My Story
“Everything that goes wrong in our house is your fault,” my mom barked while trying to overcome the limitations of her seatbelt to hit me. I was a senior in high school. We were driving my younger brother home from what would end up being his first of many trips to drug rehab. My brother, who took her side most of the time, was always so zen right after rehab. He laughed and said, “Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? Staci has never done anything wrong in her life. C’mon…if anyone is to blame here, maybe it’s the person you just picked up from REHAB!”
My first memory of my mom is her making clothes for my brother on her sewing machine. I was 3 or 4 and had something I wanted to show her…like a picture I had just drawn. I walked over to the sewing machine and stood next to her, waiting for her to look at me. She never did (not even an eye-contactless, “Gimme a sec”). After a few minutes, I just walked away, deflated, ignored, unloved.
It turned out that my mom is an alcoholic. Her mom was too…and so was her mom before that–three generations of alcoholic moms. Me? I’ve never been drunk. You could say my mom’s sister crashing through the windshield of her car while driving drunk & high–ultimately being a vegetable for 10 years before we had her euthanized via starvation–sobered me right up. Cheers!
When I was 6, a family friend raped me in the street. I ran away from him while he chased after me, threatening to kill me if I told anyone. But I told my dad. Right away. My dad reported the rape to the police, and our friend was arrested. My parents were afraid for me to take the witness stand, so ultimately the rapist was set free. I repressed the memory of the rape until I was a teenager. As you might have guessed, PTSD was the soil that my life rooted in.
My dad was everything to me–nurturing, tough, patient, kind, a leader, a bad ass. (The woman I called “mom” was just a bully who lived with us–Dad was both my father AND mother.) If anyone deserves the credit for breaking the cycle of alcoholic mothers in my family, it’s him–not me. He was a self-made millionaire who owned a truck tire company and, in his spare time for fun, guided rich and famous people on grizzly bear hunts on Kodiak Island in Alaska. Nevertheless, I wanted to be just like him…and, a few months after the rape, the school sent home a paper recruiting kids for the track team. My dad had been a hurdler, so I decided to join.
Like Jenny Gump praying, “Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far…far, far away from here,” track & field gave me those wings. I won everything in sight…I went undefeated for entire seasons. I had my first state championship crown by 5th grade. In 8th grade, I got so many plaques at the team banquet that I was dropping them on the floor while 100 parents gave me a standing ovation. In college, I was a 2-time NCAA All-American…I was ranked top 3 in the nation two years in a row. And, my first year at Nationals, I did it while actively dealing with delayed-onset, rape-related PTSD. I was having regular flashbacks, nightmares, and panic attacks.
I was the first person on either side of my family (including aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents) to go to college. I graduated a year early with honors. After college, I had a lawsuit settlement from suing the rapist. After having volunteered countless hours at a local legal aid clinic and working at another one, I decided to use the money to open a legal document store/paralegal business and be an entrepreneur like my dad. The award-winning business is called Do It Yourself Documents and is now a multi-state franchise! (I later sold it.)
I met my first husband right after my first trip to Track nationals while I was still dealing with the severe PTSD. He was 4 years older than me, Armenian, had competed at Cross Country nationals, and was working on his Master’s in School Counseling when I met him. He had never told anyone that a stranger raped him in a public restroom during a little league game when he was 9 years old. The massiveness of getting married brought his trauma forward. He literally ran out the front door after telling me. We were married for 5 years.
I went on to be trained as a Volunteer Crisis Response Counselor certified by the State of California Department of Justice. I volunteered answering after-hours phone calls on the crisis hotline and responding as a victim advocate with police to reports of sexual assault and domestic violence. While I had a husband at home desperately in need of sexual assault counseling but barely able to get off the couch, I was volunteering to help those who were ready at a place called San Bernardino Sexual Assault Services.
A few years after our divorce, my dad flew down for a surprise visit. We were just hanging out…I was wrapping some Christmas gifts. My dad said he had something important to tell me. Annoyed, I said, “I can listen & wrap presents at the same time.” But he insisted I come up and sit on the couch with him. He told me he had two months to live. He had been diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer, which has a 3% survival rate. Of all the trauma I’ve written about on this page (and I didn’t even bother to mention the two date rapes I survived in adulthood), this is the one that I teared up for as I typed it.
