Smothered By Love

    Haley was suffering from her eye disease, allergies, her concussions and a lot of sicknesses at once. She had to give up all the sports she loved. My heart ached for her. I didn't think things could get any worse for her. I was wrong. Who knew her next trial would be because she was so well loved.

I love this picture because it shows just what Haley is like and how much fun she is.

She is beautiful too, which the boys seemed to notice

     Haley has always been well loved. She is fun to be around, adventurous, her smile lights up the room and she has a gift for turning every situation into a fun adventure. The boys liked her at a very young age. She told me that she was going to marry a boy named Tyler in kindergarten who she was good friends with. Later she changed her mind. I asked her why and she told me, “Because he is taller and smarter than I am”. I told her I hoped she wouldn't pass up those traits in the future. Some of the boys in elementary school got some pretty big crushes on her.  

Haley is out-going and has always had a lot of friends

She doesn't let life pass her by. She loves to be in the middle of things.

     During middle school there was a boy who was obsessed with Haley and followed her around, which started spooking her. She spent a lot of time having her friends help hide her from this boy who kept showing up everywhere. His obsession to be where she was all the time scared her.

    Haley had a friend she had been friends with for two and a half years. Christy loved Haley. Haley always had her and the other kids laughing hard at school functions. I could tell Christy adored Haley. Christy had a rough home life with parents and a brother with alcohol and drug abuse problems. We were hoping we could give her a safe and happy place to escape. The summer before high school Christy would ride her bike over to our house a lot. Then high school started and she got more and more possessive of Haley. Christy didn't want Haley to be friends with anyone but her. Christy would sit and stare at Haley and ignore everyone else or say things that made people very uncomfortable. Christy did her best to drive away all of Haley's other friends. Haley and Christy became outcasts because Christy's behavior got harder and harder to deal with and more bizarre and no one wanted to be around her. Haley hated the isolation Christy was putting her in. Haley wanted to have more than one friend. Her school life became so miserable Haley started calling me almost every day wanting me to pick her up for lunch. She tried to reason with Christy. Christy kept crying and following her everywhere just saying over and over, “Please eat lunch with me. Please be my friend?” Haley has always been very compassionate. I have lost track of how many times people have talked to or written to me thanking me for Haley and the difference she has made to them or their children. Haley told Christy she wanted to be friends with her and also have other friends. Christy did not want that. Christy kept riding her bike over to our house and calling Haley relentlessly on her cell phone and our home phone nonstop all day and night. We would get hundreds of calls in a day. Christy wanted to spend all of her time with Haley and she didn't want anyone else around. We prayed for Christy and Haley tried to reason with her. One day after the phone had rung non-stop all day, Haley picked it up and put it on speaker phone so I could better understand why this was so hard for her. Christy was sobbing on the phone and we couldn't even understand a lot of what she was saying. Haley tried to be sweet with her. Christy begged Haley to be her friend. Haley tried to explain to her why she was giving up and how she felt overwhelmed and smothered and wanted more friends. Christy wouldn't acknowledge any of these reasons, she just kept saying over and over “Please be my friend”. At one point Christy said, “Haley you almost killed me twice.” That scared us. I also saw how powerless Haley was at trying to reason with her. We knelt down and prayed for Christy again and I knew she really needed help and it couldn't wait. I knew Haley was worn out and couldn't do it anymore, especially with all her health problems. She was getting more and more depressed. I went up to the school and talked to Haley's counselor about Christy's troubled home life and all Haley had been through. He asked a lot of questions and promised to help Haley and Christy. I wondered if he thought like I did at first that Haley should just try to be her friend, that we were over-reacting.

