Outside of the school I attended for four years is a set of stairs
leading into the library. When I was in school guys from my class
moved a car that belonged to my friend in front of the stairs, before
that my parents sat on those stairs together talking about the future.
They decided that they both liked the name Jessica, the cynic in me
would like to say that my name was one of the few things they agreed on
however my romantic side wants to believe that at one point in time my
parents were in love and treated each other the way that new parents
should.
When I was a baby my mother had a very
small apartment and a friend who wanted to give her a break. I was a
little baby but neither of my parents are very big people. My mom said
that I was the baby who never slept and never ate but she also said that
I was good which I find hard to believe. When I was ready for
kindergarten my teacher didn't believe that I was really five. I
remember crying because I was the only person shorter than the wagon
wheel we had to stand by for school pictures.
My younger sister was almost always at least as tall as I was. People
thought we were twins which I didn't care for at all. I'm two years
older than she is, it doesn't matter anymore but at the time I wanted
people to know that I was the big sister. Growing up my parents had very
little money. My mom is a very thrifty and resourceful person so she
planted a huge garden. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen canning
tomatoes, making jam and eating hot breakfasts because they were cheaper
and more nutritious than cold cereal.
As a child I was a picky eater. I hated tomatoes, I didn't like
potatoes, my sister ate peanut butter
and jam almost every day but I ate it only when I didn't have any other
choice. I couldn't stand eating sandwiches, I loathed spaghetti sauce
but my mom wouldn't let me eat the noodles by themselves. My parents
thought forcing their children to eat food they couldn't stand was good
parenting. I remember my dad making us eat green balogna and my mom
telling us we couldn't leave the table until we had finished our serving
of lutefisk.
My childhood wasn't all bad. I have some good memories of my uncle
taking me and my sister fishing. I walked to school with tons of my
friends and for the most part I enjoyed school until I accidentally
wound up in an advanced math class in the sixth grade. No one in my
family liked the school guidance counselor, I'm not sure why except she
was short and fat. My middle sister told her we had a dog when we really
didn't, my parents had taught us to tell the truth but in my world
sticking up for my sister was more important than telling the truth
about a pet we didn't own.
When I was in seventh grade I drove an ATV into a large ditch full of
abandoned farm machinery. I could have been seriously hurt but
thankfully wasn't. Seventh grade was awful because for the first time
ever I looked into the mirror and saw myself as fat. I think I weighed
less than ninety pounds, I was ninety-three pounds when I started high
school but I remember sitting on the bench in gym class wearing red gym
shorts and watching this girl who was rumored to have an eating
disorder. To me she looked good although when I look at pictures now I
can see there was really nothing to her.
Eighth grade was the year my family moved. It was not a good year for
many reasons however since I had moved to a smaller school I was a much
more prominent member of the sports teams. I served the winning point
in our final volleyball game. Most of the time I was an average
basketball player but I was aggressive so I was able to steal the ball
on several occasions. I loved softball and I started dating the son of
our coach which had nothing to do with the fact that I got the first
base position. I hit a homerun during our first game and it didn't
matter what other people thought about me outside of the game, when I
was in it nothing else mattered.
My dad used to wake me and my next youngest sister up early to run
before school. Cross country was not the sport for me. My muscles were
always stiff and sore even at that age. For most of my life I have been
tense, anxious and nervous. Now that I know more about myself I can see
why some of these things were issues before I understood the
terminology. My parents didn't have much money, I didn't have the
clothes or the looks or a lot of the other advantages I wanted so I
pretended that those things weren't important to me which was my way of
trying to save some pride.
During high school I met people that I thought I would always be
friends with. It was a lonely time for me. I had friends but they ended
up not always being the best kind a girl could have. A lot of girls used
me because I was on good terms with most of the guys in our class. They
would want to hang out with me until the guys came over and after the
guys were there they stopped talking to me. My parents, my aunts and
uncles and my grandfather had all gone to school where I had. All the
faculty members knew who I was which made my life difficult because
everything I did eventually traveled back to my parents.
I wasn't really a bad kid but I was loud and outspoken. Apart from
math I did reasonably well in school. History was my favorite class
primarily because at that level it was all memorization. Anything I
could read and remember was easy for me. Things I had to figure out were
more difficult but fortunately I had roomates who were good at the
things I wasn't. Cheating became a way of life for us all. In the end it
hurt us more than it helped but at the time we did what we thought we
had to in order to get by. If our teachers wondered why we were good at
homework and had trouble with test taking no one said anything to us
about it.
