Introducing the Be THAT Mom Movement Podcast!

Oh-em-gee!! I am soooo excited to FINALLY have this up and running!! This podcast has been in the works for me for a few months. In the midst of all the uncertainty we have going on right now, I decided it was time to slow my roll, or maybe I was forced to slow my roll, but it was time to get this out! 

PLEASE SEE THE FULL TRANSCRIPTION BELOW.
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If you enjoy please subscribe, review, and share. I appreciate you!

XO Dolly

Listen & Subscribe on Itunes

Not on Itunes? You can catch it anywhere podcasts are played or check it out HERE!! 

(As of today, I could only find it on Itunes by searching my name, not by the name of the podcast. I'm not super tech savvy, so not sure if this is a glitch or just takes time to cross platforms, but reach out for any questions or difficulty accessing it.)

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Be THAT Mom!

I am SO excited to be here with you today! I am the founder of the Be That Mom podcast! We are currently in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and while this is an uncertain time for all of us, it has helped me to slow my roll a little bit and get my message out to the world!

First off, I have to tell you a few disclaimers… This message, and the podcast that goes along with it, is going to be relaxed! I am not a professional. Secondly, I will probably be saying the world “y’all” … a lot! I am just trying to embrace my imperfectness and getting my message out there because I feel strongly that I have information for you and your family that can be of benefit! Y’all ready!?

 I wanted to first start off and share a little bit about me and why I am crazy enough to launch a podcast along with the many other things going on in my life.

I live in south Texas and I’ve been married for almost 25 years! My husband and I actually met when I was 15 and was NOT allowed to date. Like they say in Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way!”.

Together, we have 3 beautiful kids, they are now teens and beyond. I have no idea how that time passed by SO FAST, but it has been such a joy of a ride… most of the time! I have loved seeing them grow up, mature, and flourish while coming into their own with their own ideas.

We have had many adventures with our oldest showing cattle and goats on a stock show road, knee-deep in FFA and FH. We have traveled all over the state of Texas and part of Oklahoma to do shows over the years. After high school, my daughter went on to attend Texas A&M and just graduated this past December!

Our second born has nudged us into realizing that she is not her sister and her interests are necessarily about animals. She is passionate about all things culinary and tasty creations. She has this really amazing way of detecting distinct flavors in foods. After she graduates high school this year, she will be going to culinary school in the fall!

Our third child is in his early years of high school, growing like a weed, eats like nobody’s business and is taller than every person in our family!

One of my personal passions that I have is doing jigsaw puzzles (does that sound crazy?). I actually started doing puzzles when I was a young girl. My Grandpa love to come home and do jigsaw puzzles when he got home from work. I really enjoyed sitting on the floor and do puzzles with him! There was just something about it that was so peaceful, and I have such positive memories about that. Every time I sit down to do a puzzle it just gives me a sense of peace and a feeling like my Grandpa is right there with me. I just love and enjoy doing them on my own or with my family!

Another thing you need to know about me is that I am a Friends show fanatic so don’t be surprised if I throw in a few Friend-isms every so often to make a point! I think that I speak in a Friends language sometimes! (Pivot!)

I also love to watch Grey's Anatomy even though I’m a few years behind in the seasons. I actually disconnected from watching any TV around the time McDreamy died (spoiler alert!). I didn’t stop watching it because he died but it just coincided with other things going on in my life and I just couldn’t keep up!

I also LOVE summertime, swimming, taking our boat out, and just being out in the sun! I love to travel and see new things. One of my favorite little trips is to go with my husband to different wineries in South Texas wine country.

By profession, I am a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner. I actually started working in healthcare at the age of 17! I knew from a very young age that I knew I wanted to be a nurse! I’m not sure exactly how young but I like to think that because I was born premature and I spent the first year of my life in a hospital and in the caring hands of nurses that somehow helped me to be drawn to that.

My first job in healthcare was in high school and I did this half-day coop kinda thing where I went to school for half a day and then to the hospital for half the day. That definitely gave me a taste of what was going on in healthcare and I absolutely loved it! I went on to nursing school and became an RN and held that position for 14 years before I finished nurse practitioner’s school, and now I have been working as a nurse practitioner for the past 10 years! I don’t know how that time goes by so dang fast! 

