Read an Excerpt
One Hundred Hearts
Inspiring Stories from the Women who Lived Them
By Terry Sidford Balboa Press
Copyright © 2015 Terry Sidford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3763-2
CHAPTER 1
How Do You Define Courage?
Courage is being true to myself and standing by my heart.
— Summary answer from 100 women's surveys
While reading the responses to this question from 100 women, two themes emerged as the overwhelming consensus:
1. Courage is being true to who you are, no matter what the circumstances are in life.
2. Courage is facing your fears.
I have observed that people often morph into what society, family, or friends want them to be. As such, standing up for who you are is one of the most courageous acts in the world. This is particularly true for women who, over the centuries, have been forced to play small in order to hide their true greatness.
Facing fears is not the same thing as not feeling fear. Almost unanimously, the 100 women surveyed for the book wrote that the courageous act was moving forward in spite of their fears, all while feeling the emotions associated with being afraid. They also said that facing fear gives them the ability to dig deep and connect to their inner strength they otherwise may not have known was there.
Most of the time, we think courage is a big emotion we muster up in times of need, when the clouds descend and life collapses around us with loud booming noises. But I have often found just the opposite to be true. Sometimes it is the quietest of moments, when I can barely hear my heart speaking to me, that require the most courage. It is in these moments of deep reflection that I have been gifted a new, clearer lens through which to see myself. But once I peer through it, there is no turning back — marching forward with my courage pressing me on is the only thing possible.
If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
— Jim Rohn
Martina's Story
Martina looked around her, pausing to focus on each item in her all-too-familiar room. It suddenly struck her how beige everything was. The color of the comfortable sofa and loveseat had been labeled Golden Fields when she had ordered them from the local furniture superstore some five years prior. The paint on the walls was Harvest Warmth, trimmed in white. The coffee and end tables were Honey Oak. Even the throw pillows were a crosshatch of browns.
She smiled to herself when she spotted her daughter's secret stash of books hidden behind the fireplace tools. The daisies she'd bought yesterday shone like neon from the middle of the coffee table. Everything matched. Everything was perfect. She glanced at her watch and made note that she'd been sitting in the same place for four hours — her spot at one end of the sofa. She moved the cushions around often so her position didn't become permanently dented or worn. The TV remote, her laptop, and the latest issue of People magazine were neatly placed on the end table near her. Two more hours until Cole and Savannah came home from school. Two more hours that she was free to do whatever she wanted, if only she knew what that was.
This restlessness had been getting to her for almost a year, ever since Max started first grade. Weekdays were the worst. The weekends, when everyone was home and she had plenty of things to do, were better. It was the hours between cleaning the house after the kids had left in the morning and waiting for them to get home that could pull her into the darkness. Martina fidgeted. She picked up the remote and surfed through the afternoon talk shows, but nothing caught her interest. She was too distracted by the conversation that seemed to be going on in the back of her mind, almost without her. Once again the anxiety spoke to her, telling her to think about things that didn't need to take center stage.
Maybe she should have another baby. Cole was just six, Savannah 10, and she knew of plenty of women who got pregnant after 35. Tina Fey, Celine Dion, Brooke Shields: they all had kids after 40, and look at them — they were still hot, and their kids were just fine. Not one Down Syndrome in the whole bunch. But oh my God, babies were so much work, and the extra pregnancy weight had been really hard to take off after Cole. Besides, another baby felt like putting off the inevitable, like trying to move backward rather than forward.
Martina let her thoughts float. Maybe a job would give her direction, grounding. She hadn't worked since Savannah had been born. Maybe she could get something part time, but where? She mentally made a quick list of the possibilities. Given that she had been out of the workforce for so long, she knew she'd descended to employment footing equal to that of high school graduates. She felt she couldn't bear the gossip that would ensue if she took a job at Starbucks or Whole Foods. She knew exactly what women would be saying behind her back. Do you think Max has lost his job? She can't be making more than minimum wage there. What's she thinking? I thought she said she had a college degree. Why would she be spending her days doing that if she really has a degree?
