Join Us in Restoring Hope for a Resilient Family

Welcome

Thank you for coming to see what this is about. I am so thankful for your choice to take time from your day to look at my journey and explore this platform with me.

I am rebuilding and repairing our life because the world has changed in unexpected and turbulent ways that have made the other ways I have survived for 10 years impossible. For the last 7-10 years (it’s hard to know when it starts sometimes) I have been surviving.

And you know what that is like.

I wish you didn’t, I wish you didn’t know what I meant when I told you that I have been only focused on survival. I wish I was reporting from some strange land where you didn’t know its landscape so well. I wish you didn’t know the fear and isolation and frailty of clinging to an edge with such ferocity that you neglect and abandon other parts of your life.

I am so thankful for how strong and resilient (mostly, against my will ) I am, and I don’t want to discount anything that version of me has done.

When life has shown over and over again that it wants me stomped into the ground, there was a little piece of me that brushed it off, melted down, cried my eyes out, spit the teeth out, and kept going.

I have done that through loss of family and friends, significant liver damage caused by Covid, job loss, hurricanes, winter storms, cancer, autoimmune disease, physical disability of my own and my family’s, degenerative disc disease, spondylitis, spondylolisthesis, radicular pain, numbness of my lower legs, and hidradenitis suppurativa.

But each time I survived, my life bore a cost also. Friends. Hobbies. Careers. Health. I lost so much more than I can ever explain but I also found out who I am. And she’s not as bad as I assumed.

I am someone who, strangely, could hope and feel love and respect for people and it didn’t matter how bad it got. I don’t blame you for not being in my place right now and I don’t blame me either (we will get to why in another post, I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes). It didn’t matter that I maybe wanted to fight someone in the street, because I also wanted to know that they came from a loving home, living a dignified life, and a life where they had access to everything they needed. We were still going to fight but I didn’t lose the part of me that also wanted justice.

This was part of me I was always ashamed of. The part that saw me in every person I hated and the part of me that kept believing in relationships that were full of restorative love and safety even though I wasn’t really familiar with being in one. I never knew that those abilities were special and something that could make me stronger. I always saw them as some flagrant weakness.

I fought that part of me because what I knew of strength was that it was cold, thoughtless, selfish, poisonous, and hard. But as much as I ever tried to be that, the me that’s still here stuck around. I hadn’t known real strength yet. I needed to look harder.

I think it’s important to be appreciative to who we were to make it here. Because sometimes we treat that survival-self like it’s some kind of pathology and in reality it’s what we needed to be to make it. And based on the results this far, I was being exactly who I needed at the time.

So I am thankful.

I’m also done with that.

During this journey, I am going to need help. And this is where you come in.

Here is a list of the kind of help I need:

In return, on this journey, you will get accountability, updates, lessons learned, art, sometimes important recipes that have helped me make it through, basically, I have adhd and autism and this is gonna be as vast and varied as my thoughts and ideas and experiences.

Part of what I need is also monetary help.

This is where the GoFundMe kicks in.

I know we have always been told that’s so filthy to say aloud. But the harsh reality of life is that life costs money and improving lives costs money. Disability and illness are expensive. Costs are not stable at the moment.

Community support is one of the strongest things we can do to show solidarity and support to people we can’t help in person. I know this because I have done it and experienced it.

My family deserves your help. If you have any help to give, please consider my family.

Background / How did we get here?

How did we get here? I have wondered this to myself and aloud so many times that I feel confident that sometimes the answers change but the short answer is this: when I look at how we got here I see a family full of people who have made such progress through such adversity that I feel proud. We have survived so many things that should have flattened us.

If you choose to be a part of this journey, you will be joining our team, and we have won so much and were on such a roll getting better that you would be joining a statistically successful team. This is not a sunk cost or a worthless venture. Life matters and we are worth saving.

I was never trained to live with disability. I never was taught that support is necessary and not shameful, because humans are social animals and we need each other and there can be no success without things to build it with and build it on. I was never taught that community is the only way we can survive. These lessons were ones I don’t think anyone takes seriously enough.

My family was living a life many of you have seen or lived yourselves, we were overwhelmed but meeting basic objectives. We took solace in that we weren’t losing but we were losing ourselves. We didn’t check in with each other enough. We didn’t know that admitting we were drowning was ok. We thought that if we just kept acting normal, things would work out.

That wasn’t the truth. Faking it until you make it doesn’t work when you can’t see the totality of what needs to be done.

In order to survive, I stopped doing things like getting my cancer treated, I stopped all medical treatment for myself except the treatment that keeps me from having panic attacks (propranolol) and keeps me able to walk (gabapentin and celebrex) because of my back and hips falling apart.

No one wants to admit that your small child’s disability is overwhelming and you feel like less of a mother every time you can’t help them feel better and help them meet milestones.

‘You were successful with your older child. What happened? Why is this so much different?’

You don’t want to admit that in your isolation, you have become your own bully instead of your own cheering section. No one wants to be seen with all of the hate your inner voice is spewing. So I hid in shame.

Two autistic/adhd people will already struggle in relationships, and in relationships with each other the struggles are sometimes too much to handle.

Neurodivergent burnout is real and deadly and I encourage everyone to read up on it. I hope that someone sees this and understands they aren’t broken, they just were never taught to live with disability.

How do you tell a world that you have seen talk about people struggling and your biggest fear is being that person they judge?

My husband and I are both unemployed and need to fix that with jobs. We need help meeting a couple months’ bills while we going. Disability is expensive. Charities are overrun and overwhelmed.

The public and private organizations I was using to survive have either been defunded, shut down, or re-focused to meet needs that have been prioritized to meet a changing world.

This help used to be provided by a combination of public agencies and private people, who are now unable to help us anymore.

Please don’t think that offering me advice that I need to seek out public assistance is help.

I know you mean well, but the reason I am here is because that assistance is now unavailable. We can argue about why or why not, but I have been doing this longer than you and am very resourceful.

We need help. And any amount is help. Sharing this is help.

My family and I need your help. Homelessness will be a death sentence for my family.

I am ready to face it now. I choose to think everyone who reads this is doing so because they are good people who want to help. You are here because having community and having people is more important than we know. What you are doing is actively building support not just for me but also for you. The more connected we are the less fragile we will all be.

What is the Money For: the money on the goal will cover our lives for April, May, June, and July

We don’t eat out. I cook three meals a day plus snacks. I haven’t been in a restaurant since 2020. I don’t use caregivers or respite care for my kids, and provide their care myself.

(picture of my children when they were much younger, recent pics will not be available in public to protect their privacy)

I clean, manage, and supply my home myself without paying for any additional expenses. I have cut every splurge from our lives with the exception of Disney plus. I have not purchased shoes for myself since 2018. I have the same purse I had when I was 17. My car is a 2014 Hyundai Sonata that is completely paid off. Our family is recreational drug and alcohol free.