Instead of going to a school I could afford for college I went to an
expensive private school so I could get a good
liberal arts education. I always had at least two jobs and I resented my
friends whose parents were paying for them to go to school. History was
my major and if I could go back and do it all over again I would have
chosen to study something else. Maybe I should be embarrassed at how
little I remember from school but at the time I studied to get good
grades and my grades had to stay high enough so I could keep the
scholarship money I had.
My education was good enough but I didn't learn much about life which
is what I think school should prepare you for. Because I worked I had
some money of my own so I bought clothes and went out to eat with my
friends. They liked me because I had a car and a credit card, when we
went out they would promise to pay me back if I put the bill on my
credit card. I wanted their approval so even though my head was against
the idea I went along with it because I didn't want them to be mad at
me. My aunt was hired to teach English the year I graduated from
college. That year was probably one of the highlights of my life.
Since I had taken so many credits my first couple years I was able to
take fewer easier classes as a senior. That meant I could work more and
when I graduated from college I thought my life was pretty good. I had a
job, I was offered an entry level position at a brokerage firm, I got
engaged the summer I finished school and I rode that high through the
rest of June into July when I found out my parents were going to get
divorced. The people I worked with were nice to me the day I came in
obviously upset. Two of them I will remember in particular, one went
through it as an adult, the other as a child and I appreciate the time
they spent talking about their experiences.
That summer I decided I wasn't going to live with either of my
parents. After dating the same person for three years I thought I knew
him fairly well. He had a good job that he hated. We spent a lot of time
talking to each other and I liked how we could talk about things that
we disagreed about without arguing. A lot of the things I did made sense
if you remember that I didn't have a lot of self confidence. I couldn't
afford to move out on my own without going into debt, getting married
meant I would have more money and a place to stay. My mom came to me the
day before I got married and told me not to go through with it.
She came after I received a letter from my grandmother on my father's
side which I dismissed as her being bitter because my mom had left her
son. When I think back to how naive and optimistic I was it makes me
wonder how I could have been such an idiot. I took a job that paid a lot
less than I was worth. People knew I was good, they also knew I didn't
know how good I was so when my branch manager told me I was getting a
one and a half percent raise I took it and went home to vent instead of
telling him to go fuck himself like I should have.
Working in finance during the boom time was fun and interesting. I
learned a ton working there and much like my E2 experience not all of it
was information that came without a price tag. I left that job to work
for an accounting firm that no longer exists. After a brief stint with
another big player in financial planning I went to work for a car rental
company. I should have been promoted but I left before that ever
happened. Actually I never should have taken the job in the first place
but again I didn't think I could get a better offer.
I should be ashamed to admit that I slept with a couple of the guys I
worked with but I'm not. I wanted someone to love me and I think at
least one of the guys felt something or we wouldn't have ended up in bed
together the night we did. At home I was viewed as worthless and people
at work thought I was fun. All the trouble I didn't get into during
school I played out as a twenty-something. I didn't hide anything I was
doing. I didn't respect myself and I doubt other people respected me
either however at the time I told myself I didn't care what other people
thought.
Eventually my husband and I went to counseling. He admitted that he
loved me. I told him I was sorry I had cheated on him, we patched things
up temporarily. I left my job after I had a miscarriage at work and
went back to finance because that's what I knew and that's what I
thought I was good at. Being pregnant and working full time was
horrible. I was sick for months, I called in the second day of my new
job and my boss was furious with me even though I had gone home, gone to
bed and thrown up everything I ate for supper after I woke up.
My daughter was due on the day after Mother's Day. My husband was
scheduled to be out of town at the end of April and when I went in for
what would be one of my last checkups my OB-GYN said I was done working
and he was going to induce labor if my blood pressure and the baby's
heartrate didn't stabilize. I developed a head to toe rash, it was
allergy season and I couldn't take anything stronger than Tylenol so I
was miserable, unable to sleep and praying that my baby wouldn't be
born too early. Nothing about my first labor and delivery went the way
it was supposed to.
