Sharon's Story: When Even Love Can't Fix It

Sharon could do anything. Give her a job nobody knew how to do, a problem no one could crack — she’d figure it out. 

Then she adopted a little girl whose early wounds no amount of trying could reach, and the woman who could do hard things came apart. 

This is the story of what happens after the control runs out: the guilt, the melt, the radical choice, and a rainy night when a frightened girl finally reached for her mother’s hand.

Contact Sharon here: 

Website: https://sharonhujik.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharon-hujik/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sharon_hujik/

Hosted by Bernice McDonald — Life & Courage Strategist, 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_00 0:02

She was the woman who could do anything. Give her a job she'd never done, a problem nobody could craft, a challenge that scared off everybody else. She'd figure it out. She always had.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

I have always just had this sort of innate sense of I can do hard things. You know, like give me a challenge and I'll figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Web developer, sales manager, she took in a runaway cousin in her 20s. Because somebody had to. So why not her? And under it all, one thing. She wanted more than anything else. I was really secure in who I was.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Secure in my faith. I had great relationships with my sister and my parents. And I just had a lot of things that I was very clear about. And the most important thing, second to my my faith, was like this idea that my purpose in life was to have a family.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

She got that family. Three children. The last one through adoption. And then she met the one thing her competence couldn't fix. So here's a question I want you to hold while you listen. What happens to a woman who can do hard things when she finally meets a hard thing she cannot do? I'm Bernice McDonald. And this is Sharon's Courage Story. Now if you're new here, we tell the truth about hard things. Woman to woman. And we look for the courage that was there the whole time. And if you've ever stood in front of the one thing you could not muscle your way through, this one is for you. Act one, wake up your courage. Every courage story moves through the same four places. It's not a formula, it's a path. When you face something hard, first, you have to wake up your courage. Then to get through it, you have to find the person inside you that is brave. And when you do, you start standing up for what matters. Here's what Sharon believed about herself. Smart, capable, hard worker with skills that people paid for. And somewhere in there, she'd done the quiet math that high achieving women do.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

I think it's very tempting for people like myself, who are like known as high achievers, to look at the successes that we have and the kind of, I can do this, I have done this, I can figure it out, to kind of like make us think that we have control over stuff. And I I fundamentally think like I actually bought into this lie that because I am a high achiever, I also have control over what my future looks like. Control. That was the illusion. And the truth of the matter is none of that ever was true. Um, I have really had to like come face to face with the reality that what I wanted or thought my life was going to look like.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Um, you know, it didn't happen. Her youngest came home at almost two years old, adopted internationally after a long and chaotic road. And she carried something no sticker chart or supper table consequence could reach. Something that began before Sharon ever met her.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

And through no fault of her own. I mean, she didn't do anything wrong. She was just born in an environment that nobody took care of her for the first 20 months of her life. And when we think about like fetal brain development, that means that for 20 months her brain was growing and forming and creating neuro neurological pathways where people weren't safe. Comfort didn't come from a kind of consistent caregiver.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Twenty months where comfort didn't come, where a tiny brain learned that people weren't safe, none of it the child's doing. None of it Sharon's. And all of it landing in a home built on love. Sharon did what good mothers do. She tried harder, more therapies, more reading, more hustle. She was, after all, the woman who could do hard things. But then the world shut down. COVID took every support she'd built all at once. And for the first time, the woman who could do anything started to come apart.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

The term that I now know is called blocked care. Just like it there is nothing coming back. Like you're giving and giving and giving and giving, and it never returns back. And your body just starts protecting yourself, itself, from caring because it hurts all the time. And you just, you know, you're gutting it out on a daily basis. That's pretty hard spot to be when you have this identity of like the thing that matters most is being a mom. I would say to my husband, like, it's just not what I want. It's not what I thought was going to happen. Um over the course of several years, it became increasingly obvious that what we were able to provide at home wasn't going to help.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Sharon loved this child so hard, dedicating herself to reach into a place that even love couldn't reach. She loved until it hurt so much that something in her finally said, stop, stop giving, stop hoping. It's too painful. It hurts too much. It will never happen. That wasn't weakness. That was a guard going up around a wound that she could no longer bear to feel. Her fear that it was hopeless encouraged her to shut down, turn off. And ironically, this became the way she began to wake up a part of her that could face one of the most difficult fights of her life. Act two, embrace who you are. Embracing who you are is the part nobody photographs. It's the inside of you, where you actually live. It's where the self you have been on the outside comes apart, and for a while you don't know what you'll be on the other side. There came a decision Sharon swore she would never make. Her husband had been watching her come apart, and he was afraid that he was going to lose her. What their daughter needed was care that Sharon couldn't give at home. Residential treatment. To Sharon, that word meant one thing failure. The thing a good mother would die before allowing.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

