Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Baker.
Mary, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Hi, I’m Mary Baker and I’m a recovering perfectionist and people-pleaser with a mission to help other women learn to overcome the feelings of unworthiness, doubt and fear that keep you trapped in an unfulfilling life.
At a very early age, I learned the importance of beauty. In fact, my earliest memories are playing with my Barbies and making sure they looked beautiful, even in their relationships. It was an education that continued as I grew older and was encouraged to go into beauty pageants by my mom. For me, this became a lifelong message that outer beauty was more important than the inner person. This early conditioning led to an inability to show up fully as ME in my relationships. In fact, I truly didn’t have a clue who “I” really was. Instead, I played the part of a human transformer or chameleon. Whatever the person in front of me needed or wanted, I magically transformed for them. I prided myself on my ability to morph and adapt. I sought desperately to fit in, to be loved, and to be accepted. I developed the belief that in order to earn this acceptance I had to be PERFECT. And boy did I work hard at it. Perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect clothing…and if it didn’t feel perfect then I got caught up in a never-ending loop of self-doubt and criticism. I’m not enough was my constant mantra. This went on for YEARS and was truly exhausting, not to mention it was super manipulative and fake. So fake, in fact, that during the course of my entire first marriage – a total of 6 years in the relationship – my first ex-husband had no clue that I wore bright blue contact lenses! I was so attached to my image with those fake blue orbs that I did whatever I needed to keep him from seeing me without them. We’ll get into more of THAT relationship in just a bit though.
My adult life used to be ruled by the “shoulds”. What should I do? Who should I be? And always with a long list of to-dos with boxes to check that would prove to me that at the end of the day I had done a good job. That was how I measured my worth. I was cruising through life without a sense of purpose. Without even an understanding that I was put here for a purpose. I always allowed others’ suggestions to become the choices I made for my life. This made things much easier on the perfectionist who would get so wrapped up in making the “right” choice, that I would freeze and not be able to move forward. I spent so many years measuring my worth by all the things that people told me I was good at. Even the being a pretty thing, well I can be really good at that. I can be an expert at that. And baking. I’m a really good baker and I spent years busting my ass to create fabulous things for the purpose of giving to people to then in turn have them stroke my ego. Just to try to please people with that because I didn’t feel worthy enough as myself, it had to be my cookies. My life was co-dependent around everyone else’s happiness. And of course, when that’s your definition of happy you find people who are going to use that against you.
This deep desire to be loved and accepted led to relationships that lasted well beyond their expiration date, such as marriage #1. My first marriage was to a man 13-years older than me who I was convinced that I could change and that I could make his broken life better. He was handsome and charismatic and swept me off my feet with his assertive charm. I quickly transformed into the version of me who fit best in his life and did everything I could to make a “perfect” life with him. Turns out, he was also completely controlling and verbally abusive. His needs always came before mine. His demands were always more important than my voice and I didn’t have the toolset to know how to express what I needed. The relationship quickly became co-dependent and by the end, after 6 long years, I had nothing left. I was living in a town I hated, working an unfulfilling job, and was completely isolated from my friends and family. I was an empty shell that had given and given until my well was dry. At that point, all I knew was that I had to get out with my almost one-year-old son.
No better place to start than the bottom, right?
Even though I felt I did “the work” after marriage #1 by going to therapy and figuring out what the heck had happened so I wouldn’t repeat that mistake again, I still found myself falling into my old perfectionist and people pleasing ways in marriage #2. At the time I met husband #2, my son was 4 and was the light of my life. I was an elementary school teacher and actually felt that this was a very purposeful and fulfilling career for me. I was “ready” to be in relationship again. He checked all the boxes on my list…stable career, good provider, seemingly good stepfather material, plus he put the perfectionist princess up on a nice high pedestal and made me feel like I was the center of his world. Sounds “perfect”, right? Well, pedestals are tall and precarious and after a few years when the glow started to wear off, his increasing resentment and dissatisfaction with our relationship began to chink away at that tower of mine. Eventually, the unspoken truth of our mutual unhappiness became harder and harder to hide. I found myself working extra hard to keep up the public image we had created of “happy couple” and “perfect wife”.
