Conquering Chaos

by Catelynn Lowell

  Tyler:

  Lying is a deal breaker for a lot of people, and it was for me, too. But I learned that’s not really the best approach. I really want people to know that lying is fixable. Just because someone lies doesn’t mean that you’re not meant to be with that person, or that the lying will go on forever. It’s a fixable issue.

  You can’t just say, “Oh, he lied, that’s it, he’s not the person for me.” I remember mentioning to the couples’ therapist that I thought I should have just left and been done with it. But whoever thinks love is like a sappy movie with no challenges is dead wrong. Love is work. And when people say “If you have to work on it it’s not love,” I’m like, what world are you living in?

  As far as trust and communication go, those are all things that take work. You don’t naturally just communicate, you’re not naturally honest. Those things take work. Your relationship is a really valuable thing that has a lot of different parts to it. Why would you throw away the whole thing based on one broken part? You have to at least try to repair it. What if I had left Catelynn for something that could have been fixed? I would never have the relationship and happiness I have now.

  Closing Thoughts

  From the very beginning, we have had a very special chemistry and passion for each other. Even when we were twelve, we knew. You know when you’re soulmates. You know when you can picture being with that person for the rest of your life. Placing Carly left us with more time to find the peace, maturity and wisdom together to start a family and do it right. It gave us room to work for the goal of making it until we’re eighty-seven, hanging out in rocking chairs.

  That being said, every relationship is going to have its ups and downs, even when two people have never doubted for a second that they are soulmates. Because when you get down to it, relationships are hard. Whether it’s the relationship between you and your parents, your friends, or a significant other.

  Relationships take communication, understanding, and compromise. Those are three things we thought we had nailed down, and maybe we did. But life catches up with you. Cate’s lying almost got the best of us. There’s no doubt about it that our relationship was put to the ultimate test. It was make it or break it time and we knew we couldn’t live with ourselves if we just let it all fall to pieces.

  Without couple’s counseling we probably wouldn’t have learned that Tyler’s obsession with sex was linked to his childhood sexual abuse. Cate’s lying started to make sense given the dysfunctional household she grew up in. It was much easier for her to lie to avoid conflict than to risk the repercussions of being honest. Before sifting through these issues Cate’s lying just seemed like something she did to be deceptive or hurtful. Tyler was able to start making sense of his obsession with sex. By working through these issues as a totally united team we were able to be there for each other in ways we never had been before.

  Nobody is perfect, so there will always be hurdles. Sometimes they’re big and sometimes they’re small. Working through our problems in therapy was a turning point for us. By going to therapy we picked up the tools we needed to put the past behind us and move forward.

  Even if you think there’s a problem in your relationship that can’t be fixed, it never hurts to try. It might be painful, and it will definitely be difficult, but if your relationship is worth fighting for, you’ll be glad you did!

  CHAPTER 9:

  * * *

  PLANNING A HAPPY HOME

  All of our dreams and efforts after Carly boiled down to our ideas about what makes a good home for a child. What does a child need to grow up to be a good person? When we wrote down all the things in our lives that wouldn’t be good for a child, the sum total was enough to make our decision. But there wasn’t any single thing on that list that was a deal breaker. We never believed it was impossible to raise a child in poverty, for example. We never thought that a person who’d struggled with addiction couldn’t step up to be a parent. We didn’t want to raise our kid in a trailer park, but that doesn’t mean we had less respect for the moms, like ours, who had done that same thing.

  Although we’ve had to take an honest look at how our family dysfunction affected our lives, we never once questioned the love and good intentions of the people who raised us. No one gets to design a perfect life. There are many amazing, wonderful parents out there who are doing the best they can for their children while struggling with poverty, family addiction, and other circumstances beyond their control.

  We talk a lot about escaping the legacies of our backgrounds, and how our family troubles showed us what not to do. But we also have to acknowledge the positive. After all, can we really take all the credit for breaking the cycle? So many teenagers — including some of our parents and grandparents before us — have walked the same line we walked and fallen onto the wrong side. What made us different? Was it just luck that gave us the strength to make the decisions we made? Were we just born with a different attitude? We don’t know the answers to those questions. But we do know that at least in part, we are products of our environment. Just like our parents were products of their environments, and their parents were before that. Carly’s environment will have a hand in shaping who she becomes, and when we have our next child, the environment we provide for her will impact the person she becomes.

  With every generation, families teach children lessons good and bad. What lessons have we learned? What did we inherit from our parents that we want to pass down? Are we safe now from the flaws and faults that have held back so many generations of our family? What new insights can we bring to our turn of the cycle? How will we build and protect our dream of a happy home?

