Baby is Given a Name

I wouldn’t change a thing.

There’s a kind of truth that comes with getting older that isn’t always spoken about.

At 66, I can see my life so much more clearly—including the parts I wish I could have done differently.

And I hold that alongside this other truth—

I would have had to be someone else to do it differently; someone who had not been born into a family of generations of unhealed, passed-down trauma.

I can see where my own unhealed wounds showed up in ways I didn’t understand at the time.

Where my pain and survival patterns shaped how I showed up in the world—who I chose, how I coped, and the ways I disappeared from myself.

I’ve loved people who couldn’t love me back. I’ve stayed too long. I’ve left too late.

I’ve tried to earn what should have been freely given.

I’ve built things. Lost things. Started over more times than I can count.

That was a hard truth to sit with. So many years. So much time I can never get back.

Because it’s not about blame. It’s about ownership.

There’s a particular kind of grief in recognizing that some of what was passed down to me…

I have also passed on.

But even in that harsh truth; there’s something else I’ve come to understand.

On this day, 66 years ago, a mother I would never get to know gave me the name “Arleen,” which means “A Pledge” in Celtic.

I saw those words in her own writing years later, after recovering my baby book along with one of those old baby name books they used to give you when you left the hospital.

To be honest, I’ve never really cared for my name. I even thought about changing it a million times, something I thought would be more pleasing or suited to me, but never did.

But now I see its power. The intention in it that my mother could never have known when she carefully selected it.

I would be and have become the woman in our lineage to do what she couldn’t…what her mother couldn’t…and what the women before them couldn’t.

I would forgo the life unlived to be with the pain of all of us.

To heal years of trauma and separation.

I have to see it this way—

to make sense of all the years spent trying to heal…

the endless therapy sessions, the highlighted passages in all of the required readings, and the repeated painful patterns until I had had enough.

None of it was wasted.

I had to go through everything I did to be able to hold a safe, sacred space without flinching for others trying to find their way.

I had to become someone who could stay. I see that now.

You can’t know the way unless you’ve truly traveled it.

You can’t know the dragon unless you’ve faced him.

You can’t know that he was always the best part of you until you’ve lived enough to see it.

That was the path, and I was the promise.

It took one more generation, but it ended with me.

At 66, I don’t see my life through the lens of—

missed opportunities, “if onlys,” or “why me’s”

I see it as a lineage that changed the trajectory of those who come after me.

A Celtic warrior turned Wise Woman—whose time it was to bring the battle to an end.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Peace,

Arleen