Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristin Tucker
Kristin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
When I contemplate about where I have been I start to reflect on who I am, and I think of the many journeys I have been on that have shaped me into the woman I am today.
My performance journey began early, at the age of three to be exact. If my memory holds correctly I’m pretty sure that’s when I wrote my first song “Oh I’m a Bear.” As you can imagine it was pretty basic, but the affect it had on the people I loved, now that was priceless!
I grew up with music.
My mom sang and played flute, piano, and tambourine. My dad was an incredible guitar player, lyrist, and song writer. He would spend hours writing music in his study. One of my favorite memories from my younger years is lying on the floor of his study and listening to him play and sing! We would write together too, it was incredibly special.
Our family life wasn’t always as smooth as one of my dads silky tunes. Although my younger sister Jessica and myself were so loved, my mom and dad struggled to be that same love to each other. My sister pushed her feelings down and mine came roaring out!
I needed an outlet.
So I clung to music and performing.
It was an escape for me, my alternate reality if you will.
I ended up attending Ohio University for both music and theatre. I loved college life, at times a little to much I’m sure, but I didn’t feel like I loved me. It was as if my performing didn’t have a curtain call and bled into my everyday living. I didn’t know how to just be myself.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to graduate, and it left me with the silent shame of “not being good enough.”
So, I did what I knew I could do best, I started performing for a living.
In my early years there were musicals and convention shows. When I finally landed a job as a stunt woman at the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, I thought I had made it. I went from struggling and barely make ends meet, to having a really good income with excellent benefits!
I met my first husband and we married. On the outside things looked picture perfect, but on the inside I was dying…but the show must go on.
And it did.
One of the greatest moments in my life was the birth of my son Joshua. It was as if all that I was striving to “be” came wrapped up in the reflection of a six pound 12 ounce baby boy. I stepped off the stage of life and into one of the most fulfilling roles I’d ever had, being a mom!
My marriage crumbled after seven years, I tried so desperately to be “good enough” but we were far to broken. I felt guilt that I couldn’t somehow have loved him more, or just made it work in spite of all of the wounds. I silently buried my bruises and threw myself into motherhood and performing!
And for the next few years I struggled.
My life began to come into focus when I met my now husband Clark. Although I knew I had met someone who loved me for me, I had a difficult time letting my walls down.
All of my brokenness from my first marriage found its way into my second one with Clark.
Today, having made it through the challenges of my life, I am so blessed!
Not only have I reinvented myself, I have finally begun to tap into the true essence of who I am! Learning that my wholeness was found in my brokenness.
I continue to perform, and enjoy it for what it is, knowing it’s not ALL of who I am.
I reinvented myself in 2020 and became a certified life coach.
My non-profit opened in 2021 and is still running strong today! Serving young moms in crisis.
So, over the past few years (during all of this) unbeknownst to me, I started dealing with the symptoms of menopause. Little did I know this would end up putting me on a new path with my life coaching.
Now in my mid-life I feel like I am just discovering the real me!
My whole life has been filled with joy, pain, laughter, and tears! I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had not been on this journey I call my life.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
My journey has been anything but smooth, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I truly think it’s the bumps along the path of life that shape us into who we are meant to be.
As I mentioned my first marriage ended in a divorce. I felt like a failure. Instead of dealing with what I was feeling I masked up and kept going. I had perfected the art of making things look like they were great on the outside, when I was silently wrestling with so much on the inside.
Getting married for the second time wasn’t an easy decision for me. I didn’t want to let someone else into my life, but it happened anyway. Thank goodness! It was easy to forget about things for a while, and try to convince myself that all of my baggage from before wouldn’t find its way to me in my new marriage…
Well it did.
Although Clark and myself were very much in love, we began to feel the pressures of life. When he moved in he instantly became a bonus dad to my son Joshua. Clark had left his career as a Hollywood stuntman back in California and was now working a 9-5 job and had very little time for much else. As a family we went ALL IN to an inner city ministry that took most of my time. We became more like roommates than intimate spouses.
In 2014 we both accepted jobs at our church in Celebration Florida. Clark was the Technical Arts Director and I was the Worship Arts Director. We worked together, but as a couple we began to drift even further apart. We became so focused on raising Josh, leading in ministry and pouring into others, we forgot that our marriage should have been a priority. Little did I know that fourteen years in we would be faced with dealing with all of that baggage!
It was 2020 when the world shut down and I had to face some hard truths in my life. I had fallen out of love with my husband, and had no grid for a way forward. I remember one day I got up the courage to tell Clark what I was feeling, thinking that he was going to respond in a negative way. He had seemed to check out years ago, and without either of us talking about what we were feeling, I had no idea where he was as far as us. I’ll never forget, when I told him the truth about where I was, he responded in love.
