Nadine's Story: When Did I Stop Singing? Losing The Magic In Marriage

Nadine spent decades helping other women find themselves — as a relationship counselor, NLP trainer, and self-esteem facilitator. 

But for 19 years inside her own marriage, she was quietly losing track of who she was.

It wasn't dramatic. It was the slow accumulation of small surrenders: preferences set aside, choices made around someone else's moods, a voice that used to sing falling silent somewhere she couldn't quite name.

When the marriage ended, Nadine made a choice many women don't know how to make: she refused to let the anger take her down. She changed the locks. She packed her cart with the foods she actually liked. And one day, driving alone, she caught herself singing — and realized she couldn't remember when she had stopped.

Nadine's story is a courage story about identity: what it costs when we give it away, what it takes to reclaim it, and how becoming fully yourself again is exactly what makes the second act possible.

If you have ever looked up and wondered how you got so far from yourself — this one is for you.

Guest: Nadine Hanchar | Relationship Counselor, NLP Trainer, Women's Self-Esteem

Website: https://progressiveplus.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadinehanchar/

Hosted by Bernice McDonald — Courage Architect, speaker, and author. 

Need to find YOUR Next Step through a hard thing you're facing? Have a simple conversation with the Tiny Brave Steps Generator AI:  www.tinybravesteps.com.

Connect with Bernice:  

Email: bernice@bernicemcdonald.com
Website: www.tinybravesteps.com

Join me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernicemcdonald/

If this episode moved something in you — leave a review, share it with a woman who needs it.

Do YOU have a Courage Story you'd like to share? Send Bernice a message. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

She was driving down the road one ordinary day, and she heard herself singing.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

I caught myself singing, driving one day. And I had been an avid singer right from the time I was little. I don't know when I gave singing up. But somewhere along that line in that marriage, I stopped singing.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Not performing, not trying, just singing. The way she had since she was a little girl. And then she thought, when did I stop singing? She couldn't remember. Somewhere inside a 19-year marriage, she had given it up quietly, without fanfare, without even noticing. And that is where this story begins. Not with the day she sang again, with the day she realized she had stopped.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Well, I think the biggest thing anyone has to do in a relationship is get to a place where they where they actually care about themselves. Um and actually take care of themselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

I'm Bernice McDonald and this is Nadine's Courage Story. And if you have ever looked up one day and wondered how you got so far from yourself, this one is for you. Act one, wake up your courage. Waking up your courage is the moment you stop explaining something away and start seeing it for what it is and what it's costing you. Before we get to that moment in the car, you need to understand what Nadine was walking out of. She had married a man she once described as a rough diamond, and before the wedding, his own best man pulled her aside and asked her plainly, do you really want to do this? She said yes. There were good times, real ones. She doesn't pretend otherwise, but there were also patterns that ground her down slowly, the kind that are hard to name because they don't happen all at once. He could get angry quickly. He was self-centered, and there was something more subtle at work, a kind of selective memory that left Nadine standing in rooms wondering if she had imagined the conversation they had just had. She would try to anchor agreements, a dishwasher, a plan to move, a business arrangement, and find that for him they had never quite happened.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

I just wish that I I recorded our conversations at times because he doesn't, he didn't, we wouldn't remember the conclusions we came to. And so that was kind of the way he moved to Victoria. He didn't remember any of the conversation that we had about him coming down one day a week and starting, you know, to build a practice and all that. He didn't remember any of that.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

After many years in that marriage, Nadine had learned to accept him for who he was. She had learned not to hold unrealistic expectations. That sounds like wisdom. And in some ways, it certainly was, but it also meant she was quietly adapting herself around something that kept shifting beneath her feet. She was a relationship counselor. She understood people, and that knowledge was both her strength and her particular kind of hard place because she knew she should see this clearly. And the truth was parts of it she couldn't. Not yet. The moment of waking up didn't arrive with sirens, it arrived at a Reiki retreat. Nadine was getting ready to leave early. The group was celebrating, people were gathering, but she was anxious to get home. She had to clean the house. Her husband was coming back, and she was saying this out loud when a woman turned and looked at her.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

It will be criticized. And I realized that I was acting like a woman that was in a situation that was not good. Now just think that over slowly.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

She wasn't being hurt physically. She would fight back, stand her ground, refuse to back down from the outside, and often from the inside, it didn't look like what she knew it to be. But she was living in a constant low-grade vigilance, anticipating criticism, managing his moods, shrinking around the edges of her own life to make room for his. That's what Fred, our name for the voice of fear, looks like when he's been in the room so long you've stopped hearing him. He doesn't always announce himself. Sometimes he just quietly rewrites the rules until you're running your whole life around what won't upset someone else. Nadine saw it. And once she saw it, she couldn't deny it. So she started changing things. And then she moved to Victoria.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I mean, I I'd been doing trainings since I was, like I said, 18, 19 years old. And so when I moved to Victoria, I'd started doing my self-esteem trainings for women, and then I ended up doing self-esteem trainings for men as well. And so, and they took off very nicely in in Victoria.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

