‘Please Don’t Let Them Die’

March 10th, 2018 should’ve been a typical spring Saturday for me. When I woke up that morning, nothing could prepare me for how my life was about to change.

I worked 6 days a week as a single mom back then, Monday through Saturday, at my own little salon, situated on the northeast end of town. My two girls were old enough at this point to be pretty self sufficient. Devon, my 19 year old and oldest kid, had just gotten her gall bladder removed a few days earlier and was getting stir crazy from being home, recovering. Peyton, who had just turned 16 less than two months earlier, was still a newly licensed driver. I left for my salon early that Saturday morning while both girls were still sleeping. The girls had mentioned the day before that they might get out of the house that day, and the weather was finally nice enough to encourage everyone to do just that.

Work was particularly interesting that day. My 10:00 appointment was with a woman named Lisa, and during Lisa’s appointment, her and I discussed some of our deepest fears. I actually became teary eyed and told Lisa that my biggest fear was that my kids would both end up in a bad car accident. It was an uncharacteristically emotionally expressive moment for me.

My 2:00 appointment, Wendy, had been a long term client and dear friend of mine for some time. When Wendy came in that day, she kept saying she just felt weird. She even almost cancelled her appointment (which would’ve been highly unusual for her) she said, because she felt so off that day.

As I was blow drying Wendy’s hair, my cell phone rang. Under most circumstances, my cell phone ringer is on vibrate. Nearly ALL the time. This particular day, I had my ringer on because my grandma was in the hospital and not doing well, and I wanted my father to be able to get a hold of me if he needed to. I grabbed my phone and saw that it was Peyton. I answered, figuring she just needed something quick.

“Yes?” I answered.

“Mom? Mom, please don’t be mad. We got into an accident.” Peyton’s voice sounded strange, and in hindsight, she was in shock and I wasn’t understanding the severity of the situation.

“Are you ok?” I asked her, trying not to panic.

“Mom, I’m sorry, she just hit us, and now there’s smoke in the car and I can’t open the door!”

I remember this next feeling very clearly- you know that old saying “my blood ran cold?” I now know exactly how that actually feels.

From that point on, I only remember a blur, punctuated by bits and pieces of memory. I remember leaving my shop in a daze as I heard sirens getting closer. I was driving in my car, behind one of the ambulances. I realized at some point that I had no idea where my girls were, and I was just following the ambulance hoping it would lead me to them. I was on highway 14, an infamous stretch of road that runs along a sharp curve at 55 mph. I remember saying over and over, “please don’t let it be on this road, please”. I’d never heard of anyone surviving a crash on highway 14 on the curve. As I approached the last set of stoplights before the curve on this highway, I saw the sheriff standing there, directing traffic. Just beyond him, at the bend of highway 14, I saw my 16 year old daughter’s car, smashed in the front end and smoking. There was a fire truck, an ambulance and emergency personnel everywhere. Without even thinking, I drove around the sheriff in the intersection and into a parking lot that was across from the accident, where the ambulance was. I slammed my car into park, opened my car door and ran as fast I could towards the ambulance. As I got closer, I could see Peyton, pacing at the back of the ambulance. I felt a sense of relief that I could see Peyton was at least up and walking, followed by an immediate sense of dread. Devon was in the ambulance...and she had just had her gall bladder removed less than 3 days prior. As I finally got to the ambulance, I could see Devon’s feet, without shoes, and her feet looked purple. (To this day, I don’t know if that was real or not. I don’t know if it was shock playing tricks on my eyes, or if her feet were really that color...) Her face was completely pale, almost blue. She was conscious, with a paramedic on each side of her. I was out of breath from sprinting the quarter mile from where I parked my car, and all I could manage to say was “She just had surgery, she just had her gall bladder out!!!” Devon was having a really hard time breathing and kept trying to tell us that her back hurt.

Peyton was still pacing, and was in full shock. 16 years old, just got her license, and now worried her sister is going to die because of a car accident in which she was driving. If all of this wasn’t traumatizing enough, Peyton’s father died in a fiery car wreck in 2006 when Peyton was 4 and Devon was 8. I don’t think any of us will fully understand the trauma that this day (and one woman’s impulsive decision to pull out on a highway, hitting my daughter’s car head on) put my kids through.

At the hospital, we spent an excruciating 2 hours waiting while my girls were each poked, scanned and examined for injuries. Peyton was fortunate when it came to physical injuries- she didn’t break any bones and her internal organs were healthy. It was already clear though, that the mental trauma for Peyton was significant, to say the least. Peyton had severe whiplash (the impact of the crash was estimated to be at 80 mph, even though my daughter was driving 5 miles under the speed limit that day), and bumps and bruises all over.