Martina's bachelor's degree in Italian had meant something in the working world when she'd graduated. Because of it, she had landed a job with American Express, answering calls from their Italian-speaking clientele. That's how she'd met Max; he'd worked in the same department. Both of them had left the company three years after they'd married. Max went on to work for Wells Fargo's credit card division, and she'd taken a part-time job with a small magazine publisher, doing office work.
Two years later, when Savannah was born, both Martina and Max thought it would be best if Martina focused on their family while Max concentrated on his career and provided income. To her surprise, Martina found she loved being home with her daughter and was fully prepared for her son, Cole, when he was born four years later. Her full schedule of childcare, play dates, PTO, Sunday school, and superficial friendships with women in the same situation filled Martina's life with so much activity she didn't notice that Max wasn't home much. When Cole started first grade the previous September, Martina thought the extra time in her day would be snapped up with finally getting the house really clean and organized, grocery shopping, and making fancy dinners. Oh, and maybe even getting a run in before the kids came home.
Presently, the house was clean. The laundry was done. Dinner was in the Crock-Pot. It was raining outside, so a run was deleted from her to-do list. No, Marina finally admitted to herself. Her problem was that it was raining inside.
Life seemed to be trying to turn pages Martina wasn't ready for. She often felt lonely, like she had lost herself somewhere along the way and was left without a compass. She loved her kids madly, but knew they could not always be the center of her life. They would grow up and move away. Max and she had a stable, pleasant relationship, although somewhere between breast-feeding and control-top panties, Martina's fire for her husband had begun sputtering. Max seemed to be fulfilled with his career in banking and never gave any indication that he would ever want anything more than what they had. He was content, probably even happy. Max was a good guy; he wasn't the problem. The problem was the cloud front that moved into Martina's soul during those long, quiet afternoons she spent planted on the couch. This was something fundamental, something bone-deep. It scared her to listen to the conversation inside her head: What are you doing with your life? Whatever happened to the young woman who was going to travel Europe, drink wine, and experience men? You've become the one thing you never thought you would — average, typical, unseen, and unheard.
Martina was certain her sad opinion of herself was useless. It wasn't any more significant than any of her other dead-end opinions.
Martina looked around her beige living room again. There was no getting around it. She was beige. She blended into a life she'd crafted with her own hands — an existence that had ended up being merely the backdrop for her children's and husband's lives. Step by step, moment by moment, she had created a life that was expressed through others. She lived vicariously through her children, but rarely personally reveled in her own existence. Everything matched. Everything was perfect. Everything was safe. Nothing about it was meaningful. None of it was an expression of Martina, a woman whose dreams and hopes and joys and sorrows had been set aside while she checked off her to-do list. Her life was the Denny's menu, replete with photos of how beautiful it all appeared, but she never got to relish the full, real flavor of the meal.
She still had an hour before the kids had to be picked up at school. She needed to do something, anything, that would tell her if there was a shred of the pre-family Martina left. The idea that there was just enough time to go buy something red or lime or purple flew into her head. She jumped from her spot, and uncertain fingers picked up her purse. She paused. Between her fingers, she thought she could feel the very end of the string that was tied to her being. For the first time ever, she courageously interrupted the conversation in the back of her mind. She would be her own superhero. Don't worry. I've got you, and I'm not letting go.
TJ Maxx was its usual madhouse of women in search of that perfect bargain, whatever that was. Martina pulled down on her blazer to straighten it and clutched her purse tighter under her arm. She was on a mission. There was an item somewhere in here just waiting for her, something important that she needed, for sure. Not like all the other women in the store looking for something they thought they needed; there was some Thing the Universe had placed in here specifically for Martina, specifically for this moment.
Taking a deep breath and hoping she wouldn't run into anyone she knew, Martina marched into the racks of clothes. As she thumbed through the size medium tops, there was nothing that didn't remind her of beige. Certain that slacks of any kind could not be the Thing, she moved to the dresses. Long, short, backless, lace, skimpy, blah, blah, blah. She looked at each and every one, but none was the Thing.
She moved on to the lingerie, the shoes, the scarves, the purses, the jewelry — nothing. Glancing at her watch, she began to doubt her previous decision about not needing a doctor: the kids expected her to be waiting for them in the pick-up line in only 15 minutes, and she was rummaging through a discount store looking for some Thing her angels had left for her. Maybe she was crazy after all.