My dad, known to friends & family as “Big Jon,” fought the most deadly cancer in the world for 2 1/2 years…I guess fighting grizzly bears was, as he would say, “just masturbation.” He spent his last few weeks in bed at home on hospice care. My family told me to go back to my house two states away for a bit, enjoy my 30th birthday. So I did. On the evening of my birthday, my aunt called and said I needed to fly back asap. I stared at my empty suitcase…wondering if I should pack a funeral outfit. He died on April 23, 2009, two days after my 30th birthday. I gave his eulogy and wrote his obituary.
We decided to have a camp fire ceremony with a “redneck” 21 gun salute across the Columbia River and place my dad’s ashes there near Crab Creek (one of his favorite goose hunting spots). Driving over to this event, husband #2 threatened to divorce me. Husband #2 was an illegal immigrant, almost always unemployed, and, as you might have guessed, emotionally abusive.
A few months after my dad died, I lost two houses in the 2008 Mortgage Crisis. My mortgage company had filed bankruptcy and the debt collection company that took over their loans defrauded thousands of Californians into foreclosure. (Ten years later, I got a settlement check from the State of California Grand Jury…for tens of thousands of dollars in lost mortgage payments, my settlement was less than $2,000). My dad was gone, I was married to an abusive loser, and now I was without housing.
I decided to move to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with husband #2, who had relatives there. He swore if he went back to Mexico he’d be able to get a job. Knowing very little Spanish and having no real understanding of how things worked in Mexico, I was very dependent on husband #2…and he became even more abusive. After 2 weeks in Puerto Vallarta, I saw a sign one day saying “12-Step English Meetings” with the AA logo.
The next day, I attended my first Al-Anon meeting. Al-Anon is a 12 step program for friends and family of alcoholics. While husband #2 was not a drinker, my main motivation for attending was to find the strength to leave him, which I did the following week. Husband #2 went on to ride his aunt’s couch, unemployed and not even looking for work, for a year.
A few months after divorce #2, I stumbled on an English-speaking church there in Puerto Vallarta. They did extensive community outreach and volunteer work. I started volunteering at the local orphanage everyday. About this time, my brother called me out of the blue to tell me he wasn’t going to be talking to me any more. Without my dad, my brother, and husband #2, all I had was my toxic mom…so these orphans became my new family. Playing with them everyday was therapy for my soul. Many of the kids started calling me Mama.
While I thought never getting drunk was good, my real plan for breaking the long cycle of alcoholic mothers in my family was to never have kids. But the orphans taught me that I wasn’t like my mom at all. I decided to adopt one of the young boys. If I had no family any more, I could just make my own. But I was informed by the Mexican social services office that I could not adopt him because I wasn’t Mexican.
After that disappointing meeting with the social worker, I ran into a good-looking guy I knew on the sidewalk. He told me his X-girlfriend had told him she was pregnant with his baby. So they got back together, and he had just found out the whole thing was a stunt to get him back. He explained that he was excited at the idea of becoming a dad. He just looked at me and said, “I want to have a baby.” Light bulb!
Two months later, I was pregnant and on my way to making my own family as an independent, single mom. Baby daddy and I had nothing in common…he grew up poor on the streets of Michoacan. His dad had worked for the cartel. He quit school in 5th grade to pick strawberries. He was married at 14 (divorced shortly thereafter) and working for the cartel himself a few years later. I was the only person he knew who had been to college or owned a car. We quickly discovered that despite our external differences, on the inside, we were frighteningly similar (both being the family abuse scapegoats and so forth).
