Conquering Chaos

by Catelynn Lowell

  Of course I wasn’t about to call the Pizza Nazi unless it was my last resort. When I realized I was lost, I thought I could figure it out. But then my phone died, and I had to admit defeat. I turned around and stopped at a little fabric store and used their phone to call Fort Pizza. I came clean and said, “I couldn’t find the house and my phone and GPS died. I’m on my way back. What should I do? Do you have the customer’s number so I can call them?”

  “Get your ass back here!”

  When I got back, the Pizza Nazi went off. He talked a tough talk and told me this was the last strike. I said, “You know what, dude? You’re absolutely right.” I took my hat off, tossed him my apron with a big smile, saluted everyone and got the hell out of the Pizza Nazi’s dungeon.

  That was when I realized I wasn’t really good with overbearing bosses. I went and got a stockroom job for a retail company where Catelynn worked. That went much better.

  Catelynn:

  In retail you definitely have to deal with dicks. But I’m good under pressure. I’ll just smile and say, “Okay, thank you, have a nice day!” Then I turn around and bitch about whatever happened. That job was pretty easygoing, and it was nice to have Tyler working in the back. Sometimes we’d be able to take lunches together.

  But pretty soon we both found something we liked a lot better. Tyler’s sister had worked for this company that placed caregivers for people with special needs, and we thought that would be a really valuable job for us to take on. We filled out applications and took all the necessary first aid and CPR classes, and then they filled out our profiles and matched us with people. I worked with a twenty-one year old girl with Down’s Syndrome, and Tyler worked with a twenty-four year old guy with autism.

  We loved the job, although it was incredibly draining. You have to have really high energy and be really excited all the time. There’s a lot of burnout. In our case it was Monday through Friday, two-thirty to seven, with no breaks at all. You’re at their homes, eating your meals with them and being at their side all the time. The agency gave us information about what our people needed to work on, so there were lots of goals and checkpoints to work toward. I was trying to help my girl become as independent as possible. I would coach her through taking a shower, blow-drying her hair, cooking for herself, and all the other little tasks most people take for granted.

  It was exhausting sometimes, but so rewarding! The best part was when they learned something for the first time and you could see the progress they were making. What always bugged me was when I’d go home for the weekend, then come back on Monday to see that she’d lost all of her progress because her parents weren’t keeping up the routine we’d planned to instill all of the things that I was helping her build up. Still, I would do that job again in a heartbeat, as long as it was one-on-one or with parents who were committed to the program.

  Tyler:

  The guy I worked with was much more independent. He lived on his own already, in a house his parents had gotten for him. He was autistic, but he was very capable. His parents had treated him just like their other kids and tried to raise him to be as independent as possible. They liked me as his caregiver because I promised never to do anything for him without giving him a chance to do it himself. When this kid would say, “Tyler, make me pancakes!” I would say, “Nope. You make your pancakes. When I’m not here, you make your own pancakes. When I’m at home, I make my own pancakes. So you make your own pancakes.”

  And he was down with that! At least, most of the time. I did have to hold my ground during some tantrums, and that wasn’t easy at all. He was a huge guy about six-foot-three and two-hundred pounds, and when he got mad he’d smack his head and stomp on the ground. It was freaky for me because he could totally destroy me. But I had to hold steady and make sure he knew I was standing firm. It was a good experience for me to actually experience the authority side of things for once and see how I handled it. It wasn’t too bad at all!

  You Can’t Fix Everything

  Catelynn:

  While we were working hard to get our lives to a different place, we still had the same old environments to deal with. After enough time had passed, my mom and Tyler’s dad finally started to come to terms with our decision. My mom felt horrible about fighting with me during all that, and she apologized to me in tears. We were able to make peace on that specific issue. But there was a lot more going on that was hard to deal with.

  My mom and Tyler’s dad stayed married for six years, and in that time they brought out all the worst in each other. They were so comfortable with each other’s bad habits there was really nothing to hold them back. After Carly was born and they moved into a different house, things got a lot worse than we even knew. They wouldn’t do things in front of us, but we found out later about the stuff that was going on in that house. They’d drink all night, or take pills, or even smoke crack together.

  Tyler:

  They were both addicts. And they sheltered each other from shame and judgment. They got comfortable with it. And then whatever problems they didn’t already have in common, they started sharing with each other. For example, Cate’s mom wasn’t into crack, and my dad never smoked it at home. That’s the thing with addicts. They can’t follow the rules you need them to follow, but they’re not soulless. They still have their own moral codes they hold onto as hard as they can. And for my dad, that was always his one single rule as an addict: No smoking in the house. That’s why he would leave on crack binges for three days at a time and come back when he was done. During those benders, we’d all be calling the jails and hospitals trying to keep track of him and make sure he was still alive. That was the reason my mom left him back in the day.