At the hospital no one knew for sure whether my water had broke until
the doctor came. She announced that I was staying but since I hadn't
planned on that I was at the hospital with nothing. I walked around for
hours without a contraction and finally my physician said she was going
to induce because you have to deliver within 24 hours to reduce the
chance of infection. After everything she had been through before birth I
thought my brand new daughter was perfect and so did a lot of other
people.
For three months I stayed home before going back to work. Not long
after I returned I quit to stay home with my daughter. She was colicky, I
was exhausted and that first year was tough because until she had tubes
put in her ears we went back and forth between the pediatrician and the
ENT. She was pretty but she never ate, she couldn't sleep and I don't
know how I made it through that time in my life. After the tubes went in
she was a much happier baby. We decided to risk another one and that
pregnancy gave me more trouble than I had had with the first.
My best friend's mother was there when I passed out. She said she
knew something was wrong but I had no memory of anything other than
being excessively warm in the room. My husband had agreed to children
but he wasn't thrilled that we were having another. I took my oldest to
the beach every day that I could, we had a routine that worked for us
and after my youngest was born we kept the routine up with her as a
newborn addition. Those first few years I did everything with the girls
that I could. I took them to the library and the zoo. We joined the Y, I
was going to get back into shape and everything was going to be
wonderful.
Until my youngest daughter was two weeks old and came down with her
first cold. After that we saw the pediatrician and the dermatologist.
She went to the ENT and a pediatric gastroenterologist. She ate but she
didn't gain weight. Everything she ate came right back up and I was
worried sick about her. The allergist said she wasn't allergic to
anything. I couldn't get any answers from anyone until we were referred
to a specialist at Childern's Hospital. We went there for more tests and
it was tragic to see children hooked up to machines and babies who were
never leaving from what had become their home.
Organic food was one of the things I latched onto when my youngest
was so sick. I made almost everything my children ate because baby food
was expensive and not nutritious. People thought I was nuts but I didn't
care. Nothing was more important than the health and welfare of my
children. Until I became so depressed that I stopped doing anything that
didn't absolutely have to be done. My sister complains that her husband
doesn't help and I can relate because I did everything for the girls
until one day I couldn't do anything.
Being the perfect parent had burned me out and stressed me out. I
felt unloved, unsupported and neglected only this time I didn't have a
job to go to and I didn't think I could go back to work when my children
were constantly sick with colds and ear infections. Medication for the
two of them ran about $600 a month, my husband had lost his job when I
was expecting my youngest. He never worries about money so I did enough
worrying for the two of us. That drove a bigger wedge between the two of
us because I tried to cut spending while he bought whatever he thought
he needed.
2006 was the year I started writing. It was therapeutic, it was
something I could do while I was at home and no one in my family could
understand why I was addicted to the computer if all I was doing was
typing. I needed a new plan so I decided to go back to school. I did
exceptionally well this time around because I was going to get a nursing
degree. That meant I would make good money and be able to work some
nights and weekends when my husband could watch the girls. Gradually
their health improved but their being sick so frequently had taken its
toll on me.
That was the year I had two serious allergic reactions in a row. One
article I read explained that allergic reactions are the culmination of
progressive attacks. That made a lot of sense to me since I could
remember having difficulty breathing before the big attacks. Not long
after that my insurance changed, a new allergist I saw said I was not a
good candidate for shots. I had never liked my allergist but I trusted
him to know what he was doing and to take good care of my fragile
health. When I was in college I had been sick for months without anyone
being able to determine what was wrong.
Most of my life has been me feeling like shit without knowing why. I
went back to work in 2009. It was a crappy job but I was glad to have it
and the boys who worked for me will always have a spot in my heart
because they were such good kids. That job ended when the shoe store
across the hall hired me. From the day I started it was clear that they
were playing games with me and I let them because I was so grateful to
be out of the job I had been working at. I took a pay cut but it was
worth it because I liked the people I was working with.
Eventually I was promoted to assistant manager. My numbers were good
not because I am amazing at sales but because no one else cared enough
to work at their numbers. When the manager from another store asked if I
was interested in working for him I mistakenly thought that was a good
idea. Last December I put wheat on the list of foods to avoid and I do
not have words to explain what my life was like at this time last year.
The worst rash I have ever had stuck with me for months. It hurt to
shower, putting clothes on was a nightmare, I had busy active children, a
full time job, and avoiding wheat helped me lose weight but I sat in
the sauna by myself crying and wanting any other life than the one I
had.
