1.  Introduction
On a stormy spring day in May of 1969, was a first-born daughter to a couple who lived in the small town of Kiel, Wisconsin. My dad has always teased me since I could talk that he and my mom should have named me “Stormy,” sometimes I think he was right. I grew up as the oldest of three children. After me came my sister who has always been the complete opposite of me and then came my brother. My brother and I often thought the same way and usually felt the same way about certain things. As kids, we made decisions based on more of a feeling than a mathematical equation. Spring is always my favorite time of year, as I child I loved to run barefoot in the backyard among the trees. I went to church most Sunday mornings with my family. It became more of a family reunion sometimes because usually all my aunts, uncles, and cousins were sitting in the pews behind us. After church on Sundays, my dad used to take us for ice cream; it became my favorite treat and my favorite day of the week.
As I became a teenager, I remember the feeling of getting roses from my boyfriend for the very first time. The beautiful aroma of the rose lingered in my mom’s kitchen for days. Upon a deep inhale, the scent could begin to fill up my senses as if touched the insides of my body. I remember hoping that the floral scent would not fade but soon after, it always did. Something about getting a rose makes a young girl feel like you are the only one special enough to receive a little piece of heaven, created just for you on that day. When I get a rose, I try not to compare myself, but often feel inadequate. Back then, it took away the mere thought of even thinking about how much less valuable I may be from other girls. A token to apologize during a lover’s quarrel or spat; on occasion some have often use them to cover their own mistakes. We also tend to send them on Valentine’s Day or Anniversaries. Yet you often see them at funerals. Why is it that a single rose often laid in the casket, is a token of one’s love
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before a body is laid to rest into the ground. Women view roses differently during each cycle of our lives, so my life story is easier to understand, according to my favorite flower: the rose.
The Rose
As young girls, we grow from the soil that our parents have enriched us in. Our roots sink deep into the ground as we attend church, school, and social events. Then as we reach adolescence, little girls become young women. I refer to them as rose buds as our inner and outer beauty begin to develop both at the same time and yet we haven’t reach our fullest potential. Roses have been part of my life since I was sixteen years old when my high school sweetheart sent them to me when we began dating. They were always a pretty pale-pink, usually about six at a time. About this time in my life, I noticed I began to change by the situations going on around me. My life was very active while in my high school years. Where I had always listened to my parent’s in the past, I was not so sure they were right about everything anymore. The age of adolescence was upon me. Research often indicates how important it is to adolescents to have good role models and persistent parental monitoring. (Kim, 2008) However, I knew my own mother had so much going on in her own life that she was not interested in my emotional turmoil as I began making very adult-like decisions about my own body. I remember often yelling back at my mom in frustration because I felt she never understood me. Then I would even usually look for things to do just to defy her on purpose. How dare she be right about anything? I felt as if she really did not know anything about what life was really about.
About this time in my life, it became obvious to me that she was facing some huge emotional struggles of her own. She spent lots of time in her bedroom alone and fought with my dad a little more often than usual when I was littler. Mom was a nursing assistant the county nursing home and seemed to enjoy what she did for a living. She would go into work late at night after the three us children were sleeping. My father came home about two hours later from the factory so we were never home very long by ourselves. My mom slept while we were in school part of the day and then got up to help get my dad off to work by mid-afternoon about the time we would be coming home from school. After supper, she would then slip back into her bedroom to catch a short nap. Quite often, I was in charge of my sister and brother for
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a few hours. I remember her looking sad all the time. Maybe I should have cared more about why she was sad, instead of concentrating on my own selfish teenage egocentric needs (Craig, 2006). I thought she was an adult, she knew more than I did and adults usually took care of themselves. I was wrong.
