A Navajo love story from the American West

At first, for Janice, Damon* was a mutual friend with whom she met at an uncertain time in her life. She began with him, what she calls a “rebound relationship”. They were together for 16 years and married for 11 of them.

 

Janice was 21 years old and a mother of four children at the time when she met Damon. She had recently dropped out of college as she had become pregnant with her daughter, Amber at the age of 19. Janice grew up with her first four children. She had her first child, a son, at the age of 12. Her son was born a month before her thirteenth birthday.

 

Janice and Damon met in Farmington, New Mexico on Feb. 9, 2001, through one of her childhood friends who was dating a friend of his at the time.

 

“He just became one of my closest friends,” says Janice. “And then eventually, it turned into a relationship.” After four months, it became serious. Janice had become pregnant.

 

Damon proposed to her on Christmas Day, 2002 at his mother’s house. At the time, their first child, a daughter named Brianne, was three months old.

 

“Everybody was so happy for us and I just remembered that was probably the most, how do I say it, the most comforting time of my life, with him,” says Janice. “We were going to get married and have a family, we were going to have a home, you know the life that most people or most women want, that’s what I was going to have.”

 

The couple remained engaged for six years. During this time, they had two more children–Lena in 2004 and Mason in 2005. They married on July 7, 2007. Janice was 27 years old.

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The couple held a traditional Navajo wedding in Pueblo Pintado, New Mexico on a property belonging to Janice’s father on the Navajo Nation reservation to tie the knot. They had gathered their relatives for the grand occasion.

 

“Then life kind of took off from there,” says Janice. “Navajo way is more like ‘what I say goes’ kind of thing. And what he says went. And that’s how it was like for a while.”

 

Janice and Damon hardly argued during this period. Damon was an ironworker and he would often have to travel for work. Since the time Janice became pregnant with the couple's second child, she would travel with Damon for work. Damon’s boss liked him and provided the family with hotel rooms wherever they had to go, for long periods of time, according to Janice. They would stay in hotel rooms for two months at a time.

​

“I laid down and he laid down beside me. I felt like

he was going to kiss me. I closed my eyes and I remember

his fist hit me so hard. He started to use his elbow too.”

- Janice

​

When Janice became pregnant with their third child, Mason, she decided that she needed to settle down for the children. She told Damon that she will not be joining him on the road anymore as Brianne also had to start school.

 

“He said OK, and he left by himself and that is kinda where the arguments started,” says Janice. “The fighting over the phone and hanging up on each other.”

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Packed him up and got him ready for work

On Monday, Nov. 14, 2016, it was a normal day at home for Janice.

 

The night before, Janice had packed Damon off for work. Damon had left home Sunday night because he had to be in Hobbs, New Mexico for work in the morning. It was a nine-hour drive from Red Mesa, Utah, where Janice and Damon lived.

 

Red Mesa is a small town, its population as of July 2007 is 4,000 of which 97.6 per cent are American Indians according to a city data site of the U.S.

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“I remember not wanting him to go to work, I remember telling him that you should just stay here and then at the same time, I thought he needs to go to work because the next week will be Thanksgiving,” says Janice. “And we won’t have money, and we would be here like sitting ducks.”

 

Her daughter Ana had just left for San Diego, California to be with her husband who was training to be a U.S. marine. Ana was staying with Janice and Damon as she was pregnant with her first child. Janice had dropped Ana off at the airport a couple of days earlier so Ana had left her car, a 2015 Dodge Durango as she was coming back for Thanksgiving.

 

The next morning, Damon’s co-worker called at their home. He told Janice that Damon had not picked him up for work as that was the routine. He was asking about his whereabouts and Janice told him that she didn’t know and that he had already left last night.

​

With the update on Damon on the back of her mind, Janice went about her morning business, feeding her three sons a breakfast of eggs and toast and loading up the washer with laundry when she heard the back door open, which Janice says was unusual as no one used the back door to enter the house at that time of day.

