She Heard Her Mother's Voice... And Got Up
This week's Courage Conversation with Marcelle Mentor
There’s a moment in this week’s episode that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Marcelle is on the floor. Her husband has just slapped her… hard enough to knock her glasses completely off her face. She’s thousands of miles from her family in South Africa. She’s been in the United States for nine months. She has two boys, ages 7 and 8, in the next room. She has no plan.
And in that silence, she hears her mother’s voice.
Get up.
So she gets up. She wipes her face before her son walks in. She asks him, calmly, to help her find her glasses. And then she says: Go pack your pajamas, a t-shirt, extra pants, and your school books. We’re leaving.
Her husband is standing right there. And he says what abusers say: You have nowhere to go. You have nothing. Nobody will come for you.
She looks at him and says: I don’t know where we’re going. But we’re going.
What made this conversation extraordinary wasn’t just the moment of leaving.
It was everything Marcelle shared about what came before it… and what came after.
Before: twenty years in a relationship she now understands, through therapy, was emotionally abusive long before it turned physical. A deeply patriarchal culture that had taught her, from girlhood, that the man was the head of the household. A belief system she had absorbed so completely that even she, an educated woman, a teacher, a woman with degrees… couldn’t see clearly what was happening to her.
He raised you by his hand, goes a South African saying in Afrikaans. It means he shaped you. He taught you what was acceptable. What you would do. What you would tolerate.
Marcelle was 18 when they met. He was her first boyfriend. She married him at 23. For twenty years, she lived inside a world he had built around her… and slowly, quietly, she disappeared inside it.
After: she rebuilt. She found support in the most unexpected places, a second-grade teacher who opened her home without hesitation. Strangers who showed up when she finally let people in. A community she hadn’t known she had.
And something else happened after… something she didn’t plan but that moves me deeply.
Her niece, years later, was out on a date when a man raised his hand against her. And she picked up the phone, called her parents, and said: Come get me. We’re done.
When people asked her what gave her the strength to leave so decisively, she said: I remembered what Auntie Marcelle did. I remembered that she got up.
That’s the thing about courage that I want you to sit with today.
You rarely know, in the moment you act, who is watching. Who is learning. Whose future you are shaping by what you do right now, even when you’re on the floor, even when you’re terrified, even when you have no plan and nowhere to go.
Marcelle didn’t leave because she was fearless. She left afraid. She left not knowing. She left with two little boys and a voice in her head and a refusal to let what just happened… happen again.
That is the definition of courage. Not the absence of fear… but the decision to move through it anyway.
At the end of our conversation, I asked Marcelle what she would whisper to a younger version of herself.
She didn’t hesitate.
I would tell her she is stronger than she thought. More capable. More resourceful. And that people love her… even when she can’t feel it.
And then she said something I want every woman reading this to carry with her:
We have to value ourselves more than anybody else values us. Before anything else, we have to give ourselves the value we so freely give to other people.
Marcelle’s full episode is live now on YouTube. If you know a woman who is afraid to leave or afraid to begin again, please share it with her. You never know whose get up moment this might be.
🦋 Watch here → She Got Up Off the Floor and Left | Courage Conversation with Marcelle Mentor
And if you’re ready to have your own Courage Conversation, I’d love to be in your corner. Click here to book your Courage Clarity Call … I’m waiting for you.
With love and courage, Joi
The Joi of Courage | TheJoiOfCourage.com