Deflated, Martina decided to make one last-ditch effort in the household items aisles. There was a shiny silver paperweight — a heavy heart, perhaps? The plates with birds in flight? Yuck. So cliché. She headed to the nobody-else-in-the-world-wants-this-stuff markdown aisle. Notecards? No. Scented candle? They give her headaches. Ironing board cover? Do they really still make those? Miniature globe ...? Oh my God, stop! A globe the size of softball was sitting behind boxes of shot glasses. Martina had to stand tiptoe on the bottom shelf in order to reach it. It was cheap, almost weightless in the palm of her hand. It had not been updated since 2000. Martina knew this because the Panama Canal was labeled as U.S. territory. How she knew this, she wasn't sure, but she gave herself a pat on the back for being such a geography buff. She rotated it, thinking of the child in Asia who had glued this map onto a cardboard ball so long ago. Holding it in her palm, she imagined the journey it had needed to travel to end up on this steel shelf, waiting for her.
Suddenly, Italy was staring her in the face. Italy (with Rome and Naples and Venice and Florence) was asking why she'd never come. Long ago she had pledged her love to Italy and all she believed it to be, but had never gone to see it for herself. Martina had found the Thing. She'd figure out later exactly what the Universe was trying to tell her through this globe, and she zoomed toward the front of the store.
Her heart sank when she got to the checkout line. What had she expected? There were at least 15 people in front of her, only three cashiers, and she had a mere 10 minutes to get to the school. She started to leave the globe on one of the shelves that corralled the line of waiting people, but she could not bring herself to do it. She felt as though that globe was the necessary anchor affixed to the string that tethered her being to this world. Without it the clouds would sweep her away, and it would rain in her soul forever. She then did something that would have never occurred to her before: she allowed herself to be important. Clutching at her purse and the globe, she turned and marched up to a manager-looking sort of person who was observing the cashiers.
"Excuse me. I need to go pick up my kids at school in 10 minutes, so I need to pay for this right now. Can you help me?" Martina heard the words march out her mouth and straight into the manager's ears. She felt as though she'd just made the most ridiculously self-centered demand she'd ever heard in her life. The voice in her head rattled off the possible answers: You should have planned your time better. What makes you think everyone in that line doesn't have someplace they need to be? You want to buy a two-dollar item, and you think I'm going to make an exception for you?
Martina waited the eternity it seemed to take for the manager to respond.
"Sure," the manager said as he turned and motioned for Martina to follow him to the end register. Martina's sense of gratitude was enormous. She loved the angels that had whispered in the manager's ear. She loved the manager. She loved all the people standing in line who looked like they could not care less that she had cut in front of them all. She loved her globe.
On time and with a smile that refused to leave her face, Martina spotted Cole and Savannah waiting for her on the corner. The other cars seemed to part just for her, and she swerved her now sleek and elegant minivan up to the curb, hitting the button that opened the side door.
"Ciao, miei bei bambini!" leapt out of Martina's mouth on the wings of joy. Cole and Savannah's jaws dropped, and they stood motionless for a full two counts before tumbling into the back seat.
"You speak another language? What is it?" Savannah exclaimed.
"Where'd you learn it?" Cole chimed in.
"Oh, miei bambini! The things you don't know about me. I am so much cooler than you could possibly imagine." Martina smiled as she pulled out into traffic and down familiar streets seen with new eyes.
CHAPTER 2
Have You Had the Opportunity to Demonstrate Courage?
For the first time, I stood up for myself.
— Summary answer from 100 women's surveys
There wasn't one survey that did not have an incredibly moving answer to this question. Everyone spoke from the heart. Whether it was family, career, or health, each and every respondent had experienced having to dig deep to keep moving ahead. Most of time they would continue to take care of their loved ones even while they battled some of the most difficult challenges in their lives. One of the common themes was surviving a serious health issue such as breast cancer. I think learning that you have a life-threatening illness and being forced to face the very real possibility that you may not survive is the ultimate challenge to one's courage. Many women in the survey have faced this in their lives but found the courage to survive the process of recovery. All I can say is that I am in awe.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Hundred Hearts by Terry Sidford. Copyright © 2015 Terry Sidford. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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