I Wasn't Anyone's Mom in That Room. I Was Just Kaelin. (Part 2 of My Story) | Supporting Tones Music Therapy | Vancouver, WA | My Transformation Journey | Women's Mental Health | Reclaim Yourself |

Going back to school didn’t just teach me music therapy. It forced me to take myself apart and decide what I actually wanted to keep.

Last week I told you about the moment everything cracked open, the character in the novel, the audition I had one week to prepare for, the leap I took because I had nothing left to lose.

This week I want to tell you what happened after I landed.

Because the raw truth about choosing yourself is it doesn’t feel like relief right away. First it feels like demolition.

Class Became My Escape

Going to class became the thing I looked forward to. The quiet drive to school, just me, just my thoughts, no one needing anything from me, became sacred. Then the immersion into something that made so much sense to me. Music theory, psychology, clinical technique. It clicked in a way nothing had clicked in years.

I had never felt so successful at what I was doing.

I made the Dean’s List. I didn’t even know that was a thing you could make. I’d never been the kind of student anyone pointed to. And here I was, in my late thirties, doing the best academic work of my life, in the middle of a pandemic, with three kids, managing a household that didn’t pause just because I’d found something that was mine.

I loved seeing myself in a new light. In that classroom, I wasn’t anyone’s mom. I wasn’t a wife, a caretaker, a default parent. I was just me. Kaelin. And I was good at what I was doing.

For the first time in years, I felt relief. Real relief. Because I had skills. I had interests. I was good at something. There was a real, breathing person in there, and she had value just for being herself, not for what she did for everyone else.

I Thought I Had to Choose

Here’s what I believed for a long time, even though I never said it out loud: I had to choose. Myself or motherhood. There couldn’t be both.

I had been smothered under responsibilities and expectations that I genuinely believed were mine to own, fully, completely, with no room left over for anything else. So claiming something for myself felt like betrayal. Like I was stealing time and identity away from the people who needed me.

That belief wasn’t true. It just took me years to deconstruct all the messages that had confined my growth.

What You Learn First in Therapy School Is Yourself

Here’s something most people don’t know about becoming a therapist: one of the first things you have to look at is yourself.

You have to know what you bring into the room. Your biases. Your strengths. Your weaknesses. The unexamined beliefs sitting underneath everything you say and do. Because you cannot help another person go deeper than you’ve been willing to go yourself.

So I went looking. And I found four emotions running the show underneath everything guilt, shame, anger, and grief. I want to walk you through all four, because I think you’re carrying at least one of them too.

1. Guilt

Choosing myself brought so many tears. So much emotion around being a bad mother.

I loved being away from the house. I loved having my own space. I loved having something that was just about me. And that made me feel terrible. What kind of mother is excited about leaving her kids at home?

It got harder to show up to every single event. Harder to volunteer for everything. My husband took over a lot of the kids’ responsibilities, and on some days, I just wasn’t available to my children. After ten years of being a stay-at-home mom, this was a massive transition, for me and for my entire family.

I had to confront that guilt head-on.

But here’s what actually changed: even though there was less time, the nature and the quality of that time changed too. I was happier. So my interactions with my kids weren’t built on exhaustion, resentment, and anger anymore. I have better relationships with my children now than I did when I was home with them every single hour of every single day.

2. Shame

I spent half my master’s degree in a vocal studio. It was amazing. It was also terrifying.

One day my vocal professor came up to me and said: pull your shoulders back like this so you can have more breath support.

I bristled. I said: “No, no… I don’t do that.”

She looked at me, completely puzzled.

Here I was, 38 years old, and the shame I carried about my body, in my body, was so overwhelming it actually shocked me. I didn’t pull my shoulders back because doing so drew more attention to my chest. A chest I had been hiding and minimizing for 25 years, because I had been taught to be ashamed of it.

That moment cracked something open. I spent years after it deconstructing every belief I had about myself, tracking where each one came from, and then making a purposeful decision about whether that belief was something I wanted to keep carrying, or something I was finally ready let go of.

I didn’t need to keep carrying shame that belonged to someone else’s beliefs. The real question was: what did I believe? Because that’s what was going to shape my actions. My values, not a prescribed list handed to me by someone else, but something actually reflective of who I am and how I want to live.

3. Anger

I held so much anger in my body.

Anger that I had come to this point at all. Anger that no one saw me for years. Anger about situations and things that happened in my life because I didn’t know better, because I never questioned the narrative I’d been handed. Anger that people thought they were entitled to control over my life. Anger that I let those narratives control me for so long.

And underneath all of it: anger because I knew, deep down, that the change had to start with me. And I didn’t know if I was strong enough.

4. Sadness and Grief

Sadness for all the pain I felt over my life, thinking I wasn’t good enough, that it was my fault, that if I just tried harder I’d deserve happiness.

Then I had to grieve. Grieve for the girl I used to be, and all the dreams she had that got lost or changed along the way.

And only after the grief could I embrace the woman I had become. Own that those experiences made me stronger. Better. More compassionate. More well-rounded. More relatable. And then, finally, step up and make changes in my life. To be authentic. Found. Unfiltered. Free.

What I Want You to Take From This

Deconstruction is not optional if you want to actually find yourself again. You can’t skip to the celebration. You have to go through the guilt, the shame, the anger, the grief, in whatever order they show up for you, on whatever timeline they demand.

But on the other side of that work is a woman who knows what she believes instead of what she was told to believe. That woman is worth the demolition.

The Challenge

This week: pick one of the four, guilt, shame, anger, or grief. Just one.

Ask yourself: where did this belief actually come from? Do I want to keep it, or toss it.

You don’t have to resolve it. Just trace it back to where it started.

If any of this feels familiar, the guilt of choosing yourself, the shame you’ve carried in your own body, the anger you didn’t know where to put. I want you in this community.

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Next Week, Part 3: what emerged after I let myself stop carrying all of it.