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Janice walked down the hallway towards the back door to see who it was but to her surprise it was Damon. Janice says Damon seemed out of breath and he looked as if “something was worrying him”. Janice asked him what was the matter and why he hadn't picked up his co-worker for work but Damon ignored her concerns and straight away asked her where her cell phone was, she told him it was on top of the TV. He walked over to the TV, picked up her cell phone and started looking through it. Janice says that Damon looking through her phone was usual however if Janice ever touched Damon’s cell phone he would always tell her sternly not to. 

​

After looking through Janice’s cell phone he suddenly grabbed her arm and insisted that they go into the bedroom to which Janice resisted as she thought that they were going to have sex but the children were home. She says she was uncomfortable with how Damon was acting and at the time told him that he was “crazy”.

​

Nonetheless, Damon got Janice into their bedroom. Once they were in there, Damon picked up a lilac shirt from the floor and told Janice to wear it. She resisted but eventually obliged. Janice says that afterward, Damon proceeded to lay her down on the bed and take off her pants.

​

“I laid down and he laid down beside me. I felt like he was going to kiss me,” says Janice. “I closed my eyes and I remember his fist hit me so hard. He started to use his elbow too.” 

 

Damon had pushed Janice on to the bed, putting the full force of his body weight on her. According to Janice, Damon stood six-foot-two and 280 pounds and she stood five-foot-four and 150 pounds at the time.

 

The torture started around 10:30 in the morning.

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The good wife

After hitting her, Damon held his cell phone up to Janice's face with a pornographic video on it and asked her if she was the woman in the video. The video only showed the woman’s genital area. Janice denied that the woman in the video was her and she says that Damon kept insisting that the woman was her because he knew “what she looked like down there”.

 

However, Janice says by that time she and her husband hadn’t had sex for at least six months, as being apart from each other for long periods of time got in the way.

 

With each denial of her husband’s accusations, she says that she would either be beaten or kicked. Janice says that he took her into the bathroom and tried to shove her face into the toilet bowl. Damon then proceeded to shave her hair off with a hair clipper.

 

The time by then was 12:30 noon. Two hours had already passed since they first got into the bedroom.

 

Janice tried to pick her hair off the bathroom floor. Janice cared deeply about her “Navajo hair” which she took care of with much pride and now they laid in front of her.

 

Damon had locked their three young sons out in the yard to play since he got home at 10 a.m. Janice says that she remembers looking out of her window and seeing her sons laughing and playing, she cried seeing her children out there in the November cold. She kept wondering how much longer she would have to take his abuse.

 

“He said he was going to kill me because he thought I was cheating on him because I was making porn,” says Janice. “I would never do something like that, it was always in my thought what my mom taught me, ‘if you wanna be trashy, you will be treated like trash but you’re not trash’."

 

 Janice now believes that watching porn may have been a habit for Damon. Damon was also a drug user, according to Janice. She says that he used methamphetamine, cannabis and drank alcohol heavily but not in front of her and the children.

 

“A lot of changes started to happen around the time that he started working with his co-workers, his friends,” says Janice. “He would go out with them and he would come home very rarely but when he came home he would go straight to the casino.”

 

Janice says Damon was a serious gambler. Sometimes he would gamble his paycheques away. His paycheques averaged about $15,000 USD.

 

Janice says that Damon also comes from a family background of domestic violence, as his mother was abused by his father because she had cheated on him. Later on, Damon's parents divorced and his mother solely raised him along with his siblings.

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Today, Janice at the age of 40, has visible scars on her high cheekbones and on her chin. Janice says Damon had cut her face with a steak knife, the same one she had used that morning to cut her children’s toast with for their breakfasts. He had also tried cutting off her fingertips with the knife.

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Colonialism and its effect on Indigenous families

Colonialism interrupted a lack of hierarchy in Indigenous communities by introducing the heteropatriarchal system, according to a 2017 Canadian study titled Indigenous Communities and Family Violence. The study says that this has “resulted in harmful impacts on the health and wellbeing of Indigenous families and communities” and that colonization has contributed to systemic violence.

 

“The rule of colonialism is to divide and rule. Divide and conquer. And if you have a divided voice or a divided heart, you cannot be whole, you need to be able to find out that voice as a whole, and that is within yourself,” says M.C. Lois Provost, a story keeper and a myth teller based in New York City. 

 

Provost is Canadian and a member of the Metis nation and the Arawak indigenous group of the Caribbean. She focuses her research on healing Indigenous communities through the lens of the effects of colonization on these communities throughout generations.