And so you just hit this place of like I'm now in uncharted waters. Nobody understands. And we made the decision to place her into psychiatric residential treatment. And the most profound feeling that I can use to describe it is this awful, awful guilt. And not necessarily guilt that I had done it, but guilt because there was this relief that I didn't have to go home and be scared all the time and stressed all the time.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Relief. Her body finally let down its guard. And the second it did, the verdict came down hard.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

And then immediately, like, oh my gosh, what kind of mom would feel glad? You know, it was like this terrible thing happened, but my body was finally able to like let down its guard. And then, you know, your brain is just screaming at you, like, that's disgusting. That's disgusting.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

What what mom feels relieved? This is what Sharon calls the goo. The caterpillar that goes into the chrysalis doesn't become a butterfly right away. First, it dissolves, it turns to liquid. It stops being one thing before it's ever the other.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

And there's this melt, this goo. But then like what emerges out of that, it can either be, you know, broken or it can be beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Broken or beautiful. That's the choice that lives in the middle. And nobody gets to skip the goo to find out which one they'll be. Here's where I I need you to watch Sharon closely. Because this is not the part where she's brave and graceful. This is the part where she thought she was failing. And she kept going anyway. A therapist sat with her in the worst of it and said something Sharon couldn't have said to herself.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

And this um really talented therapist said to me, when I confessed this to her, kind of in horror, she said, you know, Sharon, like that thought is going to destroy you. Let's reframe what your body is experiencing in a way that you can live with it.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Twenty minutes later, Sharon could finally say this.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

I am grateful that we have a season of healing for my daughter, for myself, and for my other children. And the weight that that reframing took out of my body and off my shoulders, where I'm like, I can take this terrible thing and see that it's going to be for good and used for healing and give me and my daughter the tools, hopefully, Lord willing, to be better.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

That's the first crack of flight in the chrysalis. Not the guilt leaving, but the story changing. But the melt wasn't done with her. Grief has this ugly cousin who again moves in to help protect. Sharon will tell you its name, even though it embarrasses her.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

I would hear people's stories, you know, somebody would be like, oh gosh, you know, my wife just had a miscarriage. And I'm they're just devastated. And the thought that first came into my head and be like, I've done that. That's nothing compared to what I've had to go through. And it was this sort of like the term that I learned now. I was idolizing my suffering. I had bit literally like created like a superiority complex. Well, mine was worse.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

She is not proud of that. She's telling you because it's true. It's what happens. Because here is where our fear shows its hand. The hardness, the bitterness, the mine was worse. That was her fear helping her cope, finding the significance she needed in the middle of feeling so helpless. If her pain was the biggest pain in the room, then no one could make it small. It was armor, it was protection, and it was turning her into someone that she did not want to be. So she looked at what fear was doing, looked it right in the eye, and she made a choice.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, I think of it as this radical choice, like literally, like there is that clear moment where radically I knew I'm either going that way or I'm going that way. And you're like, okay, I get to pick.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

I get to pick. The woman who was crumbling under that realization that she actually controlled almost nothing, found the one thing she did control. Who she was going to become in the middle of all of this. Underneath all of it, within the goo, the melt lay what we call a strange jewel. It had been a part of her since she was a girl, a gift she was made with a quality that was always in her and had given her the confidence to be as successful as she had been, to believe that she could do anything. And now it was exactly what her hardest moment needed. Sharon's gift was her sheer determined will. Yes, it had gotten her into a lot of trouble, but the will itself was never the problem. It was about to be the only thing strong enough for what came next. Act three. Stand up for you. Standing up for you is when the inside work starts to show. It's the day you stop waiting to feel strong and start acting from who you've decided to be. For yourself first, and then for the people you love. Sharon's daughter needed a kind of help that existed in almost no place in the country. The experts named one program in Oregon. But they said it probably wouldn't accept her. Sharon sat at her desk and looked at that mountain.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

