Motherhood is balance

Last November, Associate Editor Simone Delochan interviewed entertainment entrepreneur Candace Guppy-Sobion about her call back to faith and motherhood. Freelance writer Daniel Young spoke with Sobion as she reflects on her new role as mom.

The home is the first place we learn to interact with the world. It’s the first place we experience interacting with others as well as learn about ourselves. The environment that we grow up in shapes our personalities, helps to determine our outlook and is the most important experience for us as we grow up and learn about life.

As a parent, it is the space in which our family is protected, loved, and nurtured. Our home life can nurture happiness, love, and respectable values when healthy or it can nurture a sense of lack, an insatiable desire for more or bitterness if we do not take the time to address our weaknesses.

This home life dynamic begins at the individual level, when we improve ourselves, the world around us improves along with it. It is part of the gift of being human where we can affect change in our environment simply by addressing change within ourselves.

Candace Guppy-Sobion’s story is the perfect example of how changing oneself has major effects. She went from chasing affluence and success to focusing full-time on motherhood.

As a result of the pandemic and the shutting down of the events and the entertainment industry, she was forced to reevaluate her life’s direction. Candace and her husband, Jules had been attempting to expand their family with a child in 2019. This was more challenging than she expected with various attempts being met with tragedy and multiple miscarriages.

In 2021 however, as the pandemic continued and her life continued to change, circumstances improved. Candace began recognising that her home life had taken a significant hit with the level of responsibilities her work required, and ultimately, the toll it took on her well-being.

Physically, she was tired, but the cost of building an event-based business affected her home life in a much deeper way. “I recognised that the relationship with my husband in the home was not being taken care of.” Her job had taken such a toll that there were aspects of her life that she neglected, making her suffer.

She says that the moment she began focusing more attention on her connection with God and developing healthier lifestyle habits, things began to change. She not only felt better, but the things in her life drastically improved.

The life she was pursuing was the reason for those multiple miscarriages. She says, “the moment I began focusing more on my home life, things began to change.”

Candace’s story is unique in that as she began putting a greater attention on living a life that she felt God wanted for her, and as previously told to the Catholic News (see CN November 7 and 14) she began receiving, what she calls messages in the form of visions.

These visions would come in many ways to her, in dreams, in waking and through an internal guiding voice. These visions would lead her to build a solid trust in God and God’s plan for her life.

This faith that she has developed led Candace to reflect on the purpose of her life, a purpose she feels is intertwined with being a mother.

“I feel as though God has given me this gift of motherhood as a way of reintroducing balance, especially in terms of women’s role, into the family home.” She continues saying, “… it’s a balance within the home in society as a whole.”

She describes her relationship with her husband in relation to that balance, saying that his role is one of protecting and providing for the family and her role is one of nurturing and caring for the familial home. It is a dynamic that she feels has shifted in recent times and could be the reason so many families are having difficulties.

She believes that God has chosen to use her to help bring about a societal shift towards balance. Candace’s beliefs are not egotistical ramblings however, as she feels she is not the only one that has been called to this responsibility. It is a societal imbalance that she believes is being corrected.

Her view of the ‘pandemic baby’ phenomenon is more than just a strange occurrence but it is one of the first times we are seeing babies who are spending their first year with both parents.

As a result of the pandemic’s effect on various industries, parents were now finding time for more intimacy in their marriages. She says that due to the lack of intimacy in her own marriage, the culture and nature of the relationship were strained. A factor that she says contributed to her miscarriages.

For Candace, Jules and their newborn Sarai, life is going just as God intended. The time Candace has taken off work has allowed her to reevaluate the important things in life and allowed her the space to try to live in accordance with what she feels God intended for her.