I’d set the benchmark of our 10-year anniversary as the tipping point. If by then, we’d still not been able to work things out then I was done. But within one month in late 2009 (just about 6 months before our 10-year mark) both of my parents were diagnosed with what turned out to be terminal cancers and in an instant, my life was redirected. My energy became entirely focused on caring for and managing my parents’ lives – treatment, home care, hospitalizations, all times 2. This went on for almost a year and a half. And on top of all that, I was doing my best to raise my son in a house where neither of us was truly happy. That magical bond with my son I’d hoped for when I carefully selected husband #2 never did take root. Instead, I was faced with a surly pre-teen with a strong dislike and disdain for his stepfather. Fun times, right?
Fortunately, along the way I found yoga. It was actually my mom who suggested I give it a try. She’d always been very intrigued by spiritual practices and had found yoga and tai chi in her own life. What I started to learn in yoga was that my body was talking to me and if I was willing to listen, the body’s message was way more important than the head message and all the external messages that I had received my whole life that said that I wasn’t good enough unless I was perfect. My body’s message started telling me that this fake life I was living wasn’t right for me, that it was actually toxic to my body due to all of the suppressed emotions I was holding in. It taught me that I didn’t have to be perfect to be accepted. That I could show up imperfectly perfect and actually be more accepted by those who truly loved me.
My BIG decision to leave marriage #2 didn’t happen overnight. After losing both of my parents within 6 months of each other to cancer in 2010/2011, I was in no place to make a big life change. Plus, my son had finally found his passion in the world of competitive cheerleading which took us on a 6-year wild ride of late nights of practices and travel around the country. I immersed myself in being busy and in focusing on Mason. I was determined to see him get through the loss of his grandparents and become a fully functioning, healthy adult.
I did take this time to dive into some deep inner healing work with the help of a fabulous grief therapist. By this point of my life and my relationship, I felt that my heart was locked up in a steel trap with a Houdini-proof lock on it. All of the loss, disappointments, resentment, and lack of true love had taken their toll on me and there were very few people I was willing to let in. Over the course of several months, I worked to find my light again.
It took me a very long time to finally find my voice and learn to speak it. It was in there, but it was buried deep. The roots of this go way back to my upbringing and being raised by two parents who did not express feelings or emotions. Plus my mom was a major overthinker, a trait I definitely inherited from her. In our house, we did not express love or affection hardly ever. This pattern definitely followed me into both of my marriages and let to a lifetime of unspoken words and unexpressed emotions. Ironically my maiden name is Eisberg and as a child, my nickname was Iceberg – brrrrr! As an adult, I took on the title of Ice Queen and played that part well. So overcoming that was a lot!!
Ultimately, I stayed in marriage #2 for another 8 years…
All the excuses to stay…
All the fears of leaving…
I stayed because I was terrified and had no idea how I could possibly support myself and my son outside of that space. I was so tied to this man who I’d picked because I thought he’d be a great provider. I had no savings, nothing to step out and survive on. It was a fear so big that it froze me in my tracks and I convinced myself that things were good enough and this was the life I was stuck with.
So what finally, finally pushed me to take action??
I started speaking my truth to myself. Actually, my truth decided it could no longer be silent. It started screaming at me. I realized he was the last person on the planet I wanted to share my heart with. I felt deeply that he had failed the test of how to help me after my parents passed. So I shut him out. And then it all started to fray. The dark times started to become much longer than the light times. I looked forward to him being out of town. I dreaded him coming home. Even our time away on vacation – I could no longer pretend. My acting muscle was becoming fatigued.
That’s when I truly started diving in – I wrote a new story for my life outside of the marriage. It was so beautiful and so good that I had to have it and I absolutely could not stay.
I stopped being the actor in my life and became the author. I found POWER in writing MY story. Mary Baker, staring the REAL Mary Baker, written by THE ONE AND ONLY Mary Baker.
It was a crazy process. I turned to my favorite book at the time – The Universe Has Your Back by Gabby Bernstein– and on my 3rd read though I began to do the work. I grabbed a journal and in the wee hours of the morning and words would flow out of my pen. It was my heart going on paper, I had no control over it. I would literally read back what I’d wrote and cry. That’s my heart, that’s my truth. Right there. I didn’t overthink it. I just let it flow.
In 2018, our divorce was final. I moved out with my now adult son and began a brand new, beautiful life. The first morning I woke up in my little condo, sleeping on a futon bed with minimal décor, I thought to myself with tears of joy running down my face, “this is MY life and I am blissfully happy.”
