by Tiffany

I was born on Labor Day, September 6th, 1977 in Salt Lake City Utah. Mom and dad chose the name Tiffany because grandma Flo said it was beautiful and classy just like the Tiffany jewelry store in New York. Only through my struggles, mistakes, and influences during my past have I polished up like a jewel from Tiffany’s.

I was born on Labor Day, September 6th, 1977 in Salt Lake City Utah. Mom and dad chose the name Tiffany because grandma Flo said it was beautiful and classy just like the Tiffany jewelry store in New York. Only through my struggles, mistakes, and influences during my past have I polished up like a jewel from Tiffany’s.

I was the average baby weighing six and a half pounds and stretching nineteen inches long. I didn’t like to take the breast and I wouldn’t take a binky. I had to drink goat’s milk due to having colic. I started walking at the age of ten months and was potty trained too, so mom says, but I didn’t have a full set hair until two years of age. Mom was the oldest of six so being the first grandchild and niece I received a lot of attention.

From birth to about age six my mother stayed home and my father worked. Dad owned a hair salon with his brother and then a tanning salon but throughout the years both businesses went out of business. We lived in a small two bedroom blue house that was centered in the middle of an upper class neighborhood. I guess you could say that we were the poorest family compared to our neighbors. Although our house was the smallest in the neighborhood it was by far the house with the most character. I think about the little blue house on Berkley Street with the two big pine trees in the front yard consistently. After all eleven years is a long time and I had a deep relationship with that house. We use to drive by it for years after we had moved out until it was torn down and replaced by a huge new house. Even the pine trees were demolished. I wouldn’t mind walking on the pine needles on the front lawn if we still had that house.

When I was four years old my little sister Brittany was born. I was so excited to have a sister and a friend to play with. I remember this time of my life vividly. I was told that I needed to stay the night at my grandma’s house because mom was going to the hospital. I remember the next day when they came to pick me up at my grandmas with the new baby. My dad bought me a fisher price record player and the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas record. It was two days after Christmas. I wanted to help with the new baby so bad that one day I tried to change her diaper and made a huge mess.

Starting school was exciting but I was very scared. My mom walked me to school every morning and picked me up with my little sister in the stroller. We lived pretty close to the school which was located in the center of the neighborhood. I will never forget my kindergarten teacher who was to this day the most influential. We hatched chicken eggs in the spring and always had some fun project going on. I declared that I wanted to be a nurse in this class. I had such a great imagination in elementary school but I was also very shy and timid.

Mom always had something good cooking in the kitchen and dad was always outside working in the yard. I can still smell the fresh cut grass and the barbecued spare ribs that my dad would cook on the grill. At night before bedtime my dad and I would go out in the backyard and lie down on the grass and stargaze. Mom and dad were pretty social and had friends over on the weekends. We weren’t very religious but went to church because mom wanted us to be accepted by our neighbors.

At around age seven or eight my mom had to start working and things started getting a little shaky at home. Mom and dad started fighting and eventually got divorced. I remember the exact day when my dad left. I think this was the first traumatic event in my life where things started becoming unbalanced and inconsistent. My dad shared an apartment with his friend Duane and on the weekends my sister and I would go visit. My dad and his friend smoked and drank a lot and had parties and woman over. I remember playing waitress and taking drink orders from my dad’s friends. I loved the smell of the smoke and tried puffing on one of the butts one time. In the morning my sister and I would walk to the store on the corner and buy doughnuts and milk and then come back to make my dad and his roommate breakfast in bed.

When I was ten my dad got sick with Cardio Myopathy and was put on a list for a new heart. He carried a beeper around and every time it went off we had to rush to the hospital to see if he was a match for the heart. It was scary every time we were called because of the severity of the operation and not knowing if this would be the last time we would see him. During this time my mom and dad decided to remarry which was very exciting because our family was together again. Not too long after I received great news that I was going to have another sister.

I was almost twelve and in sixth grade when my dad had his heart transplant and remarkably two weeks later my youngest sister Madelyn was born. We were all present for the birth, my dad who now had the name of Bob New heart, grandma, my sister Brittany, and me. It was quite a shock for my sister and I to see such a thing as a delivery. I remember my dad and how weak he was but he still had such a great humor and was showing off his three foot long scar to the staff at the hospital.

It was April when my little sister was born and six weeks later mom had to go back to work and leave us home with the baby. The next six months were filled with a lot of responsibility for me and I was also starting puberty. Mom had to travel for her job and was gone for about one week per month. Dad’s heart kept rejecting his body and he became a regular at the hospital. So much happened in such a short time frame that I can’t remember clearly.

Six months later my mom bought our first home just a few blocks away from where I lived for the past twelve years of my life. It was so nice to finally have my own room and not have to share with my other two sisters. It was so exciting to have more room but I missed our little blue house. At the same time I was transitioning into a new school and becoming a young woman.

Junior High was pretty difficult for me. Life at home didn’t make it any easier and I started failing classes and becoming depressed. I kept taking care of my baby sister and the middle sister and my sick dad. His heart kept rejecting his body and during one of his hospital stays they gave him a blood transfusion by which he contacted Hepatitis B. Now he was on the list for a liver transplant. My mom did the best she could by working and making sure bills were paid and putting food on the table. The make a wish foundation gave us a Disneyland trip because my dad was so sick. I already had a fond memory of Disneyland from when mom and dad took me for my fourth birthday. This time was not so great because while we were on the trip my dad’s liver shut down and he had to stay there in the hospital. Amazingly a few months later my dad received a liver transplant and finally was home again.