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Provost says that colonization has created a division with the soul and body for Indigenous peoples because colonization has caused the communities and families to be cut and torn apart and become lost which is detrimental for Indigenous health. She calls this the “phantom limb-syndrome” as a result of the “colonial disease”.

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According to an Aboriginal Women and Family Violence report done by the Canadian government in 2009, the common characteristics in abuse perpetrators, who are mostly men, are substance abuse problems, domineering attitudes towards women and a lack of self-esteem as a result of intergenerational trauma from a direct or indirect experience with the residential school system which is a direct product of colonization and the oppressive effects of it are detrimental to the health of Indigenous communities weaving through generations of families in Canada and other colonized lands.

 

The U.S. equivalent to the Canadian residential school system was the Native American Boarding Schools system, also known as Indian Residential Schools, which lasted from 1860 to 1978. It was brought on by the Civilization Fund Act, which was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1819. Native children were taken from their reservations to be assimilated into the boarding school system. The creation of the Native American Boarding Schools was brought forth by the act as it was based on the idea that Native culture and language were to blame for what the American government deemed the "Indian problem."

 

The effects of enduring and surviving the Native American Boarding Schools system have been a cause of trauma for generations of Native families. With this historical context in mind, it is unfortunately not surprising that Native Americans have the highest rates of mental health disorders in the U.S. such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) according to a 2012 study published in The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

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"The rule of colonialism is to divide and rule. Divide and conquer.

And if you have a divided voice or a divided heart,

you cannot be whole, you need to be able to

find out that voice as a whole and that is within yourself.”

- M.C. Lois Provost, Metis & Arawak storyteller and scholar

​

In Canada, according to a 2014 family violence statistical profile, nine per cent of Indigenous women were victims of spousal abuse. In the U.S. nearly half of all Native American women, 46 per cent, have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner according to the Department of Justice .

 

Warmness engulfs the darkness

The torture lasted for about 12 hours from 10 a.m. in the morning to 9:30 p.m. at night.

​

About half-past noon, Damon started choking Janice with a hairdryer cord, during this time Janice blacked out.

 

“I just remember this very bright light, but not so bright where it hurts your eyes it was bright and it was the warmest feeling,” says Janice. “I remember seeing two shadows. I don’t know whose shadows they were but I just remember that there was two. I remember feeling scared, a little bit like ‘oh shit I better snap out’.” 

 

When she recalls the experience now, Janice thinks what if she did not gain consciousness?

 

She believes that she was determined to wake up because of her children. The warmness during her blackout was a reminder for her to come back.

 

Janice now believes that the two figures that she saw during her blackout were those of her eldest brother and her father who had passed on, in 2004 and 2010 respectively.

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Janice says that she came to with a deep breath and she immediately hugged her husband, her husband pushed her off of him and onto the bedroom floor. He then proceeded to whip her with the hairdryer cord.

 

“I remember seeing two shadows. I don’t know whose shadows

they were but I just remember that there was two. I remember feeling scared, 

a little bit like ‘oh shit I better snap out’.” 

- Janice

​

Now, close to 4 p.m. Janice’s son Mason started knocking on the door, so that he and his two brothers can be let inside. Damon let them back into the house but kept a watch on Janice.

​

When Mason told his father that he and his brothers were hungry, Damon told him to make Campbell’s soup. Mason prepared the soup and prepped his brothers for dinner. He was nine years of age and his brothers, Emmet and Riley were four and the latter, two.

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While the three small boys were eating, Damon decided to take Janice for a drive.

​

Janice says that Damon told her that he was going to take her to the river far into the edges of their Indian Country and drown her and he told her, “You’re going to die tonight.”

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Damon knew Janice couldn’t swim. Frightened for her life, Janice jumped out of the moving vehicle to escape Damon however he stopped the car and ran after Janice. He caught up to her and tripped her by kicking her on the legs.

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Damon picked Janice up and proceeded to carry her back to the car but not before he placed her down and proceeded to strip her of her clothes. Janice now no longer had the energy to fight back. Janice says she started to crawl away from Damon, so she could hide under the car just to get away from him. Janice says that Damon kicked her on her tailbone while she was down and grabbed her by her crotch and “twisted”.