She moved for her work, her calling, the thing she had been building since she was 18 years old. He said he would follow. It took him four years. Act two. Embrace who you are. Embracing who you are means returning to yourself, the real full version of you, and deciding that who you are is worth protecting. Nadine had been in personal growth since she was fifteen. She started giving workshops at eighteen, NLP training, timeline therapy, hypnosis, meditation, neurology. She never stopped learning. And she had also grown up moving four schools a year through elementary school because her father was the kind of man who got called from project to project across the province. Brilliant, in demand, and always packing the family up.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

So, you know, I I learned to let go, and I learned that I didn't have a lot of control over everything. It's the thing is, change is a given.

unknown 8:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

And so, you know, you need to be you need to get comfortable with change. It's a given. And you need to learn to accept and adapt.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

That girl, the one who learned to make new friends, let go of old places, trust that she could land somewhere new, didn't disappear. She grew up and built a business and worked seven days a week and brought herself fully to every room she walked into. She became Nadine. And when things got hard with her marriage during those years in Victoria, when he arrived uninvited, unprepared, and expecting a welcome, the woman she had spent a lifetime building was the one who had to hold the line. He joined her company. He treated her staff badly. He assumed authority he hadn't earned. He insisted on 50% of a business she had built alone, made such a scene at the lawyer's office that she, publicly embarrassed, gave in. There were moments she lost her temper. She'll tell you that honestly. But most of the time she came back to something that had always been her compass.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

I'm the one I have to look in the mirror. And I have to like what I see. And if I don't look in the mirror and see somebody that I can respect and, you know, then I'm not behaving well, right? So I have to behave well.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

That's not a small thing. She wasn't being a pushover. She was making a conscious choice about who she was going to be inside a very hard situation. The mirror wasn't asking her to shrink, it was asking her to stay herself.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

So I found out that I could do that. I found out that I could come from a place of compassion and love and generosity, even without without him being who it would have been nice for him to have been.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

This is what embracing who you are actually looks like when it's not easy. It's not a spa day or a journal prompt. It's choosing your own character as the thing you will not negotiate, even when someone around you is pushing hard in the other direction. Nineteen years. She was learning and re-learning this. Not perfectly. She'd tell you that too, but she was doing it. Act three. Stand up for you. Standing up for you is where what you know about yourself starts to show up in what you actually do. The line you hold, the lock you change, the thing you refuse to give away. When he wanted a divorce, he expected negotiation. He expected her to push back, to fall apart, to fight for what they had.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

He said, I want a divorce. And I said, So do you want to work on anything? And he said no. And I said, Okay, that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Then she packed his things and moved him out. He still had a key to her office, but he kept showing up. She had already agreed to pay a salary if he would just leave and get his life in order. He wouldn't. For twelve months she held the line. And then she told him she was changing the locks.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Somebody can't do it the way that you would like them to. There's no point in getting upset about it because it's not going to serve you to do that. And you know, when you have anger, anger is like smoking a pack of cigarettes. You know, it damages your body.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Nadine was not a woman without feelings. She felt plenty. His behavior during the separations stung. He started taking the dancing lessons she had wanted them to take together for years. He used her sporting equipment for someone else.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Mostly he was angry at himself. So I mean I think that that's the thing that I understood probably more than he did. And so, you know, for me, I just kept going.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

She understood him. And she chose not to give him her peace. That is standing up for yourself. Not necessarily with a speech or a confrontation, though sometimes it is that, but sometimes it's quieter. Sometimes it looks like changing the locks and getting back to work. And then one ordinary day, after the papers were signed and the offices were cleared, she was at the grocery store.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

She looked in her cart. I'm in a in in the lineup, and I look in my my cart, and there's not one thing in my cart that I would have bought if I had been with him. So all the things in the cart were things that I liked that I had given up. Right? And I started laughing.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

She had been giving up small pieces of herself. Her food, her preferences, her choices. She had been doing that so quietly that she had not even known she was doing it. Well, they were back now. And then came the car singing.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

I caught myself singing, driving one day. And I had been an avid singer right from the time I was little. You know, sung and I traveled in a 75 voice choir around the states when I was a teenager. Um I don't know when I gave singing up. But somewhere along that line in that marriage, I stopped singing. And I again I was like, oh, when did I stop singing? And I couldn't remember. The groceries were hers again.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

The voice was hers again. She was hers again. Act four. Create your impact. Creating your impact is what becomes possible when a woman has done the inner work. When who she is starts shaping what she builds and who she lets in. She separated in June. She met her second husband in January. She was not looking, she was building.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

She phoned me up and she was asking me, and I put my hand over the phone and and I screamed, and then I said, What time would you like to pick me up? You know. So I mean, you you had to sort of go with things that were good for you and not necessarily give in to the feelings of not wanting to go out and meet new people. If you sit at home waiting for the phone to ring, it's never gonna ring, right? So um you you have to you have to live life. And I wasn't gonna not live life. And so that was part of it. That's the courage nobody talks about.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