The summer of 2010 was probably one of the lowest points of my life
in terms of my physical health. In the past I had characters who had
suicidal thoughts. I told myself I would never do anything but I thought
about driving into a concrete structure on my way to work. People in my
family would take care of my children and my husband didn't care
anyways. I wrote a lot about that and when I first joined E2 I read what
TheDeadGuy and liveforever had
written about it. When I left the emergency room in 2006 I had friends
to take care of me that next day.
When my family came to pick me up that last day in
August I could hardly talk because whatever I had put in my mouth had
damaged my throat. Thankfully that was temporary but I existed in the
strange state between life and death state for a few days. When I
started writing I wanted my characters to be people who faced
challenges. I honestly never dreamed that the research I had done on
things I had given my characters would some day come back to haunt me.
I've always had food allergies but until this past November no one ever
told me I was unable to handle gluten.
Now that I know that my life has changed. 24% of people who are
gluten intolerant are also lactose intolerant. When your body attacks
itself you can develop leaky gut syndrome. Small undigested food
particles escape from your digestive tract where your body identifies
them as harmful. Going on the elimination diet was easier for me than
for many others. It revealed quite a few allergies and sensitivities I
hadn't known about earlier and as much as it sucks to be allergic to
common things like potatoes and lemons not knowing which foods are safe
is a terrifying way to almost live.
An article I read recently suggests that children with food allergies
are isolated from their peers due to their dietary restrictions. They
said they suffer more from anxiety, they're lonely and I can identify
with all of this. Formerly I was a social person, now I avoid situations
where food is involved. After getting the news that I probably had an
incurable disease that would affect the rest of my life I was given a
list of supplements I needed to get, a prescription and a reminder to
schedule a follow up appointment which sadly is what people in my
situation get from the current healthcare system.
Since then I've been back since I thought I should be feeling better
by now. I've had another battery of tests and people are on the fence
about whether or not I am diabetic. My neighbor told me I was years ago
however the woman I normally see isn't convinced. My skin is better than
it used to be although I have some several patches that haven't
responded to the gluten free diet. I know eating more vegetables would
be a good idea but if I don't get enough sugar in my diet I get dizzy
and lightheaded when I stand up.
When you feel like garbage and your body is in pain it is difficult
to perform well. I used to be very tense, I still suffer from anxiety
although now there are times when I feel nothing at all. Sometimes I lie
down on my bed sobbing because I don't know where I'm going or what I
am going to do with my life. I write to try and figure things out, I
also write because the people I want to read things like this don't and
it makes me sad that people on the internet know more
about my life than the people who brought my life into this world.
This is just me writing things as they come to me so please don't
worry. I have a plan in my head, sometimes I feel more on track than
other times and I was very happy to join the ranks of the living after
so many bad allergic reactions tested my will to live. God has been good to me in many ways, I believe that even when
I don't believe in him which I realize makes no sense at all. As a
mother I want the best for my children. Today we hung out as a family,
it is a day I want to store in my heart because I think one day my
children will not have parents who are married to each other.
Writing at night means I have time to focus on
what I should have done. I tend to be much more optimistic in the
morning except lately I feel as if I can't drag myself out of bed. My
massage therapist has been sending me texts lately. She is good for me
and so is the woman who cuts my hair. The help ground me and it seems as
if I need their help since I am adrift and rootless. Either I don't
care at all or I care too much, neither of those paths are ideal and I
have to remember that if the road is long at least I have taken the
first few steps towards the end.
What the end will bring or if I will go anywhere remains to be seen.
Writing this has helped some, I would like to go into more depth on some
of the issues however I would also like to go forward, focus on the
positive and things that make me a better, stronger, healthier person.
Tomorrow I am going to my first yoga class in the hopes that this old
dog can learn at least one new trick. I have always been able to talk to
people and I believe that people are, for better or worse, in my life
for a reason.
If you belong to the group that supports, encourages and wants what
is best for me than I thank you for being the listening ear, the good
friend and the shoulder to collapse against. If not, I don't have much
to say to you. Today my children have new shoes that I approve of. I can
still type, I went to the Y and out to eat without getting sick which
for me is a minor miracle. Tomorrow will be another day with hurts and
hopes of its own. For now I am off, I no longer want to see this or have
to read it ever again.