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My divorce was finalized November 30th, 2016 and by January 30th, 2017 my ex had remarried and by his choice had little to no contact with our 5 children. By September 2017 I had spent almost a year recovering from the divorce and the unexpected financial and emotional fall out that followed. To understand the severity of the impact of these events it helps to have some background about our family and situation. 

I claim five kids. I raised four and share in the privilege of claiming a fifth child with whom I share with her amazing parents. Our family was a beautiful mix of his, mine, and ours that no one would've guessed was blended. From the inside out, we were one family. My oldest son, my ex-husband's child from his previous marriage whom I had adopted and raised as my own, had recently returned home from an LDS mission in Argentina and was living with his birth mom in Utah after being estranged from her for about 7 years. My middle son had just graduated H.S. that May and had worked all summer as a director at a Boy Scout Camp and was then living and working in Idaho with some friends. He is my son from my first marriage and with whom my ex had adopted and was sealed to in the LDS church. My youngest two children were ours and at that time were 15 and just barely 13 years old. We were adjusting to the sudden shrinking of our once large family, from the 6 of us down to only 3. Their dad had dropped all communication with the kids by the time the divorce had been finalized and has never requested any visitations. My well adjusted, globally traveled, and multilingual children were struggling with the hurt and anger and loss of it all. 

By July 2017, I had found a beautiful home in Utah Valley to lease purchase close to family and friends to help in our support and recovery from the hardships of that previous year. The kids were adjusting well to a new school they shared with cousins and their cousin’s friends that they had visited over the years with our travels in and out of Utah previously. I was very busy rebuilding a couple of businesses and spending countless hours traveling all over Utah. We seemed to be in a good place. We missed our home in beautiful Star Valley, Wyoming but we felt content in creating some space and time for some much-needed healing to occur before we planned to move back home to Wyoming for my 15 year old daughter's senior year. 

That warm fall morning on September 12th, 2017, I had decided to enjoy a ride to a client in Salt Lake on my motorcycle. It was beautiful and probably one of the last before the snow would start. I had left the house and about 10 minutes into the ride I received a call from my son's school. I felt inspired to pull over and take the call as I wasn’t far from the school. The woman on the phone sounded concerned and asked if I could come pick my son up right away.  He had been hit in the head right before the bus picked him up for school and by the time he had arrived he had a severe headache and was now vomiting. I was confused why he wouldn't have come home as I had just been there! I knew from my medical training that this was not a good sign and he needed help fast. I hung up and headed straight for the school. I found him in a darkened room with a sick bowl and his face white as a sheet, his eyes glazed over. I immediately took him home and swapped out the bike for my truck and headed out for what ended up being a full day of doctors, hospitals, and tests. In the weeks following what was a silly game of tag before school and an accidental kick and multiple hits to the head, turned into a severe and debilitating concussion that rendered my fun loving, intelligent boy to a special needs child. He was unable to function without constant care for his now daily seizures along with memory and basic motor function loss. He wasn't able to keep any food down for longer than an hour or two and any light caused him severe pain to his head and eyes. He couldn't remember our names half of the time, couldn't remember simple tasks like how to unlock a door with a key, and he slept 15-18 hours a day between seizures and vomiting. 

One evening after an exceptionally bad day of seizures I found myself on my knees in a desperate plea for help. I had struggled the year before to feel worthy of love and God’s blessings in my life. After my divorce I had been overcome by feelings of betrayal and abandonment and I had allowed those feelings to creep into every relationship in my life including my relationship with my God and my Savior. I was angry, bitter, and confused how after converting my life from alcoholism and sexual promiscuity to one of following faithfully the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that I would end up in this place of desperation and loneliness. I had determinedly picked up and moved on, steadfast and resolved to solve and fix whatever issues came my way in order to provide for and support my family. But in this I found myself desperately out of answers and feeling helpless as my baby debilitated daily and no answers or quick fixes in sight from doctors and specialists. Everyone’s advice was to wait and watch. Something I was not very good at doing. And in this case, I felt I was helplessly standing by while losing another part of my son every day.

While on my knees in that desperate prayer that day, to my complete and utter surprise, after much crying and complaining and questioning the reasons why, I began to suddenly feel peace. I felt God listening and caring. And I began to feel my Savior calming my troubled soul. I didn’t have answers. But I recognized that this feeling of peace was an answer. This alone was something that not only did I need desperately but so did my children. I had been so busy putting out all the emotional and temporal fires that I had completely abandoned our need for creating spiritual peace at home. I didn't know what to do and I didn't know how we were going to survive this, but I got up off my knees and began seeking that peace in the chaos that I seemed to have surrounded myself with for what seemed like years of struggle and trial before, during, and after the divorce.