  Money Isn’t Everything

  Catelynn:

  Let’s make one thing absolutely clear. Poverty was a factor in our decision to place Carly in adoption, but being poor does not make you a bad parent. Money problems can happen to anyone, and when you’re born into them, they’re even harder to escape. My mom never had anyone to turn to for backup when money was tight. But she worked her ass off to take care of us. And whatever luxury we didn’t have, she made up for in love. We have all the respect and love in the world for the parents out there who are living paycheck to paycheck, pouring all their energy into providing for their kids.

  Tyler:

  Being a single mom is the hardest job in the world. End of story. (The second hardest job, by the way, is just being a mom at all!) Cate and I are both children of single moms who basically came from nothing, got pregnant unexpectedly, and struggled for the rest of their lives to make ends meet while providing for their children.

  When I was really little, my mom and sister and I were living in a dilapidated trailer park in the back of a dead end street. That place was full of poverty-stricken families, and our family was one of them. It was so destitute that our playground was a rusted-out broken tractor at the east end of the trailer park.

  My mom worked herself to the bone to get us out of there. She worked day and night, saving up all the tips from her bartending job at a local golf course, until she had enough money to move us into this tiny seven-hundred square foot cottage that just barely passed as a house. My mom worked her ass off for that place.

  Catelynn:

  For my mom, the big thing was being financially independent. That was an advantage she fought for. For a lot of young moms who grew up in bad environments, it’s easy to fall into the trap of having to rely on a man for money. And that can lead to all kinds of bad situations. Just look what happened with Detroit. When she didn’t have her own place to go back to, she got sucked into a nightmare it took her a year to escape. For a lot of women like her, that nightmare never ends. But for my mom it was a wrong turn that she knew she had to make right. Before and after that, my mom always worked hard to have her own house and pay her own bills. And even though she had a habit of letting guys mooch off her, I remember her kicking out at least one boyfriend who wouldn’t pay his half of the bills. She really did the best she could to stay in contr
ol of what little money she had. Sure, her house was a trailer, but it was hers and hers alone. And no matter how bad her addiction was, it never kept her home from work. I can remember waking up two hours before school so she could drop us off with a babysitter and get to her job. She worked her butt off every day to take care of us the best way she knew how, and that’s something I’ll always admire.

  Tyler:

  My mom was really open about our finances. If I said I wanted something and we couldn’t afford it, she’d say no. And when I asked why, she’d tell me. “That’s ten dollars, and I only have five dollars right now.” Some parents don’t like to talk about money with their kids, so in that situation, they would say, “You can’t have it, because I said so.” But my mom’s honesty helped me understand: I want this, but I can’t have it because my mom doesn’t have money. I agree that you should never burden your kids with financial stress, and my mom never walked around the house crying and ranting about being able to pay the bills. But if I asked for something we couldn’t have, she told me the truth.

  But we always had Christmas, and we also got treats and splurges. Sometimes even when money was tight, my mom would turn to my sister and me and say, “We’re going to Olive Garden tonight. We’re going to have a nice dinner and spend time as a family.” We’d ask, how are you going to afford that? And she’d say, “I don’t care if I’m broke for the rest of the week. We’re not going to worry about money tonight.” She was careful with finances, but never at the cost of spending quality time with us or making a happy memory. In her eyes, money was nothing compared to that.

  The Power of Love

  Catelynn:

  I had a rough childhood. We’ve already established that. But no matter which busted-up trailer park we were living in, there was always love in our house. My mom was always loving. She always gave us hugs, telling us we were beautiful, and making sure we knew how much she cared about us. No matter what’s happened, I’ve never doubted that my mom loved me.

  That was something she never had. My mom grew up being treated like an unwanted piece of trash. No one hugged her or built up her self-esteem. When I hear about it, it sounds to me like she took a lot of damage for the ugly divorce her parents went through. All the anger and frustration got taken out on her. She’s told me stories of trying to go up and give one of her parents a hug, and just being pushed away. She’d get punished for the dumbest things, just basically being bullied as a scapegoat for an unhappy house. That left a really deep mark on her. I think that’s the reason for a lot of the problems she’s struggled with in her adult life. How is a young girl supposed to cope with feeling unloved and unwanted? Drinking probably helped her detach from those problems so she could have fun and act like a normal, outgoing person. I don’t blame her for that.

  I don’t know what I would have been like if I’d gone all my life feeling unloved. And the reason I never found out was because my mom knew how it affected her, and she made sure she made up for it with her own kids. We got hugs. We got kindness. We got those expressions of love. And in a way, even though she wasn’t able to break the cycle herself, sometimes I wonder if those changes she made paved the way for me to do it. I know they definitely meant something.

  Tyler:

  Growing up, there was never a single day when my mom didn’t tell me she loved me. Even when we got in fights, she’d find a way to work it in there that she was only upset because she loved me and she wanted the best for me. There were times when we’d argue on the phone and hang up really mad, and then I’d realized we’d forgotten to say it. I’d almost be in tears until I called her back to say I loved her. There was an unspoken rule that we could never leave anything negative hanging without making that expression. You never know what could happen. So no matter what the situation was, the final note was always love.