On July 29, 2012, at 10:23 PM, in Puerto Vallarta, I gave birth without drugs on my bed to a 7-pound baby girl. About midnight, after the midwife and doulah had left, my mom (whose presence I had tolerated out of necessity to have help with the baby) told me she was “really tired.” She left. There I was with my 2-hours-old baby…completely alone. I laid her down on my bed and had my first really good, undistracted look at her. Reba McEntire said it best in her song You’re Gonna Be (Loved by Me): “Now I know what scared is.” Fuck killing bears! I named her Jennifer because my dad’s initials were “J.E.N.” (and I thought she probably didn’t want to be “the girl named Jon”…to the tune of Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue).
When Jennifer was about 4 years old, my mom came to my house to spend a few days. Jennifer was learning to use the toilet by herself at night. I told my mom the dining room light would be on all night so Jennifer could easily see the path to the bathroom (my mom normally slept on the fold-out bed in the living room). I offered my mom eye covers, to sleep in my bedroom, etc. She refused. I went to go put my PJs on. When I came back, I overheard my mom tell my daughter that “big girls” sleep with the lights off. Oh. Hell. No. She was not going to gaslight and brainwash my daughter the way she had with me. I confronted her.
In that moment, I knew. The only way to truly protect my daughter was to remove my mom from our lives completely. My mom had already done things like giving my daughter meat when she babysat her (I quit eating meat due to my dad’s hunting when I was 14…I am raising Jennifer vegetarian). That night, my mom chased me through the house trying to force me to hug her so she could relieve her conscience. I jumped up on the furniture to get away from her. Jennifer was standing in the corner crying, watching her grandmother chase her 37-year-old mother through her house, terrified.
After I quit talking to my mom, I did intense work in therapy. I learned that my mom was a narcissist and that, in addition to Complex PTSD, I also suffered from Narcissistic Victim Syndrome.
As a single mom without child support and who has no free babysitters/family, it took me until Jennifer was 5 years old before I could afford to move back to the US. Jennifer attended the Language Academy in San Diego, where she was in the Spanish immersion program. I might not be able to teach her much about her Mexican heritage, but it was important to me that she was proud of and educated about it.I started speaking to crowds of hundreds of people at DJ and wedding-industry conferences. I was a regular contributor to the biggest DJ magazines and blogs. I DJed for Lamborghini, Victoria’s Secret, Reebok, Sephora, Nike, Coca Cola, Comic Con, and many more. I learned how to play on turntables…this lead to spinning at some bars and night clubs. In 2019, I DJed over 100 gigs…then Coronavirus struck.
A few months before Covid, my amazing daughter broke down in our kitchen sobbing. She told me she wanted to die. She was 7. It turns out that she has severe learning disabilities and ADHD (I just thought she was slow with school things because of having grown up with Mom only talking to her in English and Dad only talking to her in Spanish. I enjoy her bouncy, free spirit energy, and the fact that she feels free to scream or dance or run…but apparently teachers do not appreciate this so much.) School is the bear she has to fight everyday. As I was trying to figure out therapy for her while the entire world was shut down, I got some very good, life-changing news.
I was finally, after 11 years, going to be getting a check for the full amount of cash my dad had left me when he died. I was excited…but mostly terrified. I don’t know how to manage that kind of money. And I can *not* fuck up my dad’s legacy. I knew one thing with certainty…I was not going to just hand over the money my dad had gotten up everyday at 5:00 am for to some stranger in a fancy office. I worked with a financial coach, took investment classes, read books. In the end, I more or less lost the inheritance on real estate in Mexico (still fighting numerous legal battles there, sigh).
Right before starting this website, I had a traumatizing experience that brought me back to therapy. A few weeks later, a friend recommended I attend a family constellation workshop, which lead to me participating in an ayahuasca ceremony. I had never heard of ayahuasca. I looked it up…it is an ancient tribal “medicine” (read: a powerful psychedelic) from the Amazon made from a root and leaf. It is consumed with a shaman in a temple surrounded by meditation and fasting and so forth. As far as I’m concerned, drugs are bad, so I forgot about it and moved on. The following week, I mentioned it to another friend. He totally shocked me by saying he had done an ayahuasca ceremony a few years ago. His experience had been very positive and life-changing. He agreed to go with me to the ceremony, so I decided to give it a try. That ceremony is what motivated me to start this website and share my “strength, hope, & wisdom” with the world.