Over the next week I spent a lot more time in prayer. More time than I had spent in probably that previous year combined. During and after every prayer I felt buoyed up and strengthened despite the lack of answers. I began to see the positive things around me and the things that I did have control over became easier. I quickly started re-prioritizing my life and daily choices. I found myself confident with the decisions I was having to make between working, paying rent, building my businesses, and caring for my son. I realized that I had much fewer choices if I was to put my son’s care first. After pondering on this for a few days it just hit me. I knew what I needed to do and I knew it would not be easy. I needed to drop everything and focus on my son, it was the only peace I had found. The following week I sold everything I could sell, found a new renter for the house, packed the few belongings we had in a storage unit, sold all my vehicles, and bought an old clunker to drive around the country. I was calm and confident despite the lack of direction and answers. We had traveled for 13 years together as a family previously, traveling for 2 weeks to 2 years at a time from client to client throughout the U.S. with my companies, however, we had traveled from one hotel to another and usually by air. Our old clunker was stuffed full of camping equipment, backpacks, and a variety of seasonal clothing for each one of us. I had no idea what was to come. I just knew that this time would be very, very different. 

Two weeks after that first prayer and everything stuffed into that little old four door sedan I had bought for cash the week before, we pulled out of our driveway with no plan and no where to go. We drove away from our beautiful home and neighborhood and family and friends without any idea what was to come or even what the goal would be. I thought we'd all be sad or scared but after checking in with each of my kids, it was unanimous, all we felt was peace and excitement. We drove to South Salt Lake, pulled over at the first gas station, and said a prayer. During the prayer we each felt strongly that we should head for grandma’s house 8 hours away and so...we did.

We ended up spending 3 months traveling to see family and friends from Salt Lake to Seattle then South Dakota to Kansas city and back to Salt Lake again. We then spent another 3 months in Kansas City with friends just eating and resting and eating some more. We had hardships and miracles along the way. From hitting trees felled on a highway leaving us stranded in a mountain town in Washington State to my son smashing his hand with a manhole cover and breaking three fingers. We found doctors and natural healers with neurological specialties along our route with the time and resources to treat my son for little to no money. By June, he was doing so well that I knew I needed to start pushing him physically. By then kneeling in prayer together was normal again. We all felt like living independently from others was an important step forward and we also knew that the only way we could accomplish this without me working outside the home was to live again in a foreign country where our dollar would stretch multiple times over. We felt a new country and a new language would be fun to conquer so we all did a little research and each of us separate of the others, fasted, prayed, and felt good about Brazil and learning Portuguese. 

I decided it was time to ditch the car and start backpacking in order to save the money we needed for plane tickets. We backpacked from Kansas City to Fort Lauderdale, FL. We spent a month traveling around Florida doing Workaways and Couchsurfing before saving up enough cash to leave the country and fly back to Guatemala to see friends and family there with the hope of working our way south to Brazil. We had spent time living and visiting Guatemala for 13 years prior but we also knew it would be very different without Dad and the boys. We ended up spending three amazing months in Guatemala. We stayed in a beautiful 2 bedroom house off the shores of Lake Atitlan in the Mayan highlands in our favorite little village, San Marcos La Laguna. We were able to spend some much needed quality time with our old friends and the Guatemalan family that had adopted us 13 years prior. My son was able to find two internships to help push his brain and physical capabilities. One was at an organic farmstead just getting started and the other was with a local craftsman who is also a talented chef. Soon our Visa time was up and we needed somewhere to go to renew them. I was able to secure a live-in nanny/personal assistant temporary position in the states. We arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania just before Halloween and left just after Thanksgiving. We each made new and amazing friends there! But it was time to get to Brazil. We spent the rest of the holidays working our way south to Florida to catch our flight from Fort Lauderdale to Campinas, Brazil. True to our entrance to this journey, we landed in Brazil without any plans but this time we had no friends or family or even a language or culture that we knew to rely upon, it was us against the world, literally. We landed in Brazil without a plan, hotel, friend, or language and only $50 in my pocket. But true to our experience to this point of our journey we ended up traveling in and out of Brazil for the following 2.5 years. We ate amazing food, made lifelong friends, saw a vast portion of Brazil from North to South, and I became fluent in Portuguese while dating beautiful men around Brazil.

