Persistence U with Lizbeth Meredith

Sitting down to chat with Lizbeth Meredith on her podcast, Persistence U, was an amazing experience. I was able to talk about some of my life and career challenges as well as talk about my upcoming debut novel, Focus Puller.

A little about Lizbeth and Persistence U:

Lizbeth Meredith is an author, speaker, online teacher, and coach who recently moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee after more than five decades in Alaska. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in psychology. Her first memoir, Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters, became an Amazon bestseller and is now a Lifetime television movie, Stolen by Their Father. She helps introverted, non-techie authors understand the principles of book marketing with her online course and coaching, and connects with midlife women to recalibrate after a life of being last on their lists.

A retired probation supervisor, Lizbeth previously worked as a child abuse investigator, and domestic violence advocate, and became a trainer in trauma-informed care and Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.

But nothing in her early years predicted success. Born to two high school dropouts who’d divorced before they knew of her arrival, remarrying briefly to prevent her illegitimacy, only to divorce again nanoseconds later, Lizbeth’s early years were impacted by both domestic and child abuse, poverty, parental abduction, and sibling separation.

Judgmental to a core even as a young child, Lizbeth couldn’t wait to be grown, and vowed she would never let any child of hers experience the instability that had defined her life.

And then at 20, she met the man that would change everything. Never mind that she’d done no interpersonal work. That she’d no way to support herself and lacked a back-up plan if things went wrong. Barely ninety days after dating, Lizbeth married a US citizen from Greece who appeared to dote on her. But it wouldn’t last.

In her mid-twenties, Lizbeth found herself in a domestic abuse shelter with her two young daughters, signing up for public aid, housing assistance, legal services, and parenting classes. Having failed to shield her daughters from the chaos that she’d been exposed to, Lizbeth vowed to make good choices from there on out, believing that the key to ending domestic abuse was leaving the perpetrator and striving for financial independence.

Four years later, Lizbeth had earned her bachelor’s degree and was living large on $10 an hour as the sole supporter of her girls, working at the very abuse agency that she’d fled to, and filled with the hope of what was to come.

She hadn’t yet fully understood the far-reaching consequences of leaving domestic abuse.

In March 1994, Lizbeth left work to pick her daughters up from daycare after their court-appointed visit with their father. They weren’t there. They’d been taken out of the country, to Greece.

What came next would spark a global effort, joined by friends and strangers alike, to reunite Lizbeth with her kidnapped daughters. And two years later, many thousands of dollars, one arrest (Lizbeth’s), and after relentless effort from all involved, Lizbeth found her now non-English speaking daughters. 

But the heavy lifting was yet to come. Parenting traumatized children on a shoestring budget was rough. Strong communication skills, solid support, and stubborn persistence kept Lizbeth afloat to trade dark times for a future with possibilities.

Today, Lizbeth is a proud mother of two feisty, educated women who’ve bucked intergenerational patterns of early marriage and lack of education. She’s travelled six of the seven continents so far and given trainings to authors and community groups and government organizations on a wide range of topics with a thru-thread of persistence and bucking the odds.