  But with Cate’s mom, the issue was that she didn’t want to be alone. She hated being left there by herself while he went off and did his thing. She’d beg him to just stay there with her, whatever it took. But for him it was a choice between staying home, crack-free, or going out and smoking crack. He always chose the crack. Finally Cate’s mom got so desperate to keep him there she said, “Screw it. I don’t want you to leave. Get the drugs, come back, and smoke them here so you’re not out there leaving me by myself.”

  That’s how it all escalated. Once he was doing it there in front of her, it wasn’t long before she was doing it with him. It was a bad line to cross for both of them. My dad even told me that was the first time he’d broken his one rule. Twenty years he’d been doing it, and he’d never smoked it at home in front of the kids. And as soon as he did, guess what? Cate caught him.

  Catelynn:

  He was in the bedroom smoking it when I walked in. I completely freaked out. I went absolutely crazy. I was yelling at him, demanding to know how he could do that with kids in the house, calling him a piece of shit. I was so shocked and upset and furious. I could tell how high he was by the look in his eyes. And I could tell he was caught off guard and ashamed, because normally he’d freak out at me for yelling at him. But this time he was stuttering and refusing to look me in the eye.

  I called Tyler crying my eyes out. I told him what had happened and that I didn’t want to be in that house anymore. Not a week later, I moved in with him. I just felt more comfortable at Tyler’s house. It was a safe place for me where I could feel comfortable and normal. His mom was there, and he was there. There was just no comparison.

  Tyler:

  I was shocked when she told me he was smoking crack in the house. I thought, “Damn, he’s really going off the rails if he broke that rule.” He told me later he’d never been so ashamed in his entire life, that he couldn’t even look at Catelynn after she’d seen him doing that.

  My dad and Cate’s mom were married for six years, but they only really spent six months together. The rest of the time, he was in jail. He was constantly in and out of jail because their relationship was so messed up they got hit with a no contact order, which they then kept ignoring.

  The no contact order was sparked by a fight they had in Richmond, which ended
with the cops coming and taking my dad to jail for the first domestic case he had ever had brought against him. In Michigan, the state pursues domestic violence cases no matter what. Once Cate’s mom realized what the no contact order meant, she tried to write the parole board to lift it. But they told her it wasn’t going to happen, one of the reasons being that he never completes his parole.

  So the no contact order remained in place. And they kept breaking it. And he kept going back to jail. The chaos continued, the same way it always did for them individually, and the same way they were comfortable with it together. That was what they were used to, and they just weren’t about to get out of that cycle.

  The Kindness of Strangers

  Tyler:

  Some of what we’ve talked about in the last couple of chapters might be familiar to you if you know us from MTV. Our involvement with the show became an important factor in the direction we decided to take our lives. Not because of the cameras or the media attention, but because it opened us up to the love and support of the many, many amazing people who reached out to us after watching our story unfold.

  Cate and I were featured on MTV’s reality TV series 16 & Pregnant, which documented the pregnancy, the adoption, and our experiences after placing Carly. Like all of the other teen parents featured on 16 & Pregnant, we had no idea what a huge deal it was going to be or that we’d be asked to return for another series following our lives. The show brought on a lot of attention from the press, and tons of reactions from viewers. That turned out to influence us in huge ways.

  Catelynn:

  This was back in the days of MySpace. After 16 & Pregnant aired, we started getting all of these messages on MySpace. For days and days we were just swarmed with messages. And not just little messages like, “Hey, what’s up,” but thoughtful, personal messages that were pages long. And almost every single one of them was positive.

  For days and days we were just shocked by this huge outpouring of love and support from all of these strangers. It was message after message from people of all ages, telling us how we’d inspired them. People were sharing their life stories, thanking us for our strength and honesty, encouraging us to hold our heads up and stay strong.

  It was insane to realize that just from that one hour on TV, people felt connected to us and were willing to share their life stories. Not only that, but to extend so much kindness and support to us. And it could not have come at a more important time. In a way, the people who supported us from day one really helped us through our grief and loss.

  Tyler:

  When the show aired, we were still deep in our grief and loss. We were waking up every day depressed because we didn’t have our daughter with us. All of that love and support gave us a boost during our darkest times. On the days when we were really down, we’d go online and read all of these messages of positivity and support. It uplifted us so much to know that all these people were rooting for us. And it showed us that just by sharing our story, we’d already taken a step toward making something meaningful out of our lives.

  Once we shared our adoption story and started to see the impact it had on such a huge number of people, we started to think about how many people have been somehow affected by adoption. Adoption is a big part of a lot of families, whether it’s touched the life of an immediate or distant family member, a parent or a sister or an uncle or a cousin. But the weird thing is that it’s still not something that we discuss in an educational, accurate way. There are still a lot of misconceptions out there about adoption. Even though the process of adoption has evolved, the conversation hasn’t. It still is sort of quiet and hush-hush.