​

She was crawling around on the ground for approximately 30 minutes. Janice can only describe this time as a life flashing before her eyes’ moment.

 

“I started to remember being a little girl. Remembering my older sister, my brother, when we all use to sit on the carpet, and I would walk between them, learning how to walk,” recalls Janice. “They were saying “baby ghal, baby ghal” which means baby’s walking, baby’s walking.”

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The escape

Janice pleaded with Damon for what felt like a lifetime. Eventually, he picked her up from the ground, put her in the car and took her back to their home where their three sons await them.

​

“Before we got home, he was talking to me and I was telling him ‘I won’t call the cops on you, I won’t call nobody, we will be okay’,” says Janice. “He was kissing me and telling me ‘I am sorry I did this to you, I love you…’”

 

Janice was bald in spots from where Damon shaved her hair off with the hair clippers and her clothing was ripped. When Janice and Damon arrived at the house, Mason was on the couch watching TV. When he saw his mother walk down the hallway to the living room where he was sitting, he audibly gasped seeing his mother in her dire state.  She told her son to be quiet. Janice was thinking. She was making a plan to escape with her sons.

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Janice waited for Damon to come in and be out of earshot.

​

“It hurts because I know this is happening to somebody,

to another woman and I can’t stop it, it’s not like I can just be there.” 

-Janice

​

“I ran back down the hallway to my sons, into the living room and I told my son Mason, go get help for me. Go to your Noni’s house,” says Janice.

 

Before Damon came out of the washroom, Mason was out the door and Janice went into her bedroom. Damon came into the bedroom as well, taking ibuprofen and hurling more obscenities at Janice and that is when the doorbell rang.

 

Damon’s mother and brother had arrived with Mason. Damon started confronting his family, telling them to get out because this was “his house and his business” says Janice.

 

In the midst of all the commotion, this was her chance to get out.

​

“While he was yelling at his mom and chasing them out of the house, I was collecting my sons and grabbing my daughter’s vehicle keys and I ran out the back door,” says Janice. “I ran around the entire house and I got into the vehicle and I locked the doors, and I told my little boys to stay down.”

 

Janice started the car at which moment, Damon realized that his wife and kids are no longer in the house. According to Janice, she was driving 96 km/h on a dirt road and her children were not strapped in. Her eyes were so bruised and swollen that she used one hand to pry her eye open as she drove with the other. She kept her watch on her rear-view mirror as Damon was now tailgating her.

 

As she drove with her fractured vision, she missed a turn and rolled over into a ravine completely ruining one side of the car. She heard Damon’s car coming to a halt behind her. Janice crawled out of the car as Damon came running. He first pulled his three sons out of the overturned vehicle then kicked Janice in the face and rushed back to his car with the three boys who fortunately got away with no injuries. Janice hobbled onto the road to flag down a few cars that were passing by at the moment. The car that finally stopped was her mother-in-law’s. Damon’s mother and brother took Janice to the hospital and admitted her into the emergency room.

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You are not man, you are monster

Janice was unrecognizable. Her mother, sister and her daughter Brianne were now by her side. Janice says that her daughter only recognized her from her smile from when she greeted them.

​

The next morning, on Tuesday, Nov.15, a probation officer and Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel came to visit her at the hospital. The FBI took photographs of every inch of her injured and bruised body for evidence. The doctors and the FBI told Janice and her family that her still bloodshot eyes indicated that she had blacked out from being choked. Janice says that the probation officer told her that Damon had tried to burn down their house and was on the run.

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The same day as the hospital visit, Janice left for a shelter with her three sons and her daughter Brianne. Brianne helped her mother take showers while at the shelter and also take care of her brothers. Her second youngest son, Emmet was so traumatized that he stopped speaking altogether, which later delayed his speech.

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“I was still breastfeeding him, he was scared of me. My son, Emmet, he was calling me monster,” recalls Janice. “He didn’t want to lay by me he didn’t want to drink my breast milk.”

 

 “Our values are based on holistic approaches, in other words we take into consideration the individual in context of the family,

in context of the community, and context of the nation.