And so my competent persona, my successful businesswoman, my I can do hard things persona. I just come home from a vacation with my my mom and sister, and sitting at my desk, feeling like I was standing at the base of the Alps and like resolving my spirit.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

So she climbed. Not with a voicemail, with a voicemail every single day for 10 weeks.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

When I say calling, I don't mean like leaving a voicemail. I mean like leaving a voicemail every day for 10 weeks saying, I'm so sorry. I know this is probably really frustrating and you don't know me at all, but I really need your help. And then eventually they'd call you back and they'd be like, we don't have any way to pay for it. You'd be like, How much does it cost? And they'd be like $30,000 a month. And you'd say, Okay, I'll figure it out. And you just spent your whole life figuring out how to literally open up a door that is welded shut.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

And she said, the thing that holds this whole act together.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Miraculously, we got the golden ticket. They admitted her to this program in Oregon. Um, we figured out how to pay for it. We moved across the country and rented an apartment. And I went back and forth for a year and a half. Like that's the kind of like, I can't be her mom, but I can fight like hell to get her the best care that the world could offer.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Because of that determined will, the door finally opened. They moved across the country, and for a year and a half, Sharon went back and forth holding the line for a daughter who couldn't yet hold it for herself. Until one day they came back with news that was not so good.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And they call and say, you need to come. It's not working. And I was like, this is not how the story was supposed to end. God, like, no, that's not. That's not what's supposed to happen. And I mean, I panicked to describe panic isn't like strong enough a word. Like, I was like, that's it? It's over. Like, there's no other options. Like, where do we go from here? And this one woman, God bless her, she texted me. She worked at the program and she said, Sharon, do you have any fight left? And I was like, I don't even know what I'm fighting for anymore. What am I like? What am I supposed to fight for? Like, it didn't work. And she said, fight for more time. Don't let them kick, don't let them do this. Call the board, call the psychiatrist, call everybody and anybody, and make them give her more time.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

Again, her stubbornly strong will came to life. She called the board meeting. She would not let them say no. Now, here's the other half of standing up. And Sharon almost missed it herself because all that fight, all this climbing was burning her down to nothing, taking its toll.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

I was really neglecting my own mental health because I felt somehow that there was this like motherhood, woman of God thing where it was selfish to take care of my needs. And it it's not, it wasn't like I was martyring myself to this higher calling, but I I would feel guilt that if I needed a break and I'd go out, like I'd feel guilty that I was leaving. But I was drawing on a well that literally, I was like scraping the bottom. I was like hitting granite.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

She'd been drawing on a well that was now bone dry. She found a word for the fix that wasn't self-care. And it wasn't self-pity. That word was self-leadership.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

And the term that I use now that I need to understand is that if I am gonna do my job well, and my job is taking care of my daughter, like I need to take care of like self-leadership. I have to be like, I can't do that job if I don't go and have rest. I can't do that important thing well if I'm not talking to my girlfriends and getting away and going for a walk. Like there is This, like, it's not self-care in my head anymore or self-pity. It's like I have to lead myself to being refilled.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

And she had a test for whether she was actually putting it into action.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

This is like my litmus test for did I succeed? If I go out and take a break or do something and return to the home, my home, and I'm resentful of the fact that like it's still bad and it's such a mess, and people are being jerks, and everybody's like, then I know that whatever I just did didn't actually refill the well. It was sort of like I was just eating chocolate cake instead of like soothing my soul. So self-care would make me feel resentful of what I had to return to, where self-leadership fills me back up, restore my soul. Because this battle, I have to re-enter it. And I want to re-enter it with strength and with calm and with regulation. Because if I stay regulated, then everything else works better in my home.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

That's self-leadership. That's standing up for the one person she'd forgot to fight for herself.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

