“Some drank, some took drugs, some got violent. PTSD takes a thousand forms on a person. I climbed on my motorcycle and hit the road. Faster, another gear, even faster. The dotted lines became a blur. That demon was still there. It gripped me until I could no longer breathe.”
“Young ladies, when you’re starting to pray for a spouse to spend your life with… pray for a man that will carry her down the stairs, to the car and spend all night in the hospital by her side. Because, if he can wake up at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday to hunt… he can wake up at 6:30 on Sunday to lead his family to salvation.”
“To any woman picking this box up to stare at it in longing, in mourning, in hesitation. To wonder. To wish. To throw it in her shopping cart again this month. Throwing it in with hope. With fear. With premature excitement. With anticipation. With a sense of dread that it may just be another down the drain waste basket Walmart drop of $12.98.”
“I have spent 3 hours looking up bento boxes, protein to carbohydrate to sugar ratios for those little compartments, and how to make the food look like a happy koala in a tree. Who started this stuff? Who sets the standard like this? Stop it.”
“Wanna climb that pole, Jen? Knock your socks off. Wanna shake those hips, Shakira? Go for it. I gave up judging women a long time ago.”
“Our child is not physically sick… he is mentally sick. We see no difference. He needed a hospital. He needs prayers and support. When he returns to school, please treat him like any other friend who just got out of the hospital. High fives full of welcome backs and ‘I’m glad you’re okay.’ Please don’t be afraid to talk.”
“My life was quickly thrown upside down. The love of my life was suddenly killed in a car accident. I handled it with anger and bitterness. The economy began to crumble. I quickly became the best possible cab driver I could be. Shifts were 12 hours long. I pulled my boots up and reinvented myself. Then everything changed again. The ginger ale sat on the kitchen counter, slowly turning into a bomb. At the exact second Shelly passed the sink, the bottle exploded. I was horrified. What a battle it has been.”
“My child just received an autism diagnosis. Where do I go from here? You read gossip magazines and watch reality TV so your brain can recoup from too many foreign medical words learned in therapy. You clean out a junk drawer in order to control what we still can. But now it’s done. No more limbo.”
“What absolutely nobody told us was at some point, no matter how much we loved each other, there would come a time when things felt broken beyond repair. We had seen couples split. Even couples we admired. But we figured that kind of brokenness was for people who didn’t love one another as much as we did. Like I said, we were young.”
“It started when he was a newborn. Family and friends saying I held him too much and I was going to spoil him.”