    Things did not change after our visit with the counselor. Christy followed Haley down the hall crying every day and kept asking her if she was going to eat lunch with her? She would follow Haley after school too. Haley was told to set boundaries with Christy and explain why. We already knew that that didn't work. We were told we could press harassment charges. Haley didn't want to ruin her life. Then Christy begged Haley to eat with her at least once a week. Haley told her she would if she talked to a counselor first. Christy didn't want to and kept following Haley, begging and crying. They had a class together and Haley said Christy never stopped staring at her the full hour. Haley kept telling her, “Please get help!” Christy showed up in odd places when Haley was alone. Suddenly Christy would be standing there staring at her. After months of this Haley was exhausted. Haley would go to school in the morning and Christy would be there waiting, begging, pleading and crying, “Why won't you be my friend?” One day Haley and her friend Max took Christy up to the counselor's office. The counselor later told me, “You don't have to convince me Christy needs help any more. Today was the first time I have met her and believe me I got a full blown look at her and this girl needs help!” He said he was blown away by her in his office and told me he thought she was mentally ill. He said her eyes were red and swollen and she was hyperventilate she was so upset. She wouldn't listen to anyone. She would just repeat over and over, “Why won't you be my friend?” He told us to stop all contact and call the police if we needed to, that the school would offer her counseling. Haley told me later that she was praying on the way to the counselor's office, “Please help me and help the counselor see she needs help.” Haley said her counselor kept making eye contact with her, with a look like “wow this girl is crazy”. He couldn't talk to her either. Haley broke down in tears after Christy was taken out of the room by another counselor. She was so torn by the fact she couldn't love and help her friend who was falling apart and keep her own sanity. Haley's friend Max switched her lockers and helped her the best he could. Haley was thankful for him. Then Christy started calling another one of Haley's good friends over and over, crying and begging her to get Haley to talk to her. This family also had to get help for the relentless calls. We all worried over and prayed for Christy. She had started out her life with a bad set of circumstances. The mother in me wanted to hug her and be there for her. It is hard to help someone who is beyond rational thought. I still wonder what happened to her. I hope she got help and she is happy. We have said many prayers for her.

This was the result of a group of boys who liked Haley and it made the news in two newspapers. It was an interesting night.

    We just got Haley getting back on her feet and feeling happy when she suddenly had another person obsessed with her. She hung out a lot with a group of friends, some of them boys. One of these boys became desperate to have her in his life. She told John she saw him as only a friend. He would give her pages and pages he had written of things he loved about her. He texted her over and over all day and night, hundreds of times. She became smothered and overwhelmed again. The more she would try to distance herself from John, the more intense he got. I was scared for Haley and him. He was so angry he assaulted his parents one night and the police were called. Haley would show me texts and have me listen to the relentless phone calls. He would beg and sound suicidal, then sound angry and send profanity laced texts and phone calls. He talked about crying non-stop for weeks and feeling suicidal. It was alarming. I typed up pages and pages of these calls and texts. He would not give up and he had violent tendencies. We would see him outside our house at night. Haley couldn't sleep at night and always asked me over and over if I was sure the door was locked. She slept with a light on and she said she was scared he would hurt her. I took the pages I had typed up and went back to the counselor's office. He looked at me and said, “Oh no, is Haley having trouble with Christy again?” I said, “No, actually this is a new stalker.” He said, “You are kidding me! Not again.” I showed him the pages of what John had texted her and he was shocked and scared for Haley. He set up an emergency meeting with the school administration and the police. The police talked to John. They told him not to talk to or text Haley again. Haley was assigned a case number and we were given some police numbers we could call. We hoped the police talking to him would scare him into leaving her alone. He started texting her friends. He would get desperate and call her sometimes. The police took Haley out of class a few times to talk to her and her classmates looked at her like, “What trouble are you in?”, so her school life was interesting. The police told John it would be jail time if he talked to Haley again and they wanted Haley to press charges against him. Then John started using his friend's cell phones and his brother's and he would text her so she wouldn't recognize the number. We wrote down the numbers and the numbers were always traced back to him. Haley felt bad for John and didn't want him to go to jail. He had once been her friend. She had great sympathy for him. When his last plan didn't work for him anymore he started telling everyone she was on drugs which upset her a lot as this false rumor spread. We were told that stalkers will use negative means to get their victim to talk to them if the nice approach doesn't work. He even called me one day and talked for an hour. He said some pretty crazy things. Haley was mentally and physically exhausted from a two year nightmare of health and stalkers. 

My nightmare stalker days helped me relate

    During these experiences for Haley, it was the first time I could look back on my own horrible nightmare with a stalker for over 2 years and see how much I learned, how things don't get better, they only get scarier. That the longer a stalker doesn't get what they want the more desperate and scary they get. I didn't want Haley to go through what I did and feel scared for years afterward and always fear she was being followed. When I prayed for Haley I felt glad I could help her, that I knew exactly how she felt. For the first time I could see how a bad experience could be used to help someone else. I knelt in prayer with Haley a lot. We grew very close through all of this. I was touched that she prayed and fasted for John and Christy, even after all they had put her through. Our prayers were answered for John. He is doing great and having a good and successful life now. I have often seen the power of prayer for someone we cared about help them be able to navigate life's hard paths and be able to make it to a place of deep down happiness. 

In spite of all of Haley's trials I was impressed with how she just kept smiling and being so good to her friends. She would fall apart sometimes for good reason. She wanted to love and make everyone happy, that is why it was so hard with Christy and John.

She started spending more time singing and acting in plays to take the place of the sports she had to give up.

Everyone likes how fun she is. She is a ray of sunshine. I could see why some of her friends wanted to be with her all the time.