This is why I am qualified to help you... (and it has nothing to do with the 11 letters behind my name)

21 years ago today, I said goodbye to my husband, Greg, as he prepared to get on his bike for his daily 10-mile commute to Green Fields Country Day School where he taught science.

?21 years ago today, I received a call at 7:30 am from the chaplain at the university hospital asking if I was “Mrs. Glick”...to which I thought, “No that is my mother-in-law” but quickly affirmed that indeed I have been a Mrs. for 9 months.

?21 years ago today, I walked into the ER in shock and tears to see my formerly vital, alive, and able-bodied husband on a stretcher covered in blood with half a dozen doctors standing around him…one of those doctors was a family friend who looked at me with a sober and ashen face indicating to me that this was not good.

?The rest is a blur to include the surgeon and police saying words like:

• ?“He will never walk again.”
• “We need to amputate his leg…”
• “I have never seen someone survive being hit like that…”
• “The car was going 40 mph, the guy ran a red light and didn’t even hit his brakes…threw your husband 150 feet.”

?I was 27 years old.

?I found out that I was pregnant 3 days later.

?I don’t mentor women around relationships and life because mine has been easy (it hasn’t been).

?I don’t guide women through their relationships and life challenges because I have all of the answers (I don’t).

?I am an ally and a wayshower for women because I army-crawled my way through the first 12 years of my marriage, where nothing was easy.

?My husband and I were delivered a massive curveball less than a year after we got married. I wish that I could say that I was a gallant, doting wife every day after his injury during those many years of wheelchairs, walkers, surgeries, and endless recovery.

?I wasn’t.

• ?I was angry (“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be!”).
• I was scared (“Is my husband – who was my rock climbing partner – going to be wheelchair bound forever?!”).
• I was resentful (“I know that it SHOULD all be about him because HE was the one hit by the car, but what about me? I am the one picking up all of the pieces AND sick as a dog pregnant. What about me?”).

?Sometimes, I think it is a miracle of God that we are still together and I am certain that the relationship that I have grown with the Source since has quite a bit to do with it.

But honestly, we stayed together because neither of us was mature enough to leave.?

It actually takes maturity to leave a relationship in a HEALTHY WAY – any adult can channel their inner adolescent and walk out the door with their middle finger in the air.

?But I knew that if I was going to leave, I wanted to do that from a place of love…for his sake after all that we had been through and for mine so that I would be practiced at loving someone else.

?Over the years through therapy, self-inquiry, owning my shadow parts, spiritual questing, etc. I have learned to love myself.

?And subsequently was able to love and embody that love with him.?

?So we continue to decide to choose marriage from a conscious place of CHOICE rather than a DEFAULT PLACE of “well it is easier than leaving”.

?Every year on March 15, we celebrate life in my family.

We celebrate making it through all that we have and know that the real gift has little to do with whether or not he is in a wheelchair but how we choose to handicap ourselves by choosing suffering, misery, and divisiveness when we have the power of choice to SELECT joy, connection, and compassion for one another…and everyone else.

?That took me many, many years to learn, then practice and then embody on the regular…how to choose joy and drop my own addiction to suffering and being a victim in my own life.

And what I created in the Your Marriage Is Your Ashram Self-Study Course walks you through exactly how to do it yourself. Doors close soon.

?Here is to the brilliance of a fully lived life, even when none of it goes as planned!

Jenny