Let me introduce myself, my name is Tiffany. I am displaced southerner living in the Pacific Northwest, seeking calm, serenity and beauty around every corner. I haven’t always found it, mind you, but I have faith that it’s there and obtainable. I have so much faith that as I write this and look back to how I got here, it all makes perfectly, unusual sense with every step I took. Back then though, I wanted to rip my hair out, stop explaining myself, give up, walk away and never look back. 50 times over. And let’s be honest, we all probably have more of those moments than we want to admit. But I want to share with you what happens when you go through all those terrifying things and somehow the world doesn’t end…but your true self begins. I have lived a very big life and I couldn’t possible share it all at once. Today, I just want to ease you into the first part of my story about how growing up in chaos made creating calm my superpower.
As a kiddo, I was lucky health-wise. I was a bit of tomboy, happy to run and play outside all day and night. I knew when to stay quiet around adults, loved school and was mostly a pretty good kid. I never had any broken bones or major illness. I did have one heck of a battle with chicken pox though. It was in my ears, my nose and on the bottoms of my feet making it hard to walk. And once in 6th grade, I was showing off at the bus stop before school and sprained my ankle doing a cartwheel in my new wedge boots. I recall that I had to stay home for a couple days due to my ankle and happened to see the Challenger space shuttle disaster live during one of those days. I was alone watching it and all I could think was, “How awful that life can change just like that, in a literal flash.” It was the first time I was aware of the world on a large scale and how the unexpected affects us on a large scale. Big thoughts for a scrawny 10 year old experiencing her first visual, visceral shock. I wasn’t a kid who had to worry about anything except schoolwork and wasn’t prepared when there came a day I was made aware of a larger world again in the shape of my Mother’s health. So that’s where my health story begins, the day I saw my mother’s life, and mine, change in a moment and without warning.
In 6th grade, my Grandma Hazel lived with my mother and I. I remember her calling me out into the living room full of worry with the words, “Tiffany, I need you to come help me.” My mother was slumped in a chair, sort of mumbling with a grumpy looking expression on her face and moving as if she were asleep and having a nightmare. I asked, “What’s happening?” Grandma said, “I need you to get me a wooden spoon from the kitchen and wet cloth. Your mom is having a seizure.” I did what I was told. As she tended to Mom, she explained to me what she doing, how to best to do it and then, seemingly satisfied that the seizure was over, made sure Mom was comfortable and then sat down. I immediately asked, “What happened?” She replied matter of fact, “Your Mom has something called Epilepsy and has had seizures since she just a bit older that you.” And then took a sip of coffee like we were having everyday conversation.
I just stood there a few moments processing everything she had said. My next question was, “How often does this happen?” Because it was mostly just Mom and I, I wanted to understand why I didn’t know this before and how alert I needed to be. Alert is not something kids want to be by the way. It means being so minutely observant of what’s happening around you that your superpower becomes sensing or soothing a problem before there even is one. It also means becoming CPR Certified at age 11 in the free class offered by our church. I was the only kid taking the class and think my Grandma arranged it with the church employees who had to go through the class. I never really thought I would need those skills. But I was 11, and what did I know about anything. However, they did came in handy, too often, and I eventually found myself able to stay calm and know what to do whenever Mom had a seizure.
For those who do not know of Epilepsy, it is a neurological condition that causes episodes of excessive electrical activity in the brain resulting in seizures of various types. These seizures can be triggered by food, alcohol, lack of sleep, or forgetting to take medication. Epilepsy is often caused by a brain injury as it was in my mother’s case. At 13 years of age, she slipped on the wet bathroom floor and hit her head on the commode. It knocked her unconscious for an unknown amount of time and when she woke up, she told her parents then everyone went on about their day. Soon after the fall, she began having headaches which never went away and eventually became migraines. Over the following months, she found it increasingly difficult to study, to read or to pay attention in school. She became moody and irritable due to the pain. Within a year of the fall, she was having Grand Mal seizures which are very hard on the body due to their violent nature. My grandparents finally took her to a doctor who confirmed that Mom was having Epileptic seizures due to an untreated head injury and the concussion that followed. Mom was placed on two popular medicines of that year, 1963: Phenobarbitol and Dilantin. These two drugs are Barbituates, and for a young girl still in her formative years, these two drugs would have unknown and long-lasting side effects. I will get to that part of the story because Mom would remain on those same two drugs for almost 40 years.