The courage to show up to your own life when you would really rather stay home. She went. He had been pursuing her since before the separation was final, roses for every woman in her office on Valentine's Day, showed up at her training, announced to the whole class that he and his two daughters were joining her Caribbean workshop before they had even been on a date.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

When I went out with him the first time, I was very nervous. And I I have no idea what I said. I have no idea what I was just talking my head off. I have no idea what I was saying. And I remember walking out of the restaurant and thinking, he just really wants me as his mentor, right? He doesn't really want to be with me.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

She was talking herself out of it. That's Fred, doing his job, protecting a heart that had been worn down. But then he walked her to her car, and outside her apartment, he stopped.

SPEAKER_02 17:50

Then he said, So I'd like to kiss you goodnight. And I got mad at him. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

I absolutely lost it. I said, You've given me no indication that you're even interested in me, and now you're wanting to kiss me, and da da da. And he started laughing. And he said, Well, you were the one that made all the rules.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

She had set all the rules. Of course she had. She had learned the hard way. What happens when you don't? They kissed. And in that moment, something happened that she hadn't expected.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

We did kiss, and I had that experience of seeing myself being with him forever. So um, that was kind of a very sobering, sobering thought.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

He was a widower with two little girls, one a baby, one five years old. For two months she didn't meet them awake. She wasn't going to let them get attached to someone who wasn't going to stay. That kind of care for small children, that is not the instinct of a woman who had forgotten herself. That is the instinct of a woman who knows exactly what she's doing. When she finally met them over pizza, the five-year-old sat next to her and studied her through dinner. Then took her hand afterward and led her into the bedroom. She asked Nadine to be her mom.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Um when I met the the girls, I mean that all I mean, there was no weird parts, there was no stiff parts to it. Um when I met the girls, we we we went out for dinner at uh a pizza place just locally here, and um so I had the one, the youngest one in a with in a high chair here, and the older one sitting next to me. Well, my boyfriend at the time was across from me. And um, you know, we're sitting there. This is the first time the girls have met me and were out for dinner, okay? So he looks across the table and he goes, They look like they could be your daughters. And I said, Yeah, they kind of do, you know. Anyhow, that was kind of funny.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

An elderly woman had come all the way across the restaurant during dinner.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

There was this little lady across the restaurant. She was an elderly woman, and she came all the way across the restaurant, and she came over to our table, and she said, I just had to come over and tell you what a wonderful family. And your daughters look so much like you. And they're so well behaved. Yeah. So, I mean, there was really no difficult times in terms of integrating. We integrated very easily. There were no problems.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

She had not planned this life. She hadn't known it was possible. She had spent nineteen years with a man who made her feel like the ceiling was always just a little lower than she thought. And then she had done the work, the decades of personal growth, the Reiki retreats, and the mirror and the grocery cart, and she had come out the other side. Not perfect, she'll say that.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Not without scars, but ready.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Next January will be our thirtieth anniversary. Thirty years.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Two daughters, fully grown now, independent, doing well, and Nadine still singing. She couldn't remember when she stopped singing. That's the thing about the slow diminishment inside a hard relationship. It doesn't happen in one dramatic moment, it happens in the accumulated small surrenders, a food preference, a song, a laugh in the grocery store. But here is what Nadine's story also shows us. The singing comes back. When you start taking care of yourself, when you start checking the mirror, not for how you look, but for whether you can respect what you see. When you change the locks and pack the cart with the things you actually like, when you go to the party, even though you'd rather scream into the phone, you come back to yourself. Nadine didn't arrive at her second marriage, but because she got lucky. She arrived there because she had done decades of real work, work on herself, on her thinking, on her capacity to let go of what she couldn't control without letting go of who she was. The girl who moved four times a year and learned to land without losing herself. The woman who looked in the mirror and chose her own character as a thing she would not give away. The one who stood in a checkout line and chuckled. Chuckled because her groceries were her own again. That's how she was ready. Not by becoming someone different, but by coming all the way back to herself.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

And then they end up not finding somebody because they're not doing anything to be found. And so I think that you have to sort of allow yourself to get out there and allow yourself to, you know, have a fun time. Allow yourself to go out there and and be yourself, not be somebody that you're not. And yet push yourself to do things that are maybe a little uncomfortable. That's the step right there.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Not the perfect plan. Not waiting until you're completely healed. The willingness to push yourself just a little past comfortable. Because that edge is where the life you want is waiting. I'm Bernice McDonald. And this has been A Courage Story. You can connect with Nadine at ProgressivePlus.com. Thank you for listening. And if you've ever wondered what your next step should be, make it a tiny brave one. I created an AI Tiny Brave Steps generator just for that purpose. You can find it at TinyBravesteps.com