Kylyna's Story: Not This. Not Me. This Is Where I Draw The Line

Some women learn early that the safest thing to do is disappear. 

Kylyna learned it in a house where her father’s drinking was the weather — always there, never her fault, impossible to fix. 

So she got the good grades. She kept the peace. She stayed in her room. She made herself easy to overlook.

And then she grew up and had a baby. And something in her said no.

This is the story of a woman who held a line almost no one around her understood — with the father she loved and couldn’t trust, with the brother she couldn’t save, and, hardest of all, with herself, when she saw her own pain starting to turn into the same thing she’d watched destroy them.

It’s about the strength she built alone, long before she knew it was strength. 

It’s about grief that doesn’t tie up in a bow. 

And it’s about what gets built on the other side of all of it: a business of her own, two sons who know they don’t have to numb what hurts, and a Sunday-morning phone call nobody would have predicted.

If you’ve ever been the different one in a room — the one holding a line while everyone else looks away — this one is for you.

A gentle note: this episode touches on addiction in the family and the loss of a sibling, held with care.

Find your own next step at tinybravesteps.com.

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/

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

She was the one who chose to be different. Not with a speech, not with a plan, or a therapist telling her who to be. Just a 13-year-old girl in a house full of smoke and noise and things she didn't want to become. Deciding on her own. Not this. Not me.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

It becomes a very strong, independent woman that, you know, has boundaries and has expectations for herself and her life. And there's a reason I separated myself from certain situations and certain people to protect my own people.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Nobody handed her a map. Nobody applauded that choice. She had to hold it on her own. Year after year. Through the chaos and the loneliness, and at times fear was the loudest thing in the room. And then life handed her something bigger than a teenager's quiet resolve could have prepared her for. A father disappearing into a bottle, children she needed to shield, a brother she loved and couldn't save. And the hardest question of all, the one she finally had to turn on herself. Am I doing the same thing they did? I'm Bernice MacDonald, and this is Calina's courage story. And if you've ever been the different one in a room full of people doing what you refuse to do, this one is for you. Act one, wake up your courage. Every courage story has a shape to it, not a formula, a path. It tends to move through the same four places in roughly the same order, though the terrain is different for every woman who walks it. When you wake up your courage, the knowing begins. It's the moment a woman stops explaining her fear away and starts seeing it clearly. Before we talk about bravery, you need to know what Calina was up against. She grew up in a house where her father's alcoholism was the weather. Always there. You didn't cause it, you couldn't fix it. And you learned early how to build your life around it. He wasn't only a drinker, he could be abusive, he was unpredictable. And still, here's the complicated truth about families like this. He was also in moments her dad, the one who could read the room when she'd had enough, the one who'd take her for a drive. And Kalina watched all of it from her room alone.

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Looking back at it, I think I knew as like a 13, 14-year-old child. Um, when I say like being the middle child, I was the ignored one that, you know, all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Middle child, good grades, no trouble. Stay small, and maybe nobody comes for you. She didn't have a name for that pattern yet, but she was living it. She got pregnant with her first child, and something in her changed. She was four months along, had just come from the OB, where she heard the heartbeat for the first time. She recorded it on her phone. She drove to her parents' house full of this nude, tender, exciting thing. And her father comes stumbling out of the bedroom.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

And I went to their house and he comes out of the room stumbling, and I'm showing them the heartbeat, and he's crying. And he comes to play his recorder, like he's a musician type thing. And uh he's like, Oh, play it for me, play it. I said, No, like your mouth has been on that and you've been drinking. Oh, it's fine. I said, No, like I do not want my child being exposed to alcohol and not. So that was kind of like the first me putting my foot down and saying, This like enough is enough.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

A recorder, a heartbeat, a father asking to share in a moment he had no clean hands for. And Calina said, No, it was final. And it was the first time in front of her father that she stopped making herself small. Fear has a voice. Here we shrink him down to a little dragon and call him Fred. And Fred had been with Calina her whole life, warning her about the same thing over and over. Don't rock the boat, don't stir it up, keep the peace. For a long time she listened. She stayed in her room, she hid in good grades, she made herself easy to overlook. Her fear told her based on many incidents that that was how she stayed safe. And for years he wasn't wrong. But that day with her baby's heartbeat on her phone, something mattered more than the warning. Staying small transformed to choosing her child. That's what waking up your courage looks like. It's not a dramatic declaration, but sometimes it's a quiet, steady no. Her sister was pregnant too. The two of them stood side by side and told their father the truth. Be sober or you don't see these grandchildren. And they meant it. Act two, embrace who you are. This part of the courage journey isn't about becoming someone new. It's about remembering who you already are underneath everyone else's noise and starting to trust that person again. A few weeks later, her father had a seizure in a church, trying to dry himself out. Kalina was about 35 weeks pregnant, high risk. Her mother kept her away from what was going on, protecting her from the stress. When her son was born, her father had just finished a 30-day program. He came to the hospital, he held his grandson for the first time.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