  Good and Bad Examples

  Tyler:

  One of the many things Cate and I have in common is we both have parents who are total opposites, so we got really mixed influences growing up.

  Catelynn:

  I think I was about nine months old when my mom and dad split up, and my mom’s party lifestyle had a lot to do it. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little partying! It’s cool if you never party, but lots of people have their wild and crazy phase when they’re young. We did, and we don’t regret it. But when I was born my dad thought differently about what he was doing. Obviously my mom did too but they were both still young parents, and it was all a learning process.

  My dad stayed close to me, though. We spent a lot of time together until I was twelve, when he had to move out of state. My dad’s cool. He’s the most normal person in the world. I have no memories of my dad being under the influence of anything. There was never any chaos where he was concerned. He’s just a naturally chill, laid-back person, like me.

  I was definitely a daddy’s girl when I was a kid. He was the type of guy who never missed a visit with me. Every Wednesday we’d get lunch after school, and every other weekend I’d go over to his house. We’d go on drives and go tromping around in the woods together, just spending time together and talking. Back in those days, I wasn’t acting up yet. But later, even though he was all the way down in Florida, he always tried to talk to me about doing well in school and how important my education was.

  I always looked at him and his parents as the biggest positive influence in my life. They weren’t there in Michigan with me, but the older I got the more I felt them pushing me to do good things in my life. It was so important for me to have that, especially because they were the ones who stepped in when my home life was at its most chaotic. They took me in when my own home wasn’t safe for awhile, and they supported me all through my pregnancy. Their love and understanding made it easy to be open to their guidance, and I really leaned on that positive influence in those years Tyler and I were fighting to turn our lives around.

  Tyler:

  My mom generally always had her shit together. She listened to her parents and got good grades. She might have partied here and there, but just like a normal teenage girl. She was a good kid who liked to have a good time. She caught my dad’s eye while he was riding by on his bike one day. And of course he’s always been a smooth talker. That night he charmed her into climbing onto the back of his bike with him, and eventually she fell in love. Once they got together, she started going out more to keep up with him. Even back then, he was into more serious stuff than weed, but my mom never really got too involved with it. At least not enough to take her life off course.

  Their love lost to his hard-partying ways, though. After my sister was born, my mom spent a lot of time waiting around, staying up all night, wondering where he was or if he was okay. Eventually she realized there was an addiction in the house, and she didn’t want that in our lives. So they were already separated before I was born. But one night my dad went through a crisis and my mom got a little too close as she offered support. I was conceived during a temporary reunion. They were never together during my life, and not long after I was born, he was in prison.

  The Value of Trust

  Catelynn:

  My favorite thing about my mom was that I could talk to her about anything. Our relationship only got rocky after Carly. Before that, we were very close. I could always tell her what was going on in my life, and she never judged me. When I lost my virginity and didn’t tell her right away, she was almost in tears because I hadn’t felt like I could confide in her. As a young girl, I had just been scared to admit that I’d made that choice. But she told me, “You could have come to me and talked to me and told me about it!” She was very open with me, and she wanted me to be open with her. Parents should give kids that sense that they’re going to listen and give advice and not judge them.

  Tyler:

  It always meant a lot to me that my mom listened to my side of every story. Like I explained way back in the beginning of the book, it was important to her that I trusted her enough to tell me what w
as happening in my life when she wasn’t there. That was why when I told her a teacher wasn’t giving the whole story, she never shut me down. She listened and investigated for herself. Thanks to that, I was never scared she’d take someone else’s word over mine and she could rest easy knowing no one would do something bad to her son without her hearing about it.

  Catelynn and I both agree that our children have to know, one hundred percent, that our home is their safe zone. You leave the world at the front door. Home is where you can be yourself without any judgment. Catelynn and I know that our children will always have that safety.

  Raising “Good Kids”

  Catelynn:

  My mom and I got along so well we were like best friends. We never fought, and I never disrespected her or raised my voice to her. But our relationship might not have been the best as far as rules and boundaries went. She let me do whatever I wanted! I had no restrictions at all as a kid, and very little supervision. I’m lucky I turned out the way I did! The way I was running around and the stuff I was getting away with, I could have been pregnant at the age of 12. If I had made a few different choices and gone along with some of the stuff my friends and neighbors did, I could have turned out just like everybody around me.

  My time with my grandparents in Florida balanced that out. They were so strict I didn’t even know how to take it! Of course, I can understand their motives for it. They were just taking care of me and trying to keep me out of trouble, and that was some good instincts on their part considering all the stuff I’d already done! They didn’t know about all of my wild stuff, though. At least, I don’t think they did. But they knew what kind of environment I was coming from, and they had front-row seats to how chaotic my life was getting. They were right to try and lay some boundaries down. I’ve always had respect for the ways they pushed me to be good.