I turned fourteen in the beginning of ninth grade. I had a couple of best friends from 7th and 8th grade but High School was such a huge change that my friends weren’t the same anymore. Everyone was changing and doing different things. My friends started to hang out with older teens who liked to party and I tagged along. I never considered myself to be popular or pretty but my best friend was and I looked up to her and was very envious of her. One night we went to some party and I got drunk for the first time. I wanted to be away from my house as much as possible. My dad was getting sicker and now had a horrible brain disease called P.M.L. He was dying and there was nothing we could do. It was so unbearable for me to watch him suffer for six months. He had really bad headaches at first but then had symptoms like someone with Alzheimer’s disease. He went blind and at six foot two weighed only eighty five pounds. The hospital knew him very well and let him live the last two months of his life in the presidential sweet. During his suffering I started smoking drinking and cutting and had a suicide attempt. I really wanted to die with him. They put me in a treatment facility for three months and had me take medication. I had one phone call per night and used it to call my sick dad in the hospital. He would make me laugh when I talked to him but he started not making sense and sometimes sang Elvis songs to me. I was over medicated and under treated and when my insurance ran out they made me leave. The facility was later sewed and shut down for some kind of malpractice. I was then transferred to a children’s hospital that was right next to where my dad was. Sometimes the staff would walk me across the bridge to visit him but they never came in to his room with me because it was too hard for them to see him in such a state. Days after I was discharged my dad passed away.

I believe this time of my life was the beginning of many problems I was to endure later in life. I think the reason for this is that things were good then unstable then good and it was always a letdown. This was the time when so many traumatic experiences in such a short amount of time and at such a critical age that I truly didn’t know how to process them.

My first full time job was at a Nursing Home. I had never been in one before and didn’t even know what one was but I really needed a job. I will never forget how quickly they hired me and how hard those first days were. I wanted to take care of people just as I cared for my dad. The experiences I had with my dad gave me the strength to help others in the same way. It was emotionally draining for me but rewarding at the same time. I worked so hard at $5.50 an hour with the promise of certified training and more money. After a year they had not fulfilled their promises to me and so I gave them my two week notice and got hired at another nursing home.

I continued to have a hard time but things got a little better when I met my high school sweetheart. I met him in my history class and we became very close. I started working at the training table after school and he also had a job. After we graduated high school I move in to his mom’s house in Sandy. It was very different living there but I felt very welcome by his family. My boyfriend and I still drank a lot and partied but we were also very much in love.

I was almost 20 when I got pregnant with my daughter. My love from high school was the father and we were married four months later. I had quit smoking and drinking and was working full time as a Certified Nurse Assistant throughout my whole pregnancy. We lived with my mom for a few months and then moved into our own apartment. We were newlyweds and soon to be parents at the young age of 21. That July my daughter Dominigue was born after 36 hours of labor and an emergency c-section. She was almost nine pounds and twenty one inches long. I felt like I had finally found my place when I became a mother. After six weeks I went back to work and my husband took care of our daughter during the day.

When I got home from work my husband went to work. He had a hard time with keeping a job and started getting a temper. I loved being a mom and a wife and the more responsible I became my husband became less.

I left my husband after two years of being married, filed for divorce and got my own little apartment by my mom’s house. It was very hard to do this on my own but I think having so much responsibility at a young age prepared me for this.

The next six years were great years. I moved up from a Certified Nurse Assistant to working

in Human Resources and was making more money. I moved up again as the Staffing

Coordinator and was very good at my job. I had a nice little condo and was dating a very sweet man. My daughter went to a preschool that was affiliated with my work and I started college. I

was very popular at work and was feeling overwhelmed with the pressures. I decided to quit after nine years and work as a C.N.A in Hospice which is end of life care. Little did I know that this would bring back very painful

memories of my dad.

I decided that working for hospice had become damaging to my emotional wellbeing so I accepted an offer as a Psych Tech in a Psychiatric hospital. I loved this job and during the two years I worked there I made friends and planned a wedding with the sweet man I had been dating. The man I was going to marry was from another country and we struggled with cultural differences and with my previous divorce. One day he called me from the airport and told me that he was going back to his country for good. This broke my heart badly and it seemed that every bad memory of things going bad had come to the surface. I became severely depressed and started drinking and smoking again. I was good with my dying patients, good with my daughter, but not so good alone and with myself. My life became unrealistic and I was becoming a very unhappy person whom I didn’t know.

I loved my daughter very much and tried to be a good mom but something was eating at me inside and before long it had consumed me. My daughter went with her dad every other weekend and every time she left I was lost and alone. Being alone was hard for me so I would drink to feel better but it only made things worse. One weekend when my daughter was with her dad I was drinking and decided that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I thought life would be better for my family and my daughter if I was gone. I overdosed on over 200 pills and as I started getting really sick and scared so I called 911. I woke up three days later in ICU with the pains of tubes down my throat and unable to speak. This was an experience that I never want to relive. After almost succeeding with a suicide and realizing how much I was hurting my family and especially my daughter I knew I needed to change and I knew I wanted to really live. I signed into treatment just after being released from the hospital and stayed in a facility for two months and then voluntarily entered an outpatient treatment program for about a year and a half.

I have taken my daughter to Disneyland three times to share the experience with her that I

shared with my dad.

I know that what I have been through has given me the great gift of compassion towards the elderly and I know that without that I wouldn’t have been able to change the lives of many people. I am also a very strong and responsible person and a good mother. I currently take care of a retired Pediatrician who is in her 90’s with Alzheimer’s dementia and I’m back at school to finish my generals and then plan to work towards something in Psychology. I volunteer at my daughter’s junior high when I can and also help with my grandpa who has Alzheimer’s. I know that the experiences and struggles I had in the past have made me who I am today. It took me a long time to figure this out but I am so grateful and so proud of who I have become that I wouldn’t change a thing.