Ep. 1 My Story
Welcome to my podcast! I can't believe it! But I've actually been talking about starting this podcast for over a year now. And it just feels so surreal and exciting for it to finally be out in the world. And I'm so grateful you're here spending time with me.
My name is Michelle Purta. And I'm a Life and Marriage Coach for moms. And I want to use this episode to share more about me and why I do what I do and why I created this podcast.
So I am a woman, a wife, a stepmom, and a mom. We live out in California, in the Bay Area right outside of San Francisco. We have a blended family, so my oldest is my husband's son from a different relationship and we have two kids of our own. So right now as we speak, my oldest is twelve. My middle child will be six later this year. My youngest will be two next month and we also have two bunnies.
Now, why am I a Life and Marriage Coach for moms? Of all the things that I can do, why am I this?
Well, the short answer is, I want you to be happy. The long answer is I just genuinely love to help empower people to create the life that they desire. And based on my personal experiences, working with moms is my favorite. Particularly in the self-love and marriage aspect. Why? Because those are things that I have personally struggled with growing up.
My parents are divorced, my mom remarried, but my parents are divorced. And because they didn't have a good example of how healthy relationships worked, naturally they didn't know how to do it either. Right? And because they didn't really know how to do it, I didn't really know how to do it. Their parents likely married because of survival. Both my parents immigrated from Hong Kong.
Now, what I imagine is that their parents got married because it's someone that they can trust, to do life with. Nothing about love. But just trust that they can navigate life with them. Because it's it's tough to do it on your own right? And so with that being their example, it's no wonder why what I witnessed growing up were communication problems, a lack of connection, and a lack of prioritization of connection. And just a whole slew of things. My mom was like the classic martyr, like that generation of moms in general, whether they were immigrants or not. I feel like this was a very common thing where moms just did it. Except that my mom wasn't a stay-at-home mom. She has always been a working mom.
So what did I witness? I witnessed a mom working all day.
Take care of the kids. Take care of the house. Get resentful from here and there, get burnt out, blow up. But they never fought in front of us. I have a sister. They didn't fight in front of us, it always was behind closed doors. So you could hear yelling, but you can't see it. And honestly, I don't know if I can count higher than the number of fingers that I have, how often they were actually affectionate with each other and how often they actually put us in other people's care so that they can spend time together. So that's where I came from. Eventually, they got divorced, which, in hindsight, even though it was challenging to go through as kids, I'm really glad that they got divorced because they were not compatible. They had very, very different life paths they wanted to go down and their divorce really shaped how I view relationships.
So while I'm a marriage coach, I'm not here to save your marriage. I know that sounds funny.
As a marriage coach, I'm actually here to make sure that you're in your marriage because you want to be in your marriage.
So this podcast really is not to save your marriage, but to help you if you feel lost in it, to help you navigate, how to move forward, however that looks, whether it's to do the work or to elevate how you communicate so that you can connect better, whether it's to remind you to prioritize each other and continue dating each other and getting to know each other, even if you've been together for a million years, or it seems like or if you're like, I really don't know if I want to be in this marriage anymore and I need clarity.
Sometimes my clients come to me saying, "I just need clarity, because this is my last-ditch effort. I've done everything I can think of, and I don't want to regret my decision of leaving." And so we do the work. And sometimes their marriage miraculously transforms into something even better than before. And sometimes they're like, I feel really confident that I've done everything I can do and instead of wanting to exit the marriage out of anger and frustration and pain, it's them exiting the relationship because they're like, "well, I've given it all and I can, I've made it clear on what I need out of a relationship, and I'm no longer taking it to heart, why it's not working out. It's not that they didn't want to give it to me, it's that we just have different takes on how relationships work and what we're both willing to do and not do." So that's the really, really big piece of why this podcast exists and why I do what I do.
Because your happiness is at the forefront of this. And if you're happy, your kids will be better off.
So, back to my story. I did not know how to communicate effectively. I did not know what it looked like to prioritize my relationship. I did not know how to handle my own emotions. I was not self-aware at all. But I thought it was because I studied psychology, and basically, I had no idea how to be the right partner in a healthy relationship. And so with that, in every single relationship, I would be very much blame the other person if something went wrong or if I got upset, because I grew up in a blame culture. If I did something wrong it was my fault. Always.
I think it's really common in Asian culture too. So my thoughts were, I was fine before you did whatever you did, or whatever you didn't do. And so the change in my emotions must be your fault, right? It's my partner's fault. And my go-to would be to make them feel really bad about it, to really guilt them. Because I thought that was the way to get them to change because I didn't want to experience it anymore, which is why I brought it up. And so I thought that I had to make them really feel my pain in order for them to take it seriously. And in order for them to be like, okay, I won't do that, again, to show a lot of remorse. But that's not the only way to elicit change, to influence change.