  Catelynn:

  So many of the responses we got came from adoptive parents and birth parents who had placed children in adoption. They wrote things like, “I’ve been waiting and waiting for someone to get it right. Thank you for showing this process the way it really happens.” When we thought about it, we realized they were right. Birth parents are misinterpreted in the media all the time. Maybe you’ve seen one of those crazy old made-for-TV movies where some deadbeat birth mom shows up to tear a family apart, and she’s hiding in bushes and stalking the kid, or whatever. Or you’ve seen some sad story about a kid who finds out she was adopted and tracks down her birth parents only to get the cold shoulder. There are lots of dramatic and tragic stories about adoption that play out in the media. But there aren’t a lot of places where you can find birth parents represented accurately or positively. We didn’t realize it when we agreed to do the show, but our representation of adoption was something that was really rare and really needed by a lot of people.

  Tyler:

  The real kicker was when we got a letter from a girl who told us that we’d inspired her to make her own adoption plan. She told us it was thanks to our story that she found the strength and peace to take that step and place her child for adoption. After that, we realized we had the chance to really make a positive impact on people. Before that, we weren’t sure if we wanted to keep showing our lives on TV. It was kind of like, “What are we doing here, really?” But when we thought about that letter and the fact that we had actually helped inspire someone to do something so important, we decided we had to keep going. And we swore as long as we did, we’d be as open, honest, real and raw as we could. We figured authenticity was what had helped us connect with people, and after that, connecting with people was what we wanted to do.

  Closing Thoughts

  The day we sent Carly home with her adoptive parents was the day we realized that our lives would never be the same again. Things that we used to find fun, like partying with our friends, were no longer going to cut it. There was no going back. Hell, we wouldn’t have even wanted to. We may have still been two teenagers in high school, but at that point we felt like fully grown adults and we were ready to take on new responsibilities.

  Seeing our lives from a new perspective, and with Carly on our minds every single day, we were motivated to become the type of birth parents that Carly would be proud of one day. We were motivated. Not only would having jobs give us a little bit of financial independence but we wound up doing something extremely meaningful.

  At the pizza joint Tyler quickly learned the qualities he did not want in an employer. He also learned a lot about himself and how he deals with certain situations in the workplace. Growing up, Tyler had been responsible for himself and his mom had always respectfully laid down the law when it came to chores. When his boss would bark orders and treat him like a child, well, that didn’t sit well with him. Disrespect from authority figures just wasn’t going to fly. We both did well working at Rue 21, so at least it wasn’t a problem everywhere! But still, we wanted more than food service and retail, and working with people with special needs was the perfect next step. It felt good to use our new independence to teach others how to be independent themselves. On an important personal level, it helped us channel our parental instincts into something that felt positive instead of painful. And best of all, it gave us the chance to make a difference in people’s lives.

  That meant more to us than anything. And it reaffirmed that we had made the right choice when it came to placing Carly in adoption. Would we have been able to take such quick steps toward becoming responsible, mature, financially stable adults if we had been scrambling to make ends meet for a baby? Our upbringings were a good indication that the answer was a big fat no. Because of our choice we had the opportunity to take control of our futures and make a difference in people’s lives. In our mission to make Carly proud, we found real reasons to be proud of each other...and proud of ourselves.

  While we focused on making strides off camera, we never expected the amount of love and support that was about to come our way from the time we spent on camera. We were completely taken by surprise when MTV viewers responded to our story with an outpour of love and support. And we were shocked when we realized how many lives it had touched. We never knew how badly people needed a positive adoption story like ours on a mains
tream level. It quickly became clear to us that our purpose in life was to show these people they weren’t alone. There was no longer a reason for us to question our roles on MTV. If we could make a difference in people’s lives and make a positive impact on people, we were going to do it.

  CHAPTER 8:

  * * *

  HOLDING ONTO EACH OTHER

  Crisis can bring a couple together. But oftentimes when the dust settles, you look around and realize the landscape has completely changed. You’re older now, and you’ve changed in ways you don’t yet understand. In our case, we went from a fairy tale childhood romance to an experience that pushed us even closer and left us with a bond — a child — that would stay between us forever. And once we got through the struggle, the heartbreak and the aftermath, we found ourselves passing into the next phase of our life together.

  So, what then? Well, for years we had been the ideal couple: never fighting, always a team. But the reality was that we each still carried our own issues that were just waiting to pop up and cause some mayhem. Our effort to grow up and be serious about our lives was like renovating a house from top to bottom: You’re bound to stumble on rotten beams and structural weakness you never suspected. And that’s exactly what happened to us.

  But what do you do? Burn down the house? Hell, no! You put your heads together, call a contractor — or a relationship counselor — and do what you have to do to make that house stronger than ever.