Motherhood

Motherhood awakened a part of me that had been buried under chaos. It taught me responsibility, devotion, and the fierce kind of love that demands you rise. But it also landed me in an emotionally and spiritually controlling relationship. I lost my freedom, my voice, my identity. I had handed over all that I was to his father; I didn’t even know what colour I liked.

He moved me from my family in Adelaide and isolated us in Brisbane, Qld.

He used a particular religious belief system as a tool to control me. He invited representatives into our home under the guise of “spiritual guidance.” Still, looking back, it has become clear that the teachings they brought were being used to shape my behaviour, limit my freedom, and reinforce his authority. Their doctrines were steeped in fear, obedience, and unquestioning loyalty, especially from women, and I found myself slowly absorbing messages that told me to submit, stay small, and silence my own voice. The manipulation was subtle at first, almost disguised as love and righteousness, but over time it became a form of psychological confinement.

A devastating blow was losing my father to Cancer when I was 20 years old, when he was only 46 years old. It left an ache in me that took years to understand. He called me the night before he passed, his voice fragile, struggling to breathe, asking me to come back to Adelaide as soon as I could. I told him I loved him and promised I would be on the first flight in the morning. But he slipped away during the night, before I could get there, before I could say goodbye in person. It was on Father's Day.

Finding courage

At the age of 21, I found the courage to leave the father of my son and start again with almost nothing, except my son. I found a unit, got my license, completed an Administration Office course and found my first job. I bought a little yellow Datsun Stanza with the money my father left me after he passed. I could see how the brainwashing and male-dominated hierarchy were used to keep me compliant, disconnected from my own intuition, and convinced that obedience equalled goodness. It took courage, clarity, and the love of my son to break free from that dynamic and reclaim the power I had never truly lost.

Then, a few years later, it was time to leave the religious group I had now been baptised into and dedicate my life to. Leaving that belief system was one of the hardest, yet most liberating, decisions of my life. The cracks had begun to show, the red flags, the hypocrisy, and the predators, the unsettling things no one wanted to talk about. I realised that if this was the version of “paradise” they promised, I would rather face whatever came at the end of days than live forever in their version of eternity. People who had once embraced me suddenly turned their backs, their conditional kindness disappearing the moment I stepped outside their rules.

Walking away meant losing my community, my identity, and the only structure I had known for years. But it also meant choosing truth over fear, freedom over control, and a real life for myself and my son. That was the moment I learned I could stand on my own, fully and unapologetically.

My twenties were a time of rebuilding.  Slowly, quietly, often painfully. I was a single mum working to survive, but my son and I created a warm world together, full of imagination, Harry Potter voices at bedtime, and small moments of magic.

The words that changed everything

Then came my thirties, marriage, stability, and the birth of my beautiful daughter. But with this new chapter came enormous challenges: a life-threatening postpartum haemorrhage, a traumatic ectopic pregnancy, clinical depression, and years of trying to understand why happiness felt just out of reach.

And then came the words that changed everything:

“You have breast cancer.”

Those four words could have broken me, but instead they snapped me awake.
Chemo, surgeries, radiation, and eventually a full hysterectomy became not just medical treatment… but spiritual initiation.

Meditation carried me. Creativity soothed me. Naturopathy supported me. Lomi Lomi massage helped me return home to my body. Slowly, I stopped living by the rules of who I “should” be and started listening to the whisper of who I truly was. My body had been speaking to me for years. I had just never paused long enough to hear it. Why was I here? Ok, I am listening, Universe, talk to me!!