“I finally reached my breaking point. My wife was getting ready to leave town for work. I had a panic attack and Brittany had to cancel her trip. It was hard for her. She didn’t know how to help me. It hurt her to see me struggling, I could see it in her eyes. I was embarrassed. I wanted someone to say, ‘You’re not alone, it happened to me too.’”
“Stay in tune with your stress levels and monitor your emotions.”
“I was extremely scared to tell my mom. After I sent the text, I held my head over the toilet because I thought I’d puke. It was a whole day before my mom finally answered. My girlfriend texted her, ‘Please answer him, he needs your love and support.’ My mom did not like it and refused to call me her son. ‘You should dress more like a girl.’ I told her, ‘This doesn’t change who I am, this is who I’ve always been.’”
“We received a call from a very desperate young man named Jonathan. ‘My wife is not properly caring for our 4-month-old son.’ He very was concerned about the welfare of his baby and convinced his wife to allow us to help. My husband and I are 47-years-old, we are sometimes mistaken as the grandparents. We know we probably won’t have an empty nest and that’s just fine with us.”
“He said, ‘I made you a mother and nobody else would ever marry you.’ He spit on my face. I worried about how others saw divorce. I looked at my life and my innocent girls who didn’t deserve the hand I dealt them, and suddenly I saw the reality of our situation. I chose to JUMP! My daughters were better off with a divorced, living mother, than a dead, married one.”
“Labor pains, breastfeeding, postpartum hormones. She looks at herself in the mirror, wondering if her body will ever look the same again. I thought I knew what motherhood entailed. Like most new dads, I only experienced it as an outsider. I saw my mother, sister, and friends do it. I got the gist of it. Or at least I thought I did. But what I didn’t know was how little I really knew.”
“I kissed, hugged and squeezed him, laughing and crying, in shock. The crazy thing about it is that even though our marriage was always hard – he was abusive and constantly tormented by his own mind – I loved him. I still do.”
“My two-year-old was asking for bubble gum and chocolate bars. Without missing a beat, the man behind me in line handed the cashier his card. ‘I’ve got it.’ He said. My friend at the cash register was near tears by the end of her shift. I won’t ever forget that day and I doubt she has either.”
“Our Christmas is different than yours. We get no excited screams when they see what Santa brought. It’s struggling with gift ideas. What do you get a non-mobile, non-verbal child? It’s walking past all the cool toys at the front of every store, wishing our child could play with them. Our Christmas is different, but it’s still so magical.”
“Basically, my car was too dirty to go to a car wash. I chose the vacuums as far away from other people as humanly possible, sure no one would notice the avalanche of crap about to fall out of my passenger side door. I was so very wrong. Up pulled a man in a light blue, flawless car.”
