Finding My Roar

Ironically I write this with no roar at all. Literally I have lost my voice. Maybe I have a case of laryngitis, definitely a sore throat and a dry cough. My voice became scratchy Friday night and has gotten progressively worse, with some words barely creeping out as a whisper. Talking has proven to be very difficult, singing with the kids during music practice extremely challenging, calling for a runaway dog and yelling, forget about it. 

I can’t help but think maybe losing my voice this weekend is for the best. I think I needed to take this time to recognize and realize when best to use my roar, especially since I’ve just gotten it back. 

What do I mean by I’ve just gotten my roar back? Well, I’ve suppressed my roar for a very long time now. When I was a teenager and in my early to mid twenties, I was very quick to tell people what I thought and why. At one time I may have been a little hypersensitive and too fast to tell people off, especially if I felt I was being done wrong. 

It was my then boyfriend, now husband who made me aware of how vocal I really was and how my roar was chasing friends and family away. He opened my eyes to the outside world’s perspective of me (angry-bitter crazy lady who would bite your head off, if I thought you were out to get me). It was that perspective coupled with the fear of losing my source of income due to my roar that I began keeping my opinions to myself. I began to hold back what I thought, afraid of what I might say. Over time it began to become more and more natural for me to hold back not only my voice but my thoughts as well. 

Becoming a married woman, also made me believe it was my role as a woman to keep my mouth shut. I’m not sure where I got his information. Maybe growing up watching the women in my life appear to be powerless, especially my grandmother’s generation. Keep in my mind this is nothing that my husband ever made me believe, this mindset comes purely from within me. He on the other hand was wondering what was up with me, because the woman I was becoming was not who he had fell in love with and thought he had married. 

Soon I was depending on my husband and everyone else to be my voice for me. Or worse, I was miserable because I didn’t state exactly what I wanted. Instead of fighting for myself and what I believed, I was now avoiding all types of conflict. Like the time a hair stylest put these horrific blue stripes in my hair instead of doing a purple ombre on the tips like I wanted. Did I say anything to her? No. Instead I went home and cried, then lived with the ugliness wrapped up in a bun for months until I finally found somebody trustworthy to repair the damage. 

Another example was when a door to door sales man came to our home and talked us into getting a video surveillance system. I looked at my husband and said, “what do you think?”, hoping he would read my mind to send the guy away, instead he thought I wanted the system and scheduled the install. It was within 24 hours of the install that we had them come back and uninstall it, but that was all because I was afraid to use my voice. 

The last thing that I should have used my voice on and didn’t was the movers. My mother-in-law bless her heart, hired us some movers to help us move. Unfortunately they were a joke. They were not professional movers, instead they were just two guys who rented a U-haul. The one guy attempted to move everything while the other guy spent the entire time talking to my husband. See the thing was, the longer they took to move us, the more money they got paid. Instead of me saying anything to them, I wanted my husband or my mother in law to send them away. While the old me would have ripped both those “movers” a new one.

Well I think, I finally got my breaking my point. After four incompetent plumbers and three weeks without a kitchen sink, enough was enough. The fourth plumber told me that he was going to have to rip up the entire kitchen to fix the plumbing and the warranty company would not be taking care of it. He told me not to worry that he would send his restoration guy out to find some moisture and then coach me on what to say to the homeowners insurance company, so they would cover it. 

A couple hours later this used car sales man type arrived at our house. Sure enough, he was coaching us on exactly what to say to the insurance company. He wanted us to lie and say the problem had just started three days ago. Just that simple fact, sent me over the edge. I am not going to lie. That is against my beliefs. But especially knowing that the warranty company had documented our first phone call about the problem three weeks before, who was I to lie to the insurance company? This guy was telling us how he was going to break the counter on purpose so the insurance company would give us money to get a new fancy one and how he could make other things happen so we could get a brand new remodeled kitchen out of this claim. 

It didn’t sit well with me at all. He was ready to break our counter right then and there. He told us he could even take our deductible in payments. That was when I finally got my roar back. For once I didn’t look at my husband and expect him to read my mind. Instead I told that man he needed to leave. I told him I needed time to think. The whole way out to the front door, he was trying to sell us more, confirming that I was indeed making the right decision in that moment. While the kitchen plumbing was still an issue, I felt empowered from sending that man out of our home. I finally was beginning to feel like me again. 

Turns out, once I called a plumber we know and trust our problem was fixed for 150 bucks. He even showed me the pipe under the kitchen with his video scan, which by the way has absolutely nothing wrong with it. They were going to tear up our kitchen and make a huge insurance claim all for no reason. The problem with the plumbing was in the backyard, where the water had been bubbling up. The pipe had collapsed and once our trusted plumber replaced that section, everything began to work fine.

Even though not having a kitchen sink for the last few weeks has been really tough, I am thankful for all we went through. It has been a rough road, but completely worth me finding my roar again.