Making Lemonade Out of Lemons

    I have six children who have all taught me things which have made my life better and touched my heart. I watched Haley struggle through two very hard years with an eye disease, severe allergies, asthma, concussions and stalkers. I saw her hit rock bottom many times when it was all too overwhelming and she would fall apart and cry. All of what she went through at once would have made most people want to give up. It was hard for her to give up all of the sports she loved and have constant health problems. Haley refused to give up. It did not take her long before she was pouring herself into other passions.

   When Haley was a young girl she loved to act, sing and dance. She poured her time and effort into singing and acting to fill the void left from not being able to do sports and she found out she loved these things. I have always admired how much passion she has for life.

When she was young she wanted to act out Snow White. The wicked queen is giving her a poisoned apple

Snow White is dead and the dwarfs are sad, except maybe one of them

The prince has come to give Snow White a kiss

Haley and her friend Lucy stole a Christmas show as angels

She even did acting in the bathtub

She acted in some great family performances

Dissecting an alien

She can be very dramatic in her parts.

She always played a part in girl's camp skits

     She started taking voice lessons because although she sang all the time she wanted to be better at it. She tried out for a play at the high school as a sophomore and she got a very small part, as a towns-person in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". She had one line. She was just happy to get a part.

She had fun goofing around after the play

    Then she tried out for the one-acts and the musical. As a sophomore she got one of the leads, playing Chava in “Fiddler on the Roof”. Usually the leads went to juniors and seniors so she was very happy to get this part. She did a beautiful job.

She performed as a telephone operator in a one-act comedy

Haley playing Chava in "Fiddler on the Roof"

   Then the spring play came and she got the lead of Maid Mirian in “The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood”. It was a comedy version and she had a very big part in this play with some very funny lines. When she tried out she did such a good job of being fiery and mean and then turning syrupy sweet every time Robin Hood showed up the director said she just had to have Haley play that part. She did an amazing job and got a lot of laughs.

She got to have her picture on the poster advertizing the play

The whole cast was great

    That year she was still suffering the effects of her concussions. During some of the long brutal practices she would get such bad headaches she would have to lie down on the floor. She would get yelled at for goofing around and she would just get back to work, work through the pain and then come home and hold her head in agony and cry. She did not want special treatment and she never told anyone what her challenges were. She didn't want anyone to think she couldn't do it. I spent hours and hours helping her learn songs and lines and I saw how hard she worked. Some of the juniors and seniors were upset she got big parts as a sophomore but I saw how hard she worked and I knew she had earned it
    Next came her junior year and more plays. She performed in "The Night of January 16th", where she played an old Swedish woman. She stayed in the audience until it was time to testify in the trial and she kept in character as a shaky, old woman and she talked to people very sweetly until she got fired up on the witness stand. She was very funny.

She even beat one of the witnesses with her purse

     Then came time for her to try out for the musical. Her junior year they were going to perform “Beauty and the Beast”. They had an extra lot of girls try out that year. Every girl wanted badly to play the part of Belle. Some of the girls were desperate to get that part. Haley was only a junior and the leads usually went to the seniors so she didn't expect she had much of a chance to get the lead. She practiced and practiced her lines and song. She was so good it gave me chills. She worked very hard. She auditioned but when the call-back list was posted her name was not on it. She was very sad and disappointed. She said to me, “Mom, I at least want to be a spoon”. I knew she had a big part regardless of the list because her practice was so amazing. I kept telling her I thought she got Belle. I was so sure of it that I made a big congratulation sign before the list was even posted. When she went to school the day they posted the cast list she was too scared to look at the list. One of her friends tackled her screaming when Haley came out of the bathroom. Haley got the part of Belle. She was in shock but also very happy. Both the choir directors told Haley that her audition blew them away and they knew instantly they wanted her to play Belle, that there was no reason to have her come to callbacks. After she got the part some of the senior girls were very mad at her and told her it was not fair, that she had robbed the part from them on the last year they could be in the musical. This made Haley very sad. She understood why they wanted such a great part and that they wanted their senior year to be memorable. I knew what Haley had been through, all the rough times. I knew how hard she had worked for this. One of the biggest lessons I learned in this experience is not to judge another person if you have not walked in their shoes. I wished every one of these girls could have walked through the previous two years of Haley's life and all the practices. If they had been able to, I knew, like me, they would cry they would be so happy she had come through so much and fought her way back up to get this. I have thought many times about this and cheered people on in their victories. Haley did a beautiful job playing Belle. I had a lot of people tell me she played her part so well they cried. I cried too.

The sign I made for Haley and hid until her part was announced

    The final night of her performance a lot of little girls came dressed up in their princess dresses and lined up to get their pictures taken with the leads. All these little girls were so excited to meet Belle. I watched Haley hugging and talking to them and it touched me how sweet she was with these little girls. They loved her. It made me cry again. One of these little girls, who went to church with us, would look for Haley every Sunday and give her a big hug. This was one of the highlights of Haley's life and one where I was so happy she had made it to the top of this big hard mountain she had had to climb.

Signing someone's program

This is one of my favorites. I love it!

   Haley performed in more plays as a senior, in “The Miracle Worker” and she was the lead in “Guys and Dolls”.

Haley in "The Miracle Worker"

She also had a very small part in this play with no lines. She was happy for her friends who got the big parts

Haley performing in "Guys and Dolls"

     With Haley's passion for life she still wanted to do it all, she just had to find a different road to take. I traveled the very rough road with her so this victory was so sweet for her and me as her mother. It felt to me like she had worked hard to climb a mountain, where she was beaten by storms, knocked back down the mountain but she still kept climbing until she got to the top of that mountain. It was to me like her part as Belle, where everything went wrong in her life at once but she never gave up hope and always looked for what good there was in life. Thank you Haley for for being an example to me of how to make lemonade when life hands you lemons, how to climb mountains no matter how tall or how big the obstacles and that when you want do something to give it 100%. You have been a big inspiration to me. Thank you.

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.