By March 2020 we raced back to the U.S. from Montreal, Canada under the looming threat of border closures. My daughter was able to graduate with her class from an online High School albeit strangely celebrated in an old Drive-In Movie Park in Idaho Falls, Idaho where we sat in our cars and honked and celebrated as each child's bio was flashed on the big screen. We were able to spend time with my middle son in Idaho for a few months before deciding as a family to relocate us all back to Utah until the pandemic was over. I was able to make the necessary appointments at Primary Children's Hospital in January 2021 for a reevaluation for my son who seemed to me to be about 80% recovered at that point. Several tests and several months later I learned that my son still had some cognitive issues with math, science, and language and would be significantly behind his peers if he were to enter regular public school with those issues. I quickly formulated a plan and ran it by his pediatric neuropsychologist, what about a Spanish immersion into a private school in a 3rd world country? I explained further that his Spanish that he had learned as a boy with our travels in and out of Guatemala had been lost along with much of his long-term memory and maybe the stress of that immersion might force his memory and synapsis to readjust back to normal with the intensity of the experience. He looked at me quizzically and carefully responded that it was an eerily brilliant plan that could have the potential of going very, very wrong. 

By the time I had gotten back to our house in Utah I had run through all the scenarios from worst case to best case in my head and was prepared to take my decision to prayer. Not surprisingly I received a confirmation and with renewed hope I began to plan the trip. By August 2021 we landed in Colombia where I felt prompted to find an apartment in Barranquilla. That first Sunday we found our assigned ward to the AirBnb we were staying in and went to church like normal in any new place we'd been. Before the end of that day, I had leads on both schools and housing. And by the end of the week, we had met with the Dean of 3 International private schools who was thrilled to have not only my son attending a High School but also my daughter teaching English at one of the elementary schools. We moved into an apartment the following week and they both started school. During my son's third week at his school he described a moment where it was like a switch went off in his head and suddenly he was remembering both his Spanish and Algebra. We stayed our 90 day Visa and felt compelled to head for Idaho. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was trying hard not to hope that it was time to finally go home to Wyoming. We landed in Idaho Falls, Idaho in November 2021.

I can hardly believe how far we've come as individuals and as a family over these last 6 years. Twice in one year it was the first time as a parent that I had no plan and nowhere to go. First, after the divorce and second, after the accident. And after the accident it was the first time in a very long time that I listened to a feeling, a calling, and then acted upon it without enough answers to my questions to make any sense at all. The only goal I had was to heal my son. I had been told he had only a 20% chance to be as he had been before, that intelligent, funny, delightful boy back again from the shell of the child I barely knew before me. And if I ever did get him back it would take 2-4 years. This child didn't know who or where or how he was half the time and every daily seizure robbed me a little bit more of the boy I once knew. That journey turned into so much more. I didn't know then how broken we all were. I didn't know that he was simply a mirror of what had happened inside of each one of us. I didn't know it the same way he didn't realize who he had become nor did he remember who he once was. We were all that way, each enshrouded in our own cloud of misery and degrading pain. Then one day 1.5 years into our journey that beautiful boy annoyed me so badly that I dismissed him from the dining table so I could eat in some semblance of peace and with the ability to drown in my own thoughts once again. As he walked away disappointed, I realized with tears threatening to wet my cheeks that he was back. I finally had my boy back! That precocious, annoying, funny, chatterbox of a little man was back. And we were all back. Not a single one of us was the same as we once were but we are all whole once again. Put back differently but better. Put back stronger, wiser, happier, and healthier. The scars inside a reminder of every painful cut. But also, of every healing stitch that brought us closer. Every stitch that bound each of us back to something stronger and wiser than what we were ever before. That taught us how to feed our souls, turn back to our Creator, and share in our own personal and divine love with each other and with others. Every new day was brighter. Every holiday is sparkling and new, no longer tainted with the pain of better memories.  Like a new book with no words and clean white pages waiting, begging to be written upon. 

Four and a half years later and exactly ten years to the day that we originally found our Gilead in Star Valley, Wyoming and subsequently made it our home, we moved back in January 2022. My youngest son is nearly 100% recovered and spent the last 6 months of his Senior year in the High School that his brother and sister loved and with his class of friends from Middle School. He worked diligently to find where he was behind and worked hard to catch up to his peers in preparation for attending college. He graduated with his class but with a homeschool HS diploma that he earned every bit as much as any of his peers in public school these last 4 years. He and my daughter both submitted their applications on November 29th, 2022 to serve as unpaid volunteer missionaries for 2 years for our church to begin in early 2023. And I was able to fulfill a lifelong dream of writing a book and have several more in the works. I plan to continue writing and traveling and exploring the world and it's peoples, cultures, and languages with the intent of sharing what has changed us, faith, love, determination, and hope.

Our story is about renewal and redemption from pain, anxiety, depression, illness, heartache, abandonment, injury and loss. We hope that our story will inspire you to live better, dream bigger, turn your heart and lives over to our creator, and adventure life more!