During my early teen years and all through high school, my mother had many, many seizures. I went from a life of not knowing seizures were a thing to dealing with at least one a week. And they weren’t the small ones. They were called Grand Mal seizures which meant that when one began, it was violent and sometimes long. And they were very scary. I answered the phone one day after school and was told by a police officer that Mom had driven off the road and totaled her car because she had a seizure while driving. Luckily, no one was hurt, not even her really. Thank goodness. I learned to sleep very lightly so I could hear if Mom fell out of bed or knocked the lamp over. Once while doing homework, I heard a bunch of silverware drop in the kitchen and found Mom laying on the floor next to the entire silverware drawer. She had been putting dishes away and starting dinner. I would wake Mom up before school to make sure she took her medicine. I always asked about her midday medicine when I got home from school and reminded her again before I went to bed. I was also lucky that whenever an EMT had to come, they would teach me a little bit more of what I could do or look out for next time. I often saw the same EMTs and they were always incredibly friendly to me. They even would stay with me until a neighbor or family member could come over if Mom had to be taken to the hospital. Sometimes Mom woke up from a seizure fairly soon after one even if she wasn’t able to speak yet. Sometimes she wouldn’t come around soon enough or would hit her head and then they always sent her to ensure no complications of a concussion, which she had plenty of and too many to count. The worst was she never wanted to go to the hospital if awake and would beg me to not let them take her, that she would be fine…but I was only 12 or 13 and that level of understanding and reacting was daunting, physically and mentally. So if the EMT suggested she go then I took their word for its necessity.
I was always grateful for my Grandma, my uncle and all my neighbors who always appeared out of nowhere to check on me when needed, to feed me when needed and helped me try to keep up on schoolwork when I got behind. I was also deeply grateful for my middle and high school guidance counselors who gave me a safe place to go when overwhelmed, a place to cry, to vent, to ask questions, to seek help on my future plans, to ask forgiveness for late papers, to let me nap when I had been up all night with Mom but needed to show up anyway. I always did my best to at least show up. Epileptic seizures were the only health concerns my mother had at the time. She experienced several painful miscarriages in her life, struggled with depression and something that hadn’t been given a name yet: Bipolar Disorder. These days there are studies stating that Post-Partem Depression, if untreated for 10 years, can manifest into Bipolar Disorder. Living with someone struggling with big emotions, deep depression and something that didn’t have a name let alone a medicine yet changed how I viewed the world and everyone in it. It probably didn’t help that I was a teenager going through my own emotional growing pains, anger pains, and had acquired an intense anxiety that became my natural state. Years later, I would come to understand what living in a constant state of high crisis, or fight or flight, would do to my own physical and mental health.
In our house growing up, no matter where we lived, it was always loud. It was always full of people, a lot of laughter and almost always full of chaos. My mother’s temper was, and is still, legendary. There were times I was a good kid simply to not accidentally poke the bear. There were times that I was woken up at various times of the night being interrogated about a piece of mail or a missed phone call or some accusation of something I most certainly didn’t do but accepted punishment for so I could simply go back to bed. Life was exhausting, infuriating, and mind boggling and sometimes outright unexpected. And yet, my mother was my biggest cheerleader and motivator. She had high standards for me, for how I should behave and how hard I should work. She volunteered for every parent chaperone opportunity. She found a way to get me to cheer-leading camp (Thanks Uncle Danny!), new dresses for choir, glasses when I needed them (Thanks Grandma!), and prom dresses (Thanks Aunt Paulette!). Sometimes when Mom felt happy and adventurous we would take a road trip or spend a night in a hotel nearby so I could swim in the pool for an entire day. For all the madness, we were a pair. Knowing that we needed one another, we even became friends in spite of ourselves.
Money was always tight and I worked from the time I was in 10th grade. I took night school classes in Math so I could take more music classes during the day at school. Music was the place where I danced and sang it all out; where I made friends that I have to this day and experienced some of the funniest memories of my life. I graduated high school at 17 with an Advanced Studies Diploma having somehow managed to achieve more credits than I needed. I took that summer to sleep and figure out what I was going to do in the fall. I ended up taking on two jobs, one of which became my favorite memories of all time. These were early signs of a work ethic and determination that Mom taught me and has served me well. I decided to move out of my mother’s house and into my very own apartment downtown when I was 19. When the time came for me to move, I had been my mother’s keeper for a decade and I was ready to spread my wings. For Mom, it was the single most frustrating and depressing moment of my young adult life, and hers. I wish I could say she sent me off proudly with sage advice and good cheer. Instead she watched with a firm expression and oddly not a whole lot to say as my friends and I skipped down my new street in the rain laughing, singing and feeling free as the birds, without a care in the world.
And for a while, I didn’t have a care in the world. I worked hard, played hard and made up for never being a rebellious kid. I was my own person for the very first time and my life was changing all over again. But that’s a story for another day.
Until then…Be Healthy. Be Strong. Be Mindful. Be Well.
Tiffany