So here he comes out of ADAC, he's been clean for 30 days, comes up to the hospital and gets to hold his grandson for the first time. And it was super exciting. Within a week, he was drinking again. Because of the C-section, I wasn't allowed to drive for so long after. So then when that happens, and you have to take the baby for a one-week checkup at the family doctor. And my mom was supposed to drive me. And my dad started drinking again and took her keys away and refused to let her leave the house. So my sister had to pack up her one-year-old and her four-month-old to come and pick me up to take me and my son to his doctor's appointment.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

She just had a C-section. She couldn't drive. Her mother was being held at home, and right there, in a driveway, seven days postpartum, Kalina reinforced the line that would be there for years. That sentence took years to earn. She says it honestly, as a matter of fact. When you look closely, here's something about Kalina from 13 on that she almost glosses over in telling her own story. In a house full of people who numbed things, who drank, who smoked, who treated it as normal, she was the one who didn't. She couldn't know at that time that she was building something. She just knew she didn't want to become what she saw around her.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

Because I was just, I was so much different than everybody else in my family. And I didn't think I was any better than them. I just didn't want to be like them.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

This is huge. This is discernment formed early and embedded deeply. The ability to look at what's in front of you and say, this is not where I'm going. Underneath it was something else: a stubborn, lonely self-sufficiency. She paid her own way through university when there were no more funds to help her. She was told, Hey, I hope you saved enough. She worked three jobs as a single mother. She never asked anyone to carry her load.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Like, I I definitely always was strong and strong-minded and independent and stubborn. Uh, even to this day, like anything, you know, I'm very hyper-independent, and it does stem from my childhood. That I I just felt so alone that I had to do things on my own and build my own path.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

This is a strange jewel.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

That means it's a gift that doesn't always feel like a gift while you're in the middle of it. Because it just feels like survival. But look what it built. A woman who could draw a line and hold it for three years, a woman who could be very pregnant and stand on her own authority, a woman who knew bone deep that she was different and chose to stay that way. Her hyper-independence was a gift, like armor forged in a house that required it. And now she was learning something finer. The difference between armor that protects you and armor you forget to take off.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Having that addiction in the family and those addictive tendencies, you really have to, now that I'm older and understand all of that and have gone to counseling for it, I really have to like pay attention more often as to where when I'm feeling lonely, what am I looking for, what am I craving? That's knowing yourself.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Real hard one, unglamorous self-knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Not a breakthrough, a practice.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Act three, stand up for you. After seeing the fear, embracing who you are in the middle of it, standing up for you becomes the courage that you can see. In Calena's case, it sometimes looked like a fight, but more often, it was simply a steady no held long after the moment anyone expected her to hold it. Three years passed. She still hadn't let her father meet her first son. Her parents had moved to BC trying to get him clean. And then her second pregnancy hit a complication, a worrying ultrasound twenty-six weeks along.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Three years later, I still hadn't talked to my dad. My parents had up and moved to BC to try and get him to stay sober and things like that. And I had an issue with an ultrasound, and I phoned my mom bawling because I'm like, they're sending me to the hospital thinking, you know, I'm gonna have this baby.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Her parents drove 12 hours. Her mother walked into the hospital room. Her father did not.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

And they get there, and mom's like, Are you are you open for a couple of old people? And I was like, A couple? Like it's sitting in the hospital room. And I said, You're welcomed in here. I said, but he is not allowed in here.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Twelve hours in the car, a daughter in a hospital bed, and she held the line. She held it until he'd been sober a full year. Not 30 days, not six months, a year. And when that year was done, she still didn't simply hand him her children. She brought her holiday trailer.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

And we were going to a family reunion. It was also my grandfather's 80th birthday. And I remember the panic and the worry that I had. So I needed to still have control of the situation. So instead of staying at my parents' house, we hauled our holiday trailer down to BC so that I had my space, that if enough was enough, I could go and lock myself in my home and I knew I was safe.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

That isn't controlling. That's a woman who knows exactly what she needs in order to feel safe enough to give something a chance. And it worked. Her kids ran around a family reunion and met their grandfather, who held them and cried. And knew somewhere, somehow, what it had cost his daughter to bring them there. Now, here's the part of Clina's story that almost didn't make it in. The part she offers not as drama, but as honesty. During the hard years of her marriage breaking down, she started drinking.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

I mean, don't get me wrong, I've caught myself numbing. Um, and it was during my separation or right before my separation, that's, you know, I had a drinking issue, and my sister and my mom called me out, and I thought, oh crap, you're right, something's going on, I need to fix it. You know, I was drinking to cope with my marriage, and that wasn't the answer.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

The daughter of an alcoholic, numbing her pain, the way she'd watched everyone around her numb theirs. She could have explained it away, called it temporary, circumstantial, what she was driven to do. But instead, she looked at it, felt the mirror her family was holding up, and she stopped.