I would also be passive aggressive, because I didn't understand my emotions, I would feel really big emotions. And out came my words. Sharp tongue. I would walk away regretting how I said things. But at the time, I was really fired up and angry. And so I would speak through my anger. But here's the thing, I didn't know what I wanted out of the conversation. I didn't know what I needed. I just knew that I was in a bad place and we had to talk it out. Because if we didn't talk it out right then and there, then we would not be in a good place, then it would mean that our relationship was in danger. The whole don't go to bed angry thing. I'm going to make an episode about that. But I really stuck to that. And so that would look like circular conversations because I had no idea what I wanted. I didn't know what I wanted out of them. So sometimes conversations would be 15 minutes long and sometimes they'd be, three hours long, no matter what hour of the day it was. And not only that, but I would criticize them.
These habits of mine were unhealthy and toxic.
And I didn't know it. Because this is what I witnessed. And this is how I thought things worked. And TV does a great job of affirming these ways of approaching relationships.
Another reason why I have this podcast is to teach you other tools. There are more effective ways for you to handle your frustration and your resentment, and your anger. As I said, I was not self-aware. I also didn't know how to ask for help or how to even know when I needed help. It was always at the point where it was too late and my partners would be on the other end of it, where they would just get the lashing because I felt like I didn't know this at the time, but I felt like if I asked for help, that meant I was less capable.
So I took on a lot and I experienced burnout a lot. I wasn't aware enough to know the signs, so that led to me picking fights. Me being really frustrated, over exhausted and I experienced this twice with becoming a stepmom first, being responsible for a child and then having a my own son later on, where I truly learned the importance of taking care of yourself, and how that affects your relationship. Because when my son came into the world, I had like milk production issues.
I literally felt like a cow, like that was my job trying to nurse, trying to produce milk. And then when he wasn't nursing, I was pumping to stimulate the glands to produce milk. It was frustrating. I would find myself snapping at my husband a lot, starting fights with him a lot, just not seeing him in the best light, and just being so dang angry and resentful towards him. Our home did not feel fun. It didn't feel harmonious, I was even snapping at my oldest a lot as well. I just did not come to like who I was, right. And that's not why we become parents, right? That's not why we decide to have a kid with our loved ones. It's also not why we got married. Our wedding day is not the peak of our relationship and deciding to have kids is made out of love. It's not where we like to imagine ourselves putting our relationships on hold until the kids become more independent. If that was in the fine print, I'd be like, forget it, or my husband be like, forget it, I don't want kids then if that means that we're not going to connect anymore, we're not going to have fun anymore. And I'm just going to be in trouble all the time, and the source of all the issues that you're experiencing. So it was really through the birth of my son, that I started to be like, oh, gosh, this is not how I want life to be. I need for life to be more than this. I want to have a better relationship. I want to teach my kids by example what a healthy relationship is.
I want to enjoy my relationship. I want to enjoy motherhood.
So I did the work. I worked on being a better communicator, I worked on becoming more self-aware, I worked on being more vulnerable, really peeling back the layers of understanding myself so that I could share what was going on in my mind, and in my body with my husband so that we can be more transparent and open and grow together. So that I could experience motherhood with more fulfillment, and not just like be a stress case 24/7.
My goal for this podcast is to free you of what society, what your family has taught you about how to do life, and how to do your relationship, and remind you that you get to do it your way, you get to enjoy it. In doing so, you become more resilient. When things don't go right. It is in doing the work in myself, holding myself accountable, growing, not being afraid of doing the inner work, doing the unlearning that I feel really free and resilient and connected to myself and to my husband and to my kids. So I hope that this podcast really empowers you to have the courage to look inwards.
Know that your relationship with yourself really dictates the depth of all your relationships, with your partner, with your kids, with your friends, with your family.
I'll be right here alongside you, supporting you, teaching you tools on how to communicate better. Teaching you tools and how to understand yourself better, how to shatter expectations that you may be putting on yourself because of media, your family, and friends because it's what you think you should be doing. Ultimately, I just want you to be free and feel like "I love my life" however, that looks like.
I really firmly believe that you get to be the woman, wife, and mom that you desire to be. We all deserve to be happy.
The world is such a better place when we're all happy. I think we can all agree on that. So I hope that you tune into my future episodes and I'm really excited to get to know you better. So feel free to, drop a note in my inbox, on Instagram, or wherever you might want to spend time with me and let's change your life for the better.
Connect with me!
http://www.instagram.com/michellepurtacoaching
Work with me!