And for me, that's time by myself, time with girlfriends who really like my Rolodex of really wise women has gotten bigger and like investing in them, walking, spending time with God, music, those kinds of things are what me my soul helps with. And my newest one is journaling. Let's like get it out of my brain onto a piece of paper, just not as pretty, but just get it out.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

That fear voice was still in the car for all of it. Still warning her that it wasn't safe to hope, wasn't safe to rest, wasn't safe to fight one more round. She just let him talk, and she kept her hands on the wheel. Act four, create your impact. Creating your impact is what happens when the thing that nearly broke you becomes a thing that you can hand to someone else who is still standing where you stood. The psychiatrist in Oregon said they were close. Three more weeks. Don't stop.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

The next time I flew out to visit her, I said to the therapist, something's different. I don't know what it is, but like I'm looking forward to going back. That was in October, in December. We were out for dinner. It was raining. I was leaving the next morning. It was Christmas time. Everything about the night was literally a prescription for like calling 911 to say, I can't find my daughter. We were walking out of the Nike store. And I was like bracing my body for this to go badly. And she looked at me and she said, Mommy, I feel scared. Can I hold your hand?

SPEAKER_00 25:27

And for the first time in her life, she felt scared and she looked at me for comfort. Remember the blocked care. The giving and giving into a child whose brain couldn't let it land. For years, Sharon gave and nothing came back. And then on a rainy night in Oregon, a frightened girl reached for her mother's hand. They walked that city holding hands for six hours. That's the butterfly. Not easy. Earned in the goo at a cost. Sharon would not wish on anyone. But beautiful. Not broken. She'll be the first to tell you that this isn't a fairy tale. She's home.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

She lives comfortably in a family environment. We have tons of help. We have lots of resources and great therapists and lots of support. It's a village is not a big enough word to describe what we need to be successful, but the trajectory changed. And she is amazing. Oh and she's doing great. I know. And it's not like we all lived happily ever after.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

I mean, it's still very hard. Her daughter is 14 now. And Sharon describes her like this. She's 14.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

And a dynamo, a funny, talented, athletic, beautiful young lady who lights up a room. I have three children, and all of them have, you know, their own unique pains and strengths and talents and hardships. People remind me, and I think it's true, she's a teenage girl who's like, mommy, I think you're so great. I mean, I get a lot of eye rolls and a you know, normal stuff, but it is healing.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

There's still hard. There's eye rolling and teenage everything. But the thing that was missing, the part where a scared little girl knows where her mother is, that part is home.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

I'm not exaggerating when I say like I feel like we are walking in the miracle that we begged God for.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

And somewhere in the melt, Sharon found the thing she's here to give.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

If I want to be the person I needed five years ago when everything was so confusing, or I didn't know anybody else who had gone through this devastatingly hard thing. I want to be the woman that when somebody says, hey, my friend is struggling with this, can you talk to her? That I'd be like, absolutely. Oh my gosh, yes, I know how she feels. I've been there. And if I could make her not feel lonely, what a gift that would be. And it's like sort of like I gave it permission to have meaning that was bigger than me.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

The pride that used to whisper, mine was worse, is gone. What grew in its place is the thing she was made for all along. And she'll leave you with what it actually means to fall down and get back up.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

It's not really just about getting back up and trying again. It's like letting the thing transform you so that you know you're not broken by it.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

If you're the woman who can do hard things and you finally met the hard thing you can't do, Sharon will tell you this. You don't have to feel brave. You don't have to be in control. You don't even have to be out of the goo yet. You just have to pick broken or beautiful. And then take the one next step. Refill the well, make the call, hold the line. One more day. From the woman that you've decided to become. I'm Bernice McDonald. Thank you for being here for Sharon's courage story. Sharon Huchik is now a keynote speaker who helps high-achieving women move from endurance to wait for it, self-leadership. Steadier, clearer, and better equipped for what's next. You can find her at SharonHujik.com and on her own podcast, Rising to Resilience. And if today's story is speaking to something in your own life, the hard thing you can't muscle through, the next small step you haven't found yet, come find yours at tinybravesteps.com. The woman who could do hard things learned the bravest one of all. To give, even when it might not come back. You are also brave enough for this. You always have been.