t miss her or wonder how to become her again. I had become a mother, and I embraced that life completely.

I had two children. I had loved, married, built a family, and watched it break apart. The woman I had been before all of that belonged to another life entirely.

That was one of the first times I realized there might be no going back.

I’m no longer trying to recover the woman I was before everything happened. I know where she went.

She became the woman writing this.

At the time, I thought divorce was the great dividing line in my life. I thought I would rebuild once, become someone new, and remain her.

I had no idea how many more times life would ask me to become someone else.

This is the beginning of a memoir series about identity, and the different women I’ve become through marriage, motherhood, divorce, grief, loss, and survival.

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Xoxo,

Viv

People loved the fun me. The one who threw parties, planned luncheons and events, and hosted for my friends’ MLMs. My generosity was boundless. I supplied all of the drinks and snacks, opened my home, and made sure everyone felt welcome. I loved doing it. I truly enjoyed showing off my home and generously opening it to friends so they could sit, laugh, and enjoy it with me.

I felt happy every day. I felt like I’d finally made it in life and that it would always be wonderful. People were drawn to my happy energy. They’re easy to attract as long as you stay easy to love.

And who’s easy to love? A happy, pretty, genuine, generous person with nothing to worry about except her next Scentsy order.

Once her life starts catching fire, they smell the smoke and the crowd begins to dwindle. They’re uncomfortable with your discomfort because you’re usually happy, generous, light, and friendly. That’s the version of you they know what to do with.

The people who surrounded me when things were fun weren’t as keen to be around me once I stopped performing in the circus. My life caught fire fast. There were sorrys, hopes and prayers, and all the usual words people offer when they don’t know what else to say. I really should stitch “hopes and prayers” onto a pillow for myself at this point.

Pretty soon, I just became someone they scrolled past on Facebook.

People say you find out who your people are when you go through a difficult time, but they don’t always mention how painful that realization is. Some of those people weren’t really true friends. They were people who enjoyed being around my easy, fun, comical, carefree self.

I was honestly happy, and then I was honestly sad. Both versions were real, but they couldn’t handle the pain or the realness of the second one.

To me, a true friend is fully supportive no matter what happens in your life. She doesn’t only love you when you’re easy company. She doesn’t disappear because your grief changed the mood. She might not be able to fix anything, but she stays.

The people who didn’t gather around when things started falling apart scattered instead. For a long time, I wondered whether I’d become too sad, too heavy, or too much. Now I think some people just don’t have the depth to remain present when a relationship stops being fun.

They knew how to come to the party. They didn’t know how to stay once the house caught fire.

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For years, there was a chandelier hanging over our dining area.

We found it at an auction after buying our house in 2016. I don’t remember what we paid for it, but I remember bringing it home in pieces and assembling it with my husband, one crystal at a time. He installed it near two large windows and put it on a dimmer switch.

Once it was hanging, it became the centerpiece of the house. Sunlight struck the crystals and scattered tiny rainbows across the walls. People noticed it as soon as they walked in. At night, I’d sometimes leave it dimmed low so its glow would filter through the sheer curtains at the front of the house.

It was the most beautiful thing in the room, the kind of light that made me stand back for a moment and look at the life around it. I didn’t know it would become a witness.

It hung there when we brought our daughter home in 2018, above the ordinary life we assumed we’d continue having. There were birthdays, holidays, dinners, toys on the floor, and all the usual noise and mess of a family living beneath something that caught the light.

Then 2019 came. It brought destruction.

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The note I posted the other day was meant to be self-deprecating, but it was also true. I’m unhappy with mine. I don’t look at it and suddenly find it beautiful because it’s how my daughter entered the world. I see a scar on my body that I don’t like, and apparently, I’m far from the only woman who feels this way.

Naturally, I started reading.

One recent study found that cesarean scars “may negatively affect women’s body image.” It also cited earlier research showing that women experienced postpartum body dissatisfaction, with cesarean delivery playing an important role. Even when the scar wasn’t considered a social problem, it could still negatively affect the way a woman perceived her own body (Ozbek & Yıldız, 2026).

Maybe this is important because a woman doesn’t have to believe everyone else is staring at her scar for it to affect her. The discomfort can be completely private, existing between her and the mirror, her clothes, the swimsuit she puts back on the rack, or the body she sees every day.