It’s about us being able to have those kinds

of processes back in our community.”

- Cyndy Baskin, Ryerson University professor of social work

​

Damon was arrested around noon on Wednesday, Nov. 16. He was taken to the Shiprock Police Department Jail which is located on the Navajo Nation reservation.

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On Tuesday, Nov. 22, the trial commenced. Damon’s entire family was there.

 

Damon was given jail time but not for long, Janice was granted a restraining order of five years against her husband and she gained full custody of her children. Janice now has a restraining order against her mother-in-law as well. Damon’s entire family believed his side of the story with which he used to attack Janice. That Janice was an adulterer and had made porn. Janice says that this is “typical Navajo nature” of taking the man’s side in situations of domestic abuse.

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According to Janice, the judge asked Damon why he did what he did to Janice, he replied that he was “under the influence”.  Janice recalls the judge telling him, “You're not man, you're monster.”

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“Only somebody who hates you so much will do that to you, I don’t ever wanna feel like that again, I will never let a man treat me like that again,” says Janice. “It hurts because I know this is happening to somebody, to another woman and I can’t stop it, it’s not like I can just be there.”

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Healing through reconciling

Cyndy Baskin, an associate professor of social work at Ryerson University who focuses on Indigenous communities and Indigenous worldviews says that to understand family violence, one has to look at intergenerational trauma faced by Indigenous peoples through the lens of colonization. In order to heal, family violence needs "to be overcome with Aboriginal values".

 

“Our values are based on holistic approaches, in other words, we take into consideration the individual in the context of the family, in context of the community, and context of the nation,” says Baskin. “It’s about us being able to have those kinds of processes back in our community.” 

 

Baskin says that in order to heal, one has to have four aspects to them in order to become a “person in balance”: physical, spiritual, psychological and emotional.

 

Family violence is just one area regarding violence against Indigenous women, Baskin says. Such as the broader issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) is ingrained with learned and practiced colonist ideals and is a result of colonist history, past and present, as these murders and disappearances do not just happen in isolated Indigenous communities but across Canada.

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Calls to Action to address and dismantle colonist ideals have been put forth in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) 2015 report.

 

The following relates specifically to MMIWG and violence in Indigenous communities in Canada:

 

Call to Action 39 calls upon the federal government to make “measurable reduction in the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people among crime victims”; Call to Action 41 calls upon the federal government, in consultation with Aboriginal organizations, to “appoint a public inquiry” into the causes and to find solutions for the victimization of Aboriginal women and girls and finally, Call to Action 55, Sec. VI. calls upon the federal government to provide annual reports and data related to homicide and family violence, victimization and other crimes.

 

The Canadian government appointed an independent national inquiry into MMIWG on Dec. 8, 2015.

 

On June 5, 2018, the Canadian government announced an extension of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The inquiry had until April 30, 2019, to complete its final report and until June 30, 2019, to wind down on operations. The extension gave commissioners more time, until December 2018, to: "hear from additional families and survivors; further examine institutional practices and policies; and undertake the research necessary to inform their recommendations on the systematic causes of all forms of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada."

 

On June 3, 2019, the final report, "Reclaiming Power and Place", of the National Inquiry with 231 Calls for Justice was released.

 

This year, the most prominent Indigenous women's organization in Canada, Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) gave the Canadian government a "failing grade" for its response to the recommendations of the National Inquiry as a national action plan on MMIWG is still delayed. The NWAC released their own report on June 3, 2020–on the one-year anniversary of the National Inquiry's final report.

 

The NWAC  gave Canada, from coast to coast, a failing grade in the four areas outlined in their report: the right to culture, health, security and justice and unveiled its own strategy on what actions that the nation's capital, Ottawa, should take.

 

The strategy requests that Ottawa immediately: create a national task force with independent investigators to review unresolved files of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; develop a national database of cases; appoint an independent mechanism to report to Parliament annually on the implementation of the recommendations and establish a national campaign to prevent racism and sexualized stereotypes. 

 

The NWAC also says that they want to be at all decision-making tables with the federal government on issues related to MMIWG and gender diverse people. The organization is also currently looking for financial resources to create its own awareness campaigns and an internal unity to work on the outlined recommendations.