One day, while I was at school, I remember hearing my name announced over the loud speaker to come into the school office for a family emergency. A few of the details are a bit foggy but I remember my dad picked me up that day in our family car and my mom was laying with her head tilted back in the passenger seat faintly murmuring in words I couldn’t understand. After I got inside the car, my dad began to explain to me that my mom had taken a bunch of sleeping pills. He also said he needed my help to keep her awake on the trip to the hospital, which was about forty-five minutes away. I guess it did not even occur to me at the time that my mother was feeling so miserable and desperate about her life that she felt she needed to find her own escape plan so I did not panic. On the trip, I remember her talking incoherently bits and sentences mixed with a little bit of laughter. During the drive to the hospital it seemed to take forever and all I could think about was; did I talk back one too many times, did I do something to make her feel so desperate, was it me that pushed her over the edge. Although I wondered, I never said anything because back then I was mostly shy and a bit of an introvert.
I finally remember getting to the emergency room and hearing the nurse talk about charcoal and seeing the black residue left around the outside of her mouth as she tried to force it down her throat. They treated her like a child and I was not sure how I felt about the way that the whole process just seemed to degrade everything that my mother was to me. My mother is one of the most harmless people you will ever meet. My mother’s life when she was a child was quite different from mine. It was much more difficult to grow up feeling torn between living with her biological mother and a foster care home.
Transformation
A period of maximum development is the meaning of the word blossomed. When a flower has reached its maximum state of development and has spread every petal as wide as it
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possibly can, it has reached its peak in its growth stage. (blossom. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.) As women age, I ask myself at what stage or life event is it when girls finally reach the point where every petal has been opened to its maximum point and reached its fullest potential. Is it when we graduate from high school, experience our first sexual relationship, get married, have a child, or reach our fortieth birthday? By looking it up in a dictionary, you will never find the word “unblossomed”, in fact most spell checks will tell you that you need to use the word “embossed” which has little to do with my point. When using “un-“ in front of any word it is meant to imply the opposite force of the word that it follows. However, as a writer, my own definition of the word unblossomed is simply this: it is the start of a journey that begins when God creates a baby girl; a state of waiting for all of the expected and unexpected things that can happen to every little girl, before they enter the final stage of puberty. This can result in a constant state of expecting, transforming, positioning, and awakenings that continue throughout the life of a woman.
Blossomed
A few years after high school, I find myself still waiting for my high school sweetheart to return from the military as I worked and went to school simultaneously. As arguments with my parents continued and my independence seemed stifled, I ventured into my own apartment (Craig, 2006). A small, one-bedroom efficiency was a sign I had reached young adulthood. I hated being alone at night but during the day I usually felt proud of myself for obtaining survival and independence. Looking back, I wish I could have stayed at home for a few more years instead of trying to be so adventurous. I worked at a home for emotionally challenged children who had past histories of abuse and abandonment. The kids were great to work with but some of the night shifts seemed to drag on for a long time.
A few years later, my dream came true as I began to plan my wedding with my high school sweetheart. Then the day arrived that most girls can only dream about, her wedding day. At my father’s side, I clung to his arm thinking and hoping I wasn’t making a mistake. It was a beautiful day with so many pale pink roses surrounding the altar and arch inside the atrium of a fancy hotel. Roses everywhere, I could smell them and see them, I was even holding them in my hand. It almost made me panic as my dad patted my hand and then he told
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me to “just relax.” I took yet another deep breath then took my first step up the aisle during the wedding march orchestrated by a string quartet.
Just four months later I found out I was going to be a mother and spent 9 months waiting the birth of my daughter. My life had changed so much. The struggles I had faced as a new mother were multiple and a bit trying on a new marriage, so much so my high school sweetheart and I divorced 4 years later. I didn’t enjoy being a single mom either. I soon went back to living with my parents for a few months for emotional and financial support. My parents were wonderful as they began to help me put my life back together. My first-born daughter and I became even closer as we relied on each other as a family unit. This wasn’t the life I had planned for me or for my daughter. At this point, I remember thinking, had I really made a plan for my life at all? I maintained my job as a unit clerk at the hospital during the evenings and took care of my daughter during the day. While working at the hospital, I acquired the friendship of a security guard who frequently made visits to the emergency room where I was working. Little by little, my heart would be pieced back together again. I had felt so ashamed of my life and the person I had become it was sometimes even hard to look at myself in a mirror.