Until I posted that note, almost nobody knew I disliked mine. I had told my husband, but otherwise, I kept it to myself. I’ve looked at it every day for seven years. I notice the places where the skin pulls inward and dips down. I notice the tethering through the middle and the way the scar stretches from one hip to the other. My doctor placed it low, but some bikinis sit lower, or have strings….and there it is again.

I was surprised there wasn’t more research devoted specifically to this, considering how often C-sections are performed and how permanently they can alter a woman’s body. We talk endlessly about the procedure, the recovery, the pain, the lifting restrictions, the baby, the feeding, the bleeding, and the exhaustion. Then the incision closes, everyone declares the body healed, and apparently the woman is supposed to stop having opinions.

Another study found that C-section scars, while clinically manageable, can still have a profound effect on women’s functioning and self-image. The researchers also pointed to a tendency to overlook the emotional and deeply personal parts of womanhood connected to how a C-section changes the body (Almeida et al., 2025).

They argued that concerns such as self-image and the way a woman believes her partner perceives her body deserve greater consideration in medical decision-making. Those things are easily dismissed as shallow because they aren’t emergencies, but something doesn’t have to threaten a woman’s life to affect the life she lives.

Medicine knows how to determine whether an incision has closed. It can check for infection, bleeding, pain, or other complications. Those are necessary questions, but they aren’t the only ones.

Does she recognize her body? Does she avoid certain clothes? Does she feel comfortable being seen? Does the scar pull, dip, itch, feel numb, or change the shape of her lower abdomen? Does she still think about it years later?

We routinely measure a woman’s recovery by whether the incision healed instead of asking whether she did.

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Happy birthday to my eldest daughter,

the little girl who always seemed ready
to run straight toward life.

You kept me on my toes from the very beginning,
whether you were racing out the door
because swimming sounded better than waiting,
or kicking your brother in the car
while I was trying to get us safely home.

You filled our days with motion,
laughter,
surprises,
and stories our family still tells.

You were spirited,
fearless,
funny,
and completely yourself.

Now your hands create beauty where there was once a blank page.
Your talent as an artist has always amazed me,
not just because of what you make,
but because every piece carries a little of who you are.

When I look at you now,
I still see that wild little spark,
but I also see a kind, creative, resilient woman
who is deeply loved by so many people.
There is a reason for that.
You have always had a heart pe…

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The package is out for delivery, and I’ve checked the tracking more times than I want to admit.

The buyer doesn’t know she’s carrying my car payment to her front porch.

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Grief didn’t just break my heart, it taught my brain to stop trusting peace.

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The holiday weekend is here, and the calendar is blank.

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Every so often I catch myself mentally pricing the room I’m standing in.

Not because I’m planning to sell everything I own. The thought simply arrives before I have a chance to dismiss it. Hardship has a way of training the mind to take inventory without permission. The pearl necklace tucked away in my closet becomes a question. So does the KitchenAid mixer on the counter. I don’t want to part with either of them. I’ve simply lived through enough hard seasons that I no longer see my belongings the way I once did.

It isn’t really about the pearls or the mixer. It’s about what hardship does to the mind. Once you’ve had to look around your home and decide what could become groceries, a car payment, or another month with the lights on, you never completely stop asking the question. The emergency may pass, the bills may eventually get paid, but some part of you keeps taking inventory anyway. It happens so quietly that I usually don’t notice it until I’m already doing it. I can be making bread, putting dishes away, or walking through the living room with no intention of selling a thing, and suddenly my mind is calculating what could become something else if life asked again.

I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when my home was simply my home, filled with objects that carried memories instead of possibilities. My wedding ring belonged on my hand, not on a jeweler’s scale. Shoes were something I enjoyed wearing instead of something I wondered whether I could live without. I didn’t walk through rooms translating possessions into payments because I never imagined I would have to. Then life changed, and over time I realized I had quietly reordered my life without ever deciding to. I sold the ring years ago during our last financial collapse, and although I’ve made peace with that decision, I don’t think I’ve ever recovered the part of myself that believed the things I loved could simply remain the things I loved.

