My First Chance

My body started communicating with me early on but I had no idea what was happening. I started to have strong seasonal allergies that turned into hives from fresh mown lawn. My eczema was intense but the good news now is that I had health insurance and access to a doctor. I started learning how to manage some of the symptoms that flared up.

When my first son was about a year old I found a lump in my breast. I went to the doctor who sent me to another doctor who took a very long needle and used it to test the firmness of the lump. He didn’t like how it felt and recommended I remove the lump and test it for whether or not it was something to worry about. I was awake during the procedure and heard the lab report that it was benign and felt great relief wash over me. I was 20 years old, had a baby and desperately wanted to be healthy and happy.

I started having ovarian cysts that could be very painful. I had been diagnosed with a seizure disorder in my teens and worked to manage it. It was labeled as an unknown cause for years. Later I’d learn there is a seizure disorder caused with the onset of menstruation and that is most likely what I had. I took medication to prevent any seizure.

Irritable bowel kept me at a low weight. I was the classic case of needing the restroom 20 minutes post meal. I didn’t know about IBS at the time but I could feel it was related to stress. The more intensely I felt stress, the more intense the intestinal distress. My attitude was that I was unlucky to be experiencing so many issues but it wasn’t anything big so I just needed to buck up and keep going and it would take care of itself. After all, I had watched my mom manage so much more.

The arguments with my husband continued and my emotional stress grew. At a point I left with my son and stayed a few days with my mom. She was living in a small trailer with my 3 sisters so my son and I slept on the couch. I felt so uncomfortable in my marriage. I had no idea how to resolve the differences or conflict between us, but I had no idea how to be a single mother either. As I considered my options, I felt there wasn't really an option. I was married to a good guy from a good family and even though I felt lonely and lost, my only real choice was to commit to changing what needed to be changed and to focus on my main goal: giving my son the life I had always dreamed of for him and for me, a whole family.

In an effort to help our relationship, my husband and I met with our clergy. In our case, it was our LDS bishop. He recommended we make a list of the issues we were feeling and read them to each other in a kind way. We completed the activity and when we were done sharing, I wasn't feeling any better, but felt good about the effort. We decided it was time to have another child and within a few weeks of going off birth control, we conceived our 2nd child. With the benefits of pregnancy hormones, I dove into making our home and our growing family the priority.

I loved our home, I loved the rural community I was becoming a part of and I loved my husband and our growing family. I was developing a real loving relationship with my mother in law and felt very blessed to be in the life I was in. But with most things, there was a flip side to all that I was feeling and experiencing. I also felt scared, lonely, unloved and unworthy. My dreams of being the best wife and mother were sitting waiting for me to take them and make them a reality, but I could see my failures every day and I knew that my internal world was full of all the pain and darkness of my childhood.

The summer came and so did my due date. Again, we didn't use ultra sounds like we do now so we didn't know the sex of our baby. We, again, had a name for a boy, none for a girl. I went into labor 2 weeks after my due date and on the way to the hospital had the same conversation we had with our first child: "what if it's a girl, what should we name her?" "It isn't, it's a boy, we are fine". In 4 hours from the first contraction, I gave birth to our second son and we named him Chancellor and called him Chance. His delivery was easy, which was dramatically different from my experience with my first son. As I sat in the hospital wide awake contemplating this new arrival, I again felt the spark of the Divine within me. As I looked down at my new baby boy and felt the immense love pour over him from me, I could feel God's love pouring down on us both. Oh how I wanted to capture it, bottle it up and be able to call upon it always. I didn't have that ability, yet. But my 2 beautiful boys were in my life, showing me everyday what love looks like, what love feels like and the possibilities that were in front of us. In their eyes, I saw hope. In their smiles, I saw peace. And in my own being, I prayed to be the mother they deserved.

I still remember this image in my heart like it was yesterday. His beautiful brown hair, his excitement for the chocolate cake, his exuberant attitude towards everything he experienced. My 1st "Chance", my 2nd son and the loves of my life.

My body responded differently to the second birth and I quickly found myself feeling more tired and in more stress. My priority at 21 was to fit quickly back into my pre pregnancy clothes, which I did. Had I been a bit more informed, it should have been to bring all my deficiencies into sufficiency. Was I getting all the nutritional support required for a nursing mother with a toddler running around? The answer is absolutely not. I'm sure there are many mother's out there who relate to not understanding what is the highest priority of self care to insure we are able to care for our sweet young families. I was a mess and relied on a Pepsi and a sweet treat to bolster me up in the afternoons.

The bliss of another child soon left our marriage and the disagreements intensified. The sternness of my husband only acerbated my fears of being dominated and my fight response grew. As my stress grew, so did his and the storms grew too.

In this same time frame, my biological father was attempting to build a relationship with my brother and me. I was trying to determine what type of relationship I was going to have with my step father. My mother had been remarried, divorced, dated a man I despised and my sister's lives were chaotic. I was still owning the role of being my sister's 2nd mom and wanted desperately to help them, but was limited in understanding of what that even was. I found myself mad at my mother for not being able to create a more healthy environment for them. I was extremely judgmental of her choices and didn't understand the complexities of her mind frame, experiences and opportunities. I was a young 20 something year old daughter wanting all of us to have better lives and tried to find ways to help them all.

My in-laws were trying to counsel me to not take on all the responsibility of my siblings and my mom, but I thought they were being judgmental, callous and simply that they didn't understand. Looking back, I can see the kindness in their attempts to help me reduce all the stress I was feeling. I'm sure I have given similar counsel to many young women I have had the opportunity to meet over the years. But I wasn't really listening to them because my fear and love for my family was too intense for me to just let it all be their responsibility or problem. For me at the time, I felt deeply that I was in a better life now and it was my responsibility to make things better for them.

Over the next few years, I would marinate in the stress, the fear, the panic and work diligently to rise above the negative feelings into what I could only imagine as a healthy state. My body was screaming for help but I had no understanding of what I needed to do to find this place I imagined. I wonder what I would see if I could watch myself from the perspective of the woman I am today. How many times have you heard the question asked of older women and men "what would you tell your younger self"? I often wonder what I would see in my younger self's eyes. What did it look like from the outside? Would I be able to see how much pain I was in? Would I see how insecure I felt? How broken I thought I was? Would I be able to tell that I carried every bruise I witnessed my mother wearing? Or the memories of every dark moment with my step father? Or would I just see the façade that I created to appear "normal"?

While my inner world felt very dark, there was a new light that existed. It was the joy my boys filled my life with. They were so different. Different in their appearance and in their personalities. Discovering them as they developed was such an incredible adventure. Each new milestone, their laughter, the things that made them happy, even the sweet things that made them sad. One loved to play together, one would play for hours on their own. One had an even temperament, one was an emotional rollercoaster. But they were my joy and my heart was able to feel things I had never felt before and the amount of love I felt for them was more than I could have ever imagined. I didn't realize it then, as I am sure a lot of parents relate to, just how precious those early years with those sweetest of boys were and how short they are.

As much as I loved my boys, my body was breaking, my mind was in chaos and I was starting to lose the war raging inside of me. I heard a visual that is great to give us a picture of what can happen in our bodies and lives. Imagine 2 pots of boiling water on the stove. In order to remove the boiling water we can put a lid on 1 pot and on the other we can turn off the heat. In the 1st pot, we might not see the boiling water but it is still boiling. The 2nd pot will stop. My life was the 1st pot and the battle between being broken and faking being normal was constant and it was taking it's toll on every part of my life. The breaking point was coming, I just didn't know it yet.