 

In the United States, the Department of Justice released a report in May 2016 from their 2010 findings of surveys on violence against American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) women and men. The report found that four in five AIAN women who took the survey have experienced violence in their lifetime.

 

The findings of the report concluded that 56.1 per cent of AIAN women have experienced sexual violence, 48.8 per cent have experienced stalking, 66.4 per cent have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner and 55.5 per cent have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner.

 

Overall, the report found that 1.5 million AIAN women, like Janice, have experienced violence in their lifetime.

 

The National Institute of Justice has implemented a national capstone project called the Violence Against Indian Women Baseline Study (or the Tribal Study of Public Safety and Public Health Issues Facing American and Alaska Native Women). By establishing such a project, the U.S. government has recognized that there is indeed what they call an "MMIW Crisis".

 

On Sept. 11, 2019, Charles Addington, the Deputy Bureau Director at the Office of Justice Services Bureau of Indian Affairs, went before the House Committee on Natural Resources subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States in an oversight hearing on reviewing the Trump Administration's approach to the murdered and missing Indigenous women crisis.

 

Addington stated to the House Committee that significant gaps in data that worsen the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples crisis remain and that the challenges are present across multiple sectors but are problematic particularly in the context of criminal justice, "in which Federal, state, tribal, and local governments share responsibilities" and that it is "important to continue efforts to build accurate data and provide Congress, the public and most importantly, tribes, with the information needed to identify and analyze the criminal justice needs in Indian Country to better address this crisis".

 

Addington outlined that some of the challenges in the reporting of crime data in regards to violence against Indigenous peoples are "underreporting; racial misclassification, potential gender, and racial bias, and a lack of law enforcement resources required to follow through and close out the cases appropriately."

 

Reconciliation through communication

At this moment, further media and government coverage and actions in the United States in regards to MMIWG are not widely available. This creates a rift between Indian Country and the rest of the United States, where Janice lives in Utah as a Navajo woman. The majority of advocacy and action plans are not widely publicized for MMIWG in the U.S. and for what the American government deems a crisis. 

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Mainstream media in Canada also hold a "Western bias" mixed with the by-products of colonist historical policy when it comes to the portrayal of Indigenous women who are represented as static individuals and "often less valued in Canadian society". 

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TRC's Call to Action 86 calls upon Canadian journalism programs and media schools "to require education for all students on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal–Crown relations".

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The CBC's true-crime podcast series, Missing & Murdered, created by Connie Walker (a Cree woman, herself) and Marnie Luke is a glowing and revelatory example of strong coverage and compassionate, non-clinical representation of the issue of MMIWG in Canada as its second season, Finding Cleo is heralded as one of the most popular true-crime podcasts in North America. Reporting of this kind is a clear example that Indigenous stories need to be told and that people will listen, which will further create dialogue and connection of how institutions of influence are affected by such an issue of broad concern and by colonist ideals.

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Land acknowledgments statements are standard practice during the introduction point or beginning of large gatherings in Canada such as during city council meetings in Toronto and other civic events across the country. "Welcome to Country" statements are also standard practice in Australia, another collection of Indigenous lands affected by and coping with historical and present colonist contexts.  

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This is a small but essential step towards reconciliation. 

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American educational institutions like New York University are advocating to install land acknowledgments as a regular practice across the States because "cultural institutions have an obligation to support ongoing education as well as accurate and responsible representation."

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Recovery in resilience 

Janice says that her healing process, starting from the two years after the incident, has mainly focused on herself, taking care of her kids and keeping busy.

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She says that she has not seen a therapist or sought counseling in the five years since the incident took place. Janice says that sometimes she experiences what she says are symptoms of PTSD.

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Janice dreads the thought she has that one day she might come home from work to find Damon waiting for her. This is a thought she consistently tries to keep at bay.

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But Janice approaches life with positivity and kindness for herself, for the sake of her children and in hopes of advocating for others who are also on their journey of recovery.

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“If I see somebody hurting or in pain, whatever little I have, I will try and give it to them. That is the type of person I have become,” says Janice. “Just being around my family, being able to laugh and enjoy everything that I have already been through. Take life as it is.”

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~

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*Names have been changed.

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