I was usually the first person to arrive at school and one of the last to leave.
I was a dedicated teacher, and I had a plan. I wanted to mentor beginning teachers. After that, I wanted to move into administration and write curriculum, because what interested me most was how a lesson is structured and how to get the most out of what you deliver to students. I could see where my career was heading.
In 2021 my son was two, and he wasn’t talking or babbling. I had to jump up and down to get more testing done on his hearing. A behavioural test suggested he was profoundly deaf, and that we might need to look into cochlear implants.
Around the same time, he started having seizures. We were living remotely then, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service flew us out of our home town. He was diagnosed with epilepsy. Later, after an ABR test, I was told in a hospital corridor that he was profoundly deaf.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I knew I couldn’t teach the following year.
I still remember the phone call to my deputy principal. The school already had plans in place for me, and they knew which class I would be taking. I told them I couldn’t do it. My son needed me, so at the end of 2021 I left teaching.
The part I didn’t expect came later, once the appointments began to settle down. I was at home with my son, taking him to therapy and learning sign language, and all of it mattered. But I had always been career-driven, conscientious and high-achieving, and I was no longer learning or growing myself. I felt stuck in a rut, and I had lost my sense of who I was.
So I started sharing what I knew online and that eventually evolved into sharing my story online. That grew into Brolga Education, where I put what I knew about teaching to work in a new way. Then a skincare + wellness partnership came along, and with it a second business. Working out who I am online, across all of that, has been the hardest part.
These days I support my son through homeschool in the mornings, and I work on my business in the afternoons, at night and on weekends. I get to be creative and use my brain again, and I am building something that will last.
The plan I had in 2021 is gone. What I understand now is that the ambition never left. The woman who wanted to mentor teachers and write curriculum still wants to learn, grow and build. She is doing it somewhere she didn’t expect to be.
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Hi, I’m Trudy
I'm a former teacher and a medical mum, and I'm building my next chapter online. I share honest stories about starting over, along with the content strategies I use to build around real life, so that my content does the work and the right people come to me.
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I partner with women inside an established skincare and wellness direct-selling brand, and I coach and mentor the women who build alongside me. It’s for women who want a repeat-order business model, a supportive community to start over online with, and sustainable habits for building a business around real life.