SPEAKER_02 16:26

Yeah, that's why I say like that that don't numb it. You need to feel that pain and understand why you're feeling it, because you can't get past it without understanding it.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

She can say that because she tried the other way and turned around. This is courage that doesn't get applauded. Often, it's the pivot nobody sees. The moment you catch your own reflection and choose differently. No audience, no ceremony, just a woman deciding again who she was. And then August came. Her brother, a year younger, 20 months apart, had been struggling with alcohol and drugs for years. Clint had held the line with him too. She loved him. She knew the darkness he was in. And she had told him plainly.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

And I said, Buddy, like you have to fix it. I can't fix it. You've done the whole dug the hole. I understand the darkness you've been or you're at. I've been there.

unknown 17:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:39

But I was like, you need to fix yourself. You need to stop drinking, you need to stop doing drugs.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

The last time she heard from him was in July. He passed away in August.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

But again, it was me being brave enough to put in that boundary with him.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

She doesn't say that to defend herself. She says it because it's true. And the truth is what she was left to hold on to. Standing your ground doesn't guarantee the ending you hoped for. You can do the right thing, and the person you love still goes down. The line was right. The love was real. At the funeral, surrounded by family, her parents staying with her, her sister, the rotating door of condolences.

SPEAKER_02 18:40

Something happened. I shut down and I just I did my middle child thing. I made sure everybody else was happy and everybody else was satisfied, and I kept my mouth shut. And um, yeah, it hit me the morning of his funeral, and I was just like, I can't do this anymore. That's not who I've become.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

That's not who I've become. That sentence is the whole arc of this story in seven words. The middle child who stayed invisible to keep the peace had walked a long road. She had drawn lines that cost her. She had stood alone and held them.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

I've become a very strong, independent woman that, you know, has boundaries and has expectations for herself and her life. And there's a reason I separated myself from certain situations and certain peoples protect my own peace.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

She paid her own way and built something real. And she was not going back. Act four, create your impact. Impact isn't the loud part. It's what your life starts saying on its own. Once you've stopped resisting, pretending, hiding, and start living from who you actually are. Kalina runs her own bookkeeping business now. She has built something that runs on the same values she carried since she was 13, assessing details, standing on her own, and offering standards she won't lower.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

And now I will put myself first, because if I don't take care of myself, you know, who will I have to advocate?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

That's not a poster on a wall, though it may sound like one. That's a woman who learned the hard and specific way that nobody was coming to carry her. Her relationship with her dad is in a different place now.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

But he it took him a long time to build that trust back up with me and that proof. And I mean, yes, he's fallen off a couple times since then, but he's he's come back from it and now realizes that he can't do it anymore. But, you know, now we have weekly conversations. I know Sunday mornings at nine o'clock, dad's gonna call, we're gonna check in, you know, like we've got that. Um, and he's then been a rock for me going through any of the other stuff that I've had that I know, you know, I need him. He's that voice of reason when I need him.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

She knows what it means to be her own first advocate, not because somebody taught her that, but because the alternative was disappearing. And she decided a long time ago not to do that. And she's teaching her sons the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

I'm very honest with them and open. Saying, hey, look, like we have issues in our family, we have addictions. You know, you need to be honest with yourself and with me in these things. There's more to life than just sitting there at a party at high school drinking. You know, you really have to think. And now finding out, like my oldest, he's got a year and a half left and wants to go to university. Like, that's huge for me. I'm so proud of him for wanting to do that. They have these big dreams and goals, and I'm going to continue to fight for them to get those dreams and goals.

SPEAKER_01 22:27

She wanted her kids to have her strength. She didn't want them to have to earn it the way she did.

SPEAKER_02 22:36

I still feel young enough that I can change the world, whether it's sharing my story or just telling one person or helping one person.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

That's impact. The kind that lasts. A woman who broke a generational pattern, who built something from the ground up, who is raising boys who know they don't have to numb what hurts. Who can sit across from someone in their hardest season and say, I know what it costs to hold that line, I know how alone it feels. I know it's worth it. If you're in the middle of a hard thing right now, if you're the one holding a line nobody else seems to understand, if you're grieving someone you had to stand firm with, if you're the only one in the room who has chosen to be different, and you're tired of it, Kalina has something to say to you.

SPEAKER_02 23:45

Know that you're worth more, and that you're worth it, and that change is possible, and that you're loved. It's only temporary. It's only temporary that you would feel that way. Just keep going. I mean, give yourself grace. You're allowed to rest. Um, a big thing, like when it comes to the addictions, is don't numb it. Whether it's drinking, doing drugs, eating, you know, feel that pain. Allow yourself to feel it. Don't numb it. Because I think that's what motivates you to get out of it.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Don't numb it. Feel it. So you can move through it. So you can get to the other side and recognize the way Kalina did what you actually built in the middle of it all. The girl who chose different became the woman who knew her own worth.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

I want to be happy, I want to be healthy, I want to be able to retire and have my grandkids and see the world. You know, so all this heart and hustle right now is gonna pay off so that I can enjoy those last few years.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

She chose her heart, and it's paying forward in ways she'll keep on discovering. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for being here for this courage story. Kalina is a bookkeeper and financial broker and educator who runs her own business. You could connect with her at Cranberry Books Financial Solutions Limited on Facebook. And if today's story is speaking to something in your own life, if there's a hard line you need to hold or a next step you haven't found the courage for yet, come find yours at tinybravesteps.com. You are brave enough. You always have been.