Just a year later, I married that security guard who is a Police Officer in Shawano, Wisconsin. The two of us share another daughter who just turned nine years old this year. I finally finished my bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice in the winter of 2006 after being battling the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis earlier that year. After some of my symptoms finally subsided, I began working as a Child Protection worker for our county. Since I had always wanted to be a social worker this job was quite fascinating to me. Although I excelled in this position, the punitive side of the system which resulted in taking little children away from their parents proved to be an often difficult task for me. Our marriage has not been without its difficulties as my husband and I weather the multiple stages of raising children together. Managing our careers, our children, finances, and our own individual needs gets to be rather difficult at times. Just when you think you absolutely cannot handle life any more, another thorn appears, trying to tear things apart again. What is this time is that both, my husband and
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I understand that we don’t have to let that thorn tear our family apart, we have choices to make changes.
Losing the Petals
As life takes its course, it became clear to my physician that due to my illness I was never going to have enough energy to be able to last in the field of child protection. Though I wasn’t in complete agreement with him, I followed his advice and resigned from my position. Applying for a disability was not in my career plan. Although, I enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom, I began to feel lost and frustrated to the point where I had exhausted myself physically. In August of 2008, I suffered another MS relapse and endured several long days of hospitalization at the Bellin Rehabilitation Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin. When I think about the events leading up to my hospitalization, it was so much more than just about another relapse. It was about becoming stretched beyond the limit; emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally. It caused a total crash of my entire central nervous system. I had lost the use of my legs for the second time in two years but remained very angry for having to give up my career. Most women do not begin their own paths of self-reflection in a hospital, but I did. I began writing my autobiography while working on increasing my physical strength. While in that hospital bed I looked into the hearts of my own two daughters and I realized that part of my job, as their mother, is to give them all of the tools they will need for their own journey as women, maybe for all young women. I walked out of the hospital that summer, with increased physical and emotional strength.
A preoccupation with physical attractiveness, however, can make it difficult to move on to the psychological tasks of Middle Adulthood.” (Craig, 2006) It has been twenty years since I was teenage girl, but now as I see myself within the eyes of my own teenage daughter and I am stricken with the fear of not being able to protect them. I can remember being fifteen and all the rocky emotional up and downs (Kim, 2008). I knew back then that no one ever understood me and was angry that no one would even try. The feeling subsided as I matured but now that I am almost forty the feeling comes back to haunt me again. “No one understands me and why in the world doesn’t anyone want to take the time to try.” They didn’t care when I was fifteen and now that I am forty, wise and successful the rest of the world could still care less.” That
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feeling makes me fight harder everyday to keep my petals intact and my colors vibrant by coloring my hair or dressing with flair.
The life cycle process can be the hardest on a young woman. Hormonal imbalance wreaks havoc on our mind and our bodies as we go through developmental stages. As men and women, we both look at our lives and reassess our values very frequently. If we could write our own life scripts, we have the ability to decide how we want them to play. It is also equally important to understand how the plateaus and perceptions in critical life events can trigger a crisis for any one person. Writing your own story is an enlightening way to add perceptivity to your life. My mother went through her own life crisis, often not knowing which direction to turn. I am hoping to make that path easier, especially for adolescents by creating groups and programs that promote inner healing. Mark Twain once said: "There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is impossibility. Inside everyone, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy." I want to be there to make it happen for every young person starting out in this world.
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Bibliography
blossom. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blossom.
Craig, G. (2006). Understanding Human Development. Massachusettes: Prentice Hall.
Kim, C. (2008). Teen Sex: The Parent Factor. Backgrounder (2194), 1-10.