Devon wasn’t as fortunate with the physical injuries. She broke her back and her foot, and was one bone away from breaking her neck. Her internal organs were somehow fine. Thank you, Universe.

But for about 90 minutes, I wasn’t sure if both of my girls would be ok ever again.

My daughters are the most important aspect of my life. It’s always been the 3 of us, no matter what.

Something in me changed that day, in that 90 minutes. All the mundane things that I thought were so important in life...suddenly, they weren’t even on my radar. My salon and my reputation for being a great hair stylist that I worked so hard to build...suddenly didn’t matter. As Devon and Peyton both laid in their separate hospital beds that day, they each said some things...some truths...that needed to be said. They both told me that since I had started ADHD meds, I had become angry. I had been diagnosed with ADHD a couple years prior to the accident, and had been on a stimulant for about a year up until this point. Even though the meds were helping with my ADHD symptoms, they were also causing me to become emotionally more disconnected and I didn’t have the perspective to see this. I also had been abusing opiates as a coping mechanism because of the long hours I was working. I was overworked and unhappy and I had no idea what to do about it. I was working 60+ a week, I was addicted to pills and I was broke. In a lot of ways, I was kind of dying inside, emotionally and spiritually asleep at life’s wheel.

But March 10th, 2018, all that changed. I woke up.

Besides realizing that the pills needed to stop, I also realized that doing hair had lost its sense of purpose for me. For nearly 20 years, I had loved being a hair stylist. It was a huge part of my identity, that’s how my entire community knew me: Angie the Hair Stylist. But I realized the day of the accident that I wanted to do MORE. I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. The whole reason I had enjoyed doing hair so much wasn’t just the creative outlet that it provided me; it was really the ability to talk with someone for a couple hours about their life, and inspire them to do more, and BE more...it was those things that I loved the most about being a hair stylist. I loved that when someone came into my salon, they would often talk about how they looked forward to their “Angie time”, that coming to see me was regarded as therapy (or “hairapy” as we would later affectionately call it). I decided to further pursue that which makes me feel a greater sense of purpose. So on that day, while my kids both laid in the hospital, I decided to retire from the only career I’ve ever known and become a life coach.

I didn’t do it overnight. I found a school for life coaching that I could do online while still doing hair and helping my girls recover. I enrolled and began school at the Southwest Institute for the Healing Arts on January 7th, 2019. Little did I know, but enrolling in that program was also, in a way, enrolling in the school of my own enlightenment. Through classes designed to teach how to guide and inspire others towards healing and joy, I found myself on my own journey of self discovery and healing. I faced my family’s ancestral history of sexual trauma and abuse, along with mental health issues and substance addictions. I took the major steps towards forgiveness and compassion, first for myself...then for the people who made decisions that ended somehow causing me to experience pain. With every step towards my own joy, my own truth, I’ve felt lighter and more free than I’ve ever felt before. It started to become clearer that I wanted to help others do exactly what I had just done: discover their identity, their purpose and their joy.

Part of living out my own truth was moving to where it felt like home, which happened to be 1100 miles away from where I grew up. In July of 2019, I packed up my kids and my cats, and we headed out west. We ended up in Colorado Springs, where I started my coaching business out of my little apartment. I knew when I started that I wanted to make sure that my services were affordable for everyone, and easy to understand how the process works. I chose very early on to do some kind of membership service for people who wanted consistent coaching appointments every week or every month. I had one or two clients the first few months, then word started to spread. I am now at max capacity with 31 clients. Every day, I get to help people heal deep seated personal issues and see their lives and the people in them from a different perspective. I feel like I have one of the most rewarding jobs in the world.

But I want to do MORE. I want to help more people.

I know I can do that, and having a membership platform like Memberful can help make this dream a reality. I want to be able to conduct large scale presentations and reach lots of clients at once. I want to create a space for people to feel appreciated, heard and accepted as they walk on their own personal path.

I want to be able to be there when the next worn out single mom is brought to her proverbial knees. Using Memberful in conjunction with a platform like Discord, I can create content for my clients that can be useful for them whether I am personally available or not. This would allow me take on more clients, meaning I can help more people. At the same time, I can generate more revenue for myself and my family, which further enables all of us to be able to do what we need to do in order to be the positively contributing members of society that we are and strive to continue to be.

My daughters are doing well, considering their circumstances. Peyton still deals with deeply intense psychological trauma, and Devon is still dealing with daily pain and a number of other physical issues as a result of the accident. They both continue to be my biggest sources of inspiration. They are stronger (and wiser!) than most ‘mature’ adults I know, and I don’t know know how I could be any more proud of each of them.