Let’s talk about these little nudges… 

It was a little over 5 years ago at a time that I like to say the universe was giving me little nudges. It was a time where it was typical for me to care for everybody else except for myself and I pretty much lived in survival mode! I woke up each day and I hit the ground running to take care of everyone else and there was no. time. for. me. I couldn’t even fathom doing anything for me. The kids were young, my job was demanding, and I spent many hours working, and when I came home, I was EXHAUSTED and didn’t have time to do anything for me! At that time, I reached a breaking point. It was time for me to wake up. I had allowed my career to pretty much bury me. Motherhood wasn’t exactly going well either! I was at my wits end, spread too thin, miserable, and I was feeling unfulfilled in my role as a nurse practitioner. I kept asking myself at that time, is this it? Is this my life, barely surviving from one day to the next?

Now, if you followed me at that time on social media, you would probably have a hard time believing that I had reached this point of listlessness and desperation. At the time, I hardly ever posted on social media and when I did it was just of my kids. Honestly, I was hiding behind my kids. I was cynical, negative, and lacked belief in myself that I could get through all this.

To top that off, I was so burnt-out with my profession. I was so tired of barely scraping the surface of what we did for people and I truly wanted to stand in the spot where I could help people live healthy lives. I didn’t want to just be giving Band-Aids on a bigger problem anymore! I wanted to be there and discover the root of the problem to change the trajectory of people’s lives, so we don’t have parents and grandparents having strokes and heart attacks, being cut down in their prime and leaving us before their time.

That was my first nudge that pushed me to take a step towards taking care of myself more. For me, that looked like a short, 20-minute workout from a home-based workout program that promised to be the “entryway to fitness”. I never liked exercise and failed at it every time I attempted it but in the bigger perspective of things, I didn’t know how to work out! I wasn’t sure what kind of activities I should do. I thought that running was the only thing that would get me anywhere, but then it never did! I hated every second… and then eventually I was hating myself.

So, this is where the first little nudge came from… I was following a workout that I could actually DO! It helped breathe belief and life into me like nothing else ever had.

My second nudge came when people started to notice changes in me and started to ask what I was doing. That’s when I realized that I had a gift that I needed to share. It wasn’t ok for me to just do this in isolation when it was something that was helping me so much!

That’s when the wellness coach in me was born!

It was the moment that I realized that I didn’t have to be perfect in this and I didn’t necessarily need to have gone to all these years of college for this. What turns out to be more effective for people in this realm is to have people that were doing this with you actually relate to you! These people walked on similar paths, had similar challenges, similar lifestyles, and that is what would make it stick! At that time, I started to align with the tools that I had started with and began to share them with other people.

The third nudge came when I started to see my blood pressure go down and my cholesterol improve and eventually, I was able to come off of those medications because of the lifestyle changes that I made! It was then that I realized that this was profoundly powerful and definitely something that I could not keep to myself.

The fourth nudge came when I found out that I had a rectal mass. I was being woken up with pain that made no sense! My Doctor couldn’t find any obvious reasons for the pain so he proposed that I do a colonoscopy. At that time, I looked at her like she was an alien! I was only 42 years old, why in the world would I needed a colonoscopy! It was unfathomable to me that I could have anything going on in there. But, sure enough, they found a 3cm mass which is considered “massive” in size. It was not cancerous, but it had the signs of growing towards cancer. Thankfully, it was found early because of those pains I was having at night!

That was a nudge because the doctor who did the colonoscopy unknown to him that 3 years prior I had started the lifestyle changes, and he said that the mass had likely been growing for 3 years and the things that can slow it are for your to exercise, eat better, have a lot of fiber in your diet, take probiotics, and just focus on providing a lot of nutrition to your body.

He did not know that I had made changes 3 years prior, but it was 3 years from then that I had pressed “play” on that home workout program. That home workout program was my solution to getting exercise because I didn’t have the time, desire, or money to do anything other than that!

What is so crazy to think about is starting that program probably helped me to start slowing the growth of this thing and the lifestyle changes I have adopted since then can help me keep it at bay. So far, I have one check since then and it was negative! If you’ve ever had a colonoscopy or known anyone who has, the prep is HORRIBLE! If you are someone you know is in need of a colonoscopy, just do it. Colon and rectal cancer is something that is not detected soon enough.

The fifth and final nudge that I want to share with you today that brought me to where I am at right now is that I realized that I needed to take a more proactive stance on how to manage my kids and their interaction on social media and various devices along with their interconnectivity that comes along with it. There are so many other parents out there that are struggling with this same type of issue and we can come together and help support each other in this realm.

This is really where the Be That Mom movement was formed. I used to say, “I don’t want to be that mom!” but now I want to change the dialogue to one that shares and supports moms who are that mom. We need to join together because we are all walking this fluid, ever-changing path of parenthood. Let’s be THAT mom strong!

Till next time!