Hardship teaches habits no one talks about. They settle into your nervous system and begin making decisions before you’ve consciously had a chance to think. Some people brace when the phone rings unexpectedly. Others dread a knock at the door. I walk through my own house wondering what could become something else if the people I love ever needed it to.

It took me years to realize that this habit hadn’t confined itself to my belongings. It had quietly found its way into the way I loved people. When someone I care about is struggling, my mind doesn’t begin with speeches or reassurance. It begins by asking the same questions hardship had trained me to ask everywhere else. What could I do without? What could I rearrange? What could I lay down if it meant they wouldn’t have to carry quite so much? I’ve asked those questions so many times they no longer feel generous. They simply feel obvious.

For a long time I assumed everyone else’s heart worked that way. I didn’t think of it as sacrifice because I wasn’t keeping score. It was simply the direction my love moved. If someone mattered to me, some part of my mind immediately began looking for what I could surrender to make their burden a little lighter. I thought that instinct was simply love. It took me much longer to understand how much of it had been shaped by survival.

That realization explained disappointments I had never been able to name. I wasn’t grieving the absence of help as much as I was grieving the absence of an instinct I had quietly come to believe was universal. Somewhere along the way I had begun expecting love to ask itself one private question: What am I willing to give up if it would make this lighter for someone I love? I eventually realized that question had been shaped by the life I had lived, by years of choosing people over possessions, by seasons when nearly every important decision seemed to ask for something in return.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped assuming everyone recognizes love the way I do. It turns out our hearts are shaped by what they’ve had to survive. Mine was shaped by years of asking what could leave my hands if it meant the people I loved could keep something they needed more. I never sat down and chose that way of loving. It was taught to me one difficult season at a time, until eventually it became so familiar I mistook it for ordinary.

I still catch myself mentally pricing the room I’m standing in. I suspect I always will. The habit reminds me where I’ve been, but it also reminds me what those years quietly rearranged inside me. They didn’t only change the way I looked at my belongings. They changed the way I recognize love.

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I stood at the kitchen counter opening the mail one envelope at a time after my husband brought it inside, tearing each edge, pulling out each paper, sorting the ordinary from the urgent until the whole afternoon seemed to arrange itself into small piles in front of me.

Bills. Advertisements. Things to file. Things to worry about later. Then came the letter that reminded us just how expensive survival can become.

I left it on the counter because sometimes that is all a person can do with bad news. Put it down somewhere flat and keep moving.

After I carried the rest of the mail upstairs and delivered it where it belonged, I turned to go back downstairs, already halfway inside the next task, when my daughter called out for me.

For a second, I thought she needed help with a mobile deposit or one more practical thing I hadn’t reached yet.

Instead, she asked if she could show me something.

Then she brought out the basket. I had no idea what it held.

It was heavy enough that she had to set it on the loft floor before she began, and she stood over it with the pleasure of someone who had been waiting to reveal a treasure. She reached inside and lifted each piece out slowly, letting us see it before she went back for the next one. Dresses, bathing suits, cover-ups, shoes, a bag, shirts and shorts and beautiful summer things, all with tags still attached, all carrying that clean department store smell fresh fabric has before it’s been washed into ordinary life.

She held each thing up as if it deserved a proper introduction, and the loft changed around her. It became less of a room and more of an audience, all of us gathered there because she wanted witnesses to her happiness.

I kept thinking about the woman who had bought those things for her.

The woman who bought them couldn’t have known what had come in our mail that afternoon or what was sitting downstairs on the kitchen counter, asking more of us than we had to give. All she knew was my daughter. What she might like. What might make her feel beautiful. By the time the basket came through our door, it was heavy with more than clothes.

That is what nearly undid me.

Not the clothes themselves, though they were lovely. It was the timing. Another mother reached toward my child with generosity on a day when the world had already reached toward us with another demand, and for a few minutes I stood there in the strange mercy of both things being true.

Then my youngest wandered over and wanted to try on the white jean jacket.

It swallowed her in the sweetest way. She turned around for us, pleased with herself and pleased to be included, glowing in the reflected light of her sister’s joy. When the clothes had all been shown and admired, she disappeared for a minute and came back with one of her own baskets, full of toys, ready to give us a presentation too.

