About Me — Christina
I write about life transitions — birth, death and everything in-between. I live in my head, and I like it here.
I’m Christina. I’m a wife and carer to my husband, who lives with multiple disabilities after a car accident in 2012. I’m the mother of two young adults and stepmum to another two. Almost nine years into my second marriage, I’m still figuring out how to raise a blended family. I’m a staff member for two cats who generously allow me to live in their house. In another life, I was a birth doula for over a decade. I witnessed the beginning of hundreds of lives and guided the transition of hundreds more adults into parenthood. It was emotionally taxing but deeply rewarding work. It was my calling for a time, and I gave it everything I had.
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When my first marriage catastrophically imploded and my children grew into tweens, the energy of mothering began to give way to something else. Something older, wiser, and not entirely at odds with the motherhood phase of my life, but still different. I’ve always enjoyed my own company and can happily go weeks without seeing people. Around this time, the desire to hide in my cave and spend time within began to feel not just optional but necessary. Years spent lurching from one trauma to the next, reacting to what happened to me rather than making conscious choices about my future, had forced me into a “dark night of the soul”. After years of no contact with my father, I began to wrestle with my relationship with my mother, finally deciding in 2022 to step back from that, too, at least for a little while. Weeks later, my oldest child moved away for university, and at age 50, I quit drinking and hit the gym. In 2023/24, I lost 20kg and remembered what it felt like to have a strong body. For the first time since I was 19, my relationship with alcohol is normal (I drink at Christmas, and that’s it). It surprises me that I don’t even think about it anymore. Through all of it, I wrote.
I returned to therapy, finally digging through the muck of my family of origin — my parents’ affairs and eventual divorce, my fraught relationship with my father, and my ex-husband’s two-year affair. I wrote some more. I began collecting tarot decks and looking at them more closely for guidance — a hobby I’ve had since I was a teenager. I returned to university and picked up a long-abandoned philosophy/political science degree (that I still haven’t finished and will probably die trying to). My youngest child finished school at the beginning of 2025 and moved away to join his sister. It’s been hard; I miss both of my kids a lot. But I know there’s nothing for them in our town, so this was inevitable. After all, I fled this place myself when I was their age and didn’t return for twenty years.
As I write, I’m beginning to emerge from my “Dark Night”. These last few years have been about just trying to make some sense. Am I there yet? Of course not. But I do feel stronger. I feel more at peace with who I am and more in control of what I will accept. I understand the things about me that aren’t likely to change and can embrace the parts of me that are still growing and evolving.
My interests are varied enough that, like many people my age, I suspect I probably have ADHD. I’m into progressive politics, birth work, disability advocacy (my husband has an acquired brain injury), parenting in a blended family, and the effects of infidelity. I’ll be writing more about those things and whatever other passing fad grabs my interest, here on Medium.
If you’re interested in transitions and transformation of all kinds, I hope you’ll hang around.