That year, when the world shut down, we began to open up to each other. We worked every day on our relationship. It was as if we got a “do over” and we began putting our marriage back onto our priority list!
It really felt as if that bumpy path we’d been on smoothed out! It was like a re-honeymoon. We were empty nesters now, and truly focused on having some of our best years ahead of ourselves!
Enter Menopause…
Then without warning, it was as if I fell into a pot hole and couldn’t see a way out!
In the beginning of 2022 I thought I might be in menopause, or at least what I thought was menopause. The truth was I was in perimenopause and didn’t even know what that was. I had the typical symptoms, hot flashes and night sweats. I had gained weight, but I assumed that was because I wasn’t doing stunts anymore. I felt like I had a game plan and would transition into this season of my life unscathed. Then I got COVID for the first time. I struggle with asthma and I ended up in the hospital for a week. When I got home I just couldn’t seem to recover. I got what they refer to as “long haul” COVID. Every part of my body hurt! I couldn’t use my hands anymore because each finger was triggering and getting stuck. I gained even more weight. My “cup is half full” view on life started to tank, I began seeing things as empty. Insomnia, hair loss, no libido, UTI’s, and an overall feeling of not being well set in.
What I didn’t know was I was in the throes of menopause. Each symptom I was suffering with was actually a symptom of my hormones decreasing and depleting. I can’t tell you how many different doctors I went to for each different pain I was experiencing. My medical bills over the next two years were piling up! There was even a discussion of surgery!
It wasn’t until the end of 2022 that I began to question what I was feeling and started connecting the dots in the symptoms I was experiencing. Now I am a big researcher, so when it had officially been one year without my cycle, I knew I was in menopause and I continued reading and investigating everything I could about it.
It’s incredible what we as women don’t know and aren’t told about menopause. The crazy thing is we will ALL go through it!
So I decided to reframe my personal coaching practice and work with women just like myself, who are struggling with the symptoms and stigma of menopause, and help then get a plan for moving past the pause of mid-life and into living life again!
All of my experiences have brought me to where I am today. I am stronger, and wiser because I have allowed these rough parts of my journey to transform me into the woman I knew was always there inside me. I have perspective now. I know it all matters, and I do too!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
In all of my years performing I learned that I love people.
The ability to have an impact on people through what I do, makes every stage that I have ever been on special to me. Moving into coaching was a natural progression for me. I was able to use my own struggles with not being enough, and menopause to share with the women I coach and help them to discover that they are loved and so much more than just their circumstances. It’s not about what you do, it’s about who you are and Whose you are.
My years of ministry fine-tuned me to work with young mom’s in the non-profit I started in 2021. To date we have served many young moms in the inner city of Orlando, as well as their children! I am currently expanding into more counties around me, and help these mom’s get on their feet with a “hands up” approach.
The Sacred Garden Foundation is something I am very proud of. It started as a dream in 2019, and within two years we were up and running!
I launched my private coaching practice at the same time, but it’s my most recent shift, focusing on women in mid-life going through menopause, that I am most proud of! I am determined to be a trail blazer for those women coming up behind me so they will be equipped with support, and information, to make the right decisions for themselves and keep thriving thru mid-life and beyond!
My singing career is still going as well. I sing in a few bands and sit in with fellow musicians locally.
I think the thing I am most proud of is my non-profit, the Sacred Garden Foundation. I started it because of a dream I had, and I could never have imagined what it has become. The testimony of one of the young mom’s says it all, “I don’t know where I’d be if I didn’t have the Sacred Garden Foundation!” There is a vision for the future that is quite big…so I look at who I need to become to make that happen, and I start living like that version of myself right now.
I think the thing that sets me a part from others is I’m not afraid to reinvent myself, over and over again!
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
My greatest take away during the COVID 19 crisis is that sometimes you need to come to a complete stop to see what you’ve been running from. All of those years that I hadn’t dealt with my feelings of failure, and not being enough, had been piling up. Something was going to break if I kept running at that pace. When the world shut down, I had two options, implode and loose another marriage, or heal and face all of what I was trying to avoid.
It wasn’t easy, but it was good.
The inability to not go anywhere but into my mess, forced my husband and myself to choose to stay and fight for each other, not with each other.
The resulting outcome is it restored us, it restored me.
Sometimes you just need to stop everything you’re doing and focus on what’s right in front of you, to gain perspective for the journey you’re on. I am grateful for all I have experienced in my life so far. I am ready for more!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kristintucker.me/menopause-story-1
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kristinreedtucker
- Other: https://www.sacredgardenfoundation.org/
Image Credits
Galaxy Mediaworks
