Before boundaries, Before Self-Love: My awakening at 50.

What are boundaries? It’s a question I could have never answered honestly before I turned 50. We hear the word but do we truly understand what they mean? For me, it took half a century and some incredibly tough lessons- to grasp their profound importance.

Life before 50, was a testament to what happens when you don’t know what boundaries are, leaving you vulnerable to bad behavior. My first husband was verbally abusive throughout our relationship and marriage.

After a verbal attack over the microphone in a nightclub where he was the DJ, I was left

deeply hurt and embarrassed. In that moment, I decided enough was enough! Either he would respect me out of love and/or being the mother of his children or he will be made to respect me, was my thoughts.

I researched and found an organization that took my complaint and I filed a PFA against him for verbal abuse. The judge on the case granted the order in my favor and told my husband at the time: “If you so much as to call her any name other than the name she was born with, you will go to jail, do I make myself clear?”

Despite the judge’s strong warning and advice, I allowed him to stay in the home. He had nowhere else to go (so he said) and out of a love that, at that time superseded my own well-being, I obliged. It was because I never wanted things to be that way; I desperately tried over and over to make things work. My love for people who didn’t deserve me, and my then non-existent understanding of self-love, cost me a lot of heartache and allowed destructive behavior to continue. It wasn’t long before, during a heated argument, he violated that order.

This time the police were called by an outside party and I watched as he was removed from our home in handcuffs, leading to a three month jail sentence.

But here’s the honest truth: even after that pivotal step, I didn’t truly grasp what boundaries or self- love actually meant. The court order was one thing, an external barrier, but the internal lessons? Those were decades away. I was still living by old patterns, accepting bad behavior from men, unknowingly setting myself up for more heartache down the road, all before my real awakening at 50.