She had watched the room gather around someone else’s treasures and decided she had treasures worth showing. So we looked at those too. Every toy. Each small offering. Every object she pulled from the basket as if she were saying, here is what I have, here is what matters to me, please see it.

Outside, everyone is talking about tonight’s full moon, and I understand why. People want to step into the evening and find something beautiful waiting above them, something that reminds us our private worries are happening beneath a sky wide enough to hold us all.

I may look up too before the night is over, but I think this evening has already given me the image I’ll carry.

One daughter standing over a heavy basket of new clothes. Another standing over a basket of toys. Downstairs, a letter waited on the kitchen counter, carrying a deadline and a consequence.

Some evenings ask the heart to hold fear and tenderness in the same breath.

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This morning I rolled over and saw my phone standing in its charger on the nightstand. I turned the other way and pulled another blanket over myself, then another, arranging them until they settled heavily across my body. I tucked the edges around my shoulders and closed my eyes, hoping I could disappear back into sleep before the day realized I was awake.

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At this exact moment, I am tracking my husband on the map while he drives to deposit cash into our account. When it lands, he is going to call me, and I am going to send it to a bill before an automatic payment for something less important gets there first.

The money already has somewhere to be before it even arrives.

Calling this budgeting feels too civilized, like coffee, a pen, and a kitchen table where the numbers are disappointing but obedient. This is financial whack-a-mole with real consequences.

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I finally showered last night after probably three days.

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I have reached the stage of adulthood where I know the square footage of toilet paper.

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Someone had an idea of me before I knew enough to refuse it.

It wasn’t a complete idea, more like a name tag slapped crooked onto my shirt while I was still trying to figure out where I belonged. Sensitive. Difficult. Too much. The one who takes things wrong. The one who should calm down, understand better, expect less.

Some people are more comfortable with conclusions than curiosity. Once they decide who you are, they stop looking. Every conversation becomes another chance to prove the story they already believe.

I read a line recently about wanting another person to take what was thought of her and turn it into what she thought of herself. I had to sit with that for a minute because there it was, plain as day.

That isn’t criticism.

It’s identity theft with better manners.

The cruel little flourish usually arrives with invisible witnesses. Everyone else sees it too, apparently. They’re only too polite, too afraid, or too loyal to say it out loud. One opinion quietly promotes itself into a consensus, borrowing voices that were never actually heard.

It is one thing for another person to have an opinion of you. Everyone carries opinions around, most of them badly folded, none of them requested. It becomes something else when the same opinion keeps showing up, as though it were paperwork waiting for your signature.

Their version slowly becomes the official copy.

At first you explain. You remember conversations more carefully than they do. You offer context, intentions, timelines, trying to understand where everything turned. You think that if you can just find the missing piece, the misunderstanding will finally loosen its grip. Somehow the conversation circles back to your tone, your sensitivity, your reaction.

Some people can stand beneath a leaking ceiling and spend the afternoon discussing your response to getting wet.

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If you’re not careful, their voice begins showing up before your own. It sits beside every sentence you write, second-guesses ordinary feelings, wonders whether life would simply go more smoothly if you became easier to misunderstand, easier to dismiss, easier to carry.

The audacity of an inherited opinion is that it behaves like a mirror.

Look, it says.

This is you.

But mirrors aren’t supposed to arrive with someone else’s fingerprints all over the glass.

I’m learning that being known isn’t the same as being defined. Time doesn’t automatically make a person accurate. Someone can remember an old version of you with complete confidence while overlooking the woman standing in front of them, tired, medicated, making dinner, writing anyway, continuing to become herself while they’re still reading from an older draft.

Explaining what hurts can become its own kind of exhaustion. Not simply your choices or your reactions, but the landscape nobody else can enter. The weather behind your ribs. The place you wake up inside each morning before anyone else has spoken your name.

Writing gives some of that back to me.

Each page reminds me there is a voice underneath all the borrowed descriptions. I recognize the little file with my name on it, the familiar conclusions, the summaries repeated often enough to sound official. I know the shape of that name tag. I know the hand that keeps trying to press it back onto my shirt.

I don’t have to wear it.

I can leave the opinion where it belongs, walk away without signing anything, and keep becoming the person no one else gets to finish for me.

The official copy was never theirs to issue.