Then began the Dating Marathon! When you haven’t been on a date in over 18 years, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Navigating the world of app-based dating in your 50’s can be overwhelming. I made mistakes and I learned A LOT!! Boy, do I wish I’d kept a journal of that time…or maybe not! I’m sure I went out with at least 30 men in about 8 months. Ultimately, I ended up meeting and falling in love with my partner, my soul mate, my best friend. It is truly the most mature, open, honest, and fulfilling relationship of my life. I speak my truth, I honor my individuality, I continue to nurture my relationships with others in a deeper and more meaningful way than I ever have before. I am beyond happy even on the days when life is hard and heavy and challenging. Even during the recent pandemic which shook me to my core and completely changed the tapestry of my life and my career. It was during this time that I once again dug deep and made a big choice. It was during this time that I found Life Coaching and decided to take all of my life’s lessons and use them to help others REIMAGINE their lives.
Now, as a Life Coach, I know that with the clients I works with who are dealing with their own fears, their own imperfections, their own stories that they’ve been told over the years – that they too want to break free from those expectations that other people have for their lives. I pride myself in my ability to see people exactly as they are. Having played many roles over and over and over in my life, I know the masks that people wear. What I’d love to do more than anything else is help YOU remove the masks. The biggest joy that I can have in working with my clients is helping them to step into the truth of who they really are and being brave enough to actually live that life no matter the consequences knowing that the outcome will be bigger and better for them! I want to help you REIMAGINE your life. Are you ready?
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The biggest challenge I have faced in my 53 years was the loss of both of my parents to cancer in 2010/2011. They were diagnosed 1 month apart in 2009 and for the next year and a half I was on a rollercoaster of doctor’s appointments, hospitalizations, treatment, and eventually loss. The grief from losing both parents so close together was a rough journey. I was instantly an orphaned adult and my lifeline I was so used to turning to was suddenly gone. From this experience, and with the help of a wonderful grief counselor, I was able to find peace and use the experience to drive me forward and shape every decision I make. It was my “mortality moment” that made me realize that this life is just way too precious to waste and that helped me to find my purpose and ignite my passion. In 2014, I formed a nonprofit with a partner called Be Well Therapy, Inc. which provides yoga & mindfulness for those who are living with cancer. This work has been incredibly rewarding and a lovely tribute to my parents who I’m sure are very proud of what I have created. Now, as a Life Reinvention Coach, I’m able to help others on a daily basis to unlock their passion and live each day to its fullest!
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a Life Reinvention Coach, Yoga & Mindfulness Teacher and I help men and women who are seeking MORE from life overcome fears and self-limiting beliefs, so they can create CHANGE and REINVENT their most extraordinary life!
There is nothing you can’t accomplish once you learn to get out of your head and begin to trust your inner truth. Using proven coaching techniques along with my many years of yoga and mindfulness practice, I help my clients unlock their deepest desires so they can realize the life of their dreams!
I work with individuals who are ready to let go of old, unsatisfying ways of living and DISCOVER their TRUE SELF and AUTHENTIC VOICE. Whether it’s making a big life change in a job or relationship, defining and pursuing personal goals and intentions, or learning to live a more present and peaceful life – I help my clients accelerate their desires to achieve long-term and highly satisfying results.
I offer 1-on-1 coaching, small group coaching, virtual and in-person yoga & mindfulness meditation.
Additionally, I lead destination Women’s Retreats twice a year that incorporate yoga, exercise, meditation, & small group coaching in beautiful, secluded locations around the world.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
Growing up in San Diego, I have a lot of very fond memories from my childhood. We would always have family come to visit from Indiana and we loved to head down to Old Town to explore, eat yummy Mexican food, and visit the candy shop where I would get a special treat of rock candy and cinnamon gummy bears. Time with my grandparents was always special since I didn’t get to see them very often growing up way across the country.
Contact Info:
- Email: marybakerlifecoaching@gmail.com
- Website: www.marybakerlifecoaching.com
- Instagram: @MaryBakerWellness
- Facebook: MaryBakerWellness
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8E_5_M2ImWjUAJZ8gvAR_Q
Image Credits
Olga Kubrak Photography
