My Story

My passion has always been to help other people so today I am going to deviate and go back over my life--way back.
My mother married at 16 and soon was expecting me....maybe not a great treasure for a very young mother. I was born a month early and I recall my mother telling me that I was the ugliest baby she had ever seen. "You could see every vein in your bald head," she told me.
My maternal grandmother was thrilled at my birth and for some reason my mother turned me over to my grandmother after I was born. Fortunately my grandmother was an angel.
However, when I was six months old other relatives kept telling my parents they needed to get their baby back, so they did.
By the time I was one, I had hair and looking back at my baby pictures I don't think I was an ugly baby then. Tiny, but not ugly.
I don't recall much about my early childhood, except that my father was a foreman for a coal mine in Kingman, Arizona. It was and hot and dry and I didn't like it even as a toddler treking accross a prickly patch of cactus to a small one room cabin that I shared with my parents and baby brother. My mother cooked for the miners in a large tent that housed the mining machinery and smelled like greese. To this day, I don't like pancakes because they bring bake the memory and awful stenchl of those greesy machines.
I recall droping a toy down the mine shaft one day, and weeks later my father found it.....dirty and covered with black coal dust.
We moved to Salt Lake City and I soon had 5 younger siblings...born 18-months to two-years a part. The frouth child was a gorgeous little blue eyed girl with blond curlys and big dimples. My first sister, and I adored her and played with her like she was a doll. When she was two, my girl friend and I used to dress her up in lots of layers of clothes to make her look like a fat lady. She hated it and when she grew up she never let me forget it. Somehow she got the tan skin that I wanted and she had no freckles.
When I started kindergarten, I weighed a little over 37 pounds....the smallest girl in my class----and still was when I was in sixth grade. My face was loaded with freckles and how I hated those freckles.
As good fortune would have it we moved across the street from an amazing family---the Johnson family--and we became life-long friends. "Some people come into out lives and quickly go , others stay awhile and leave footprints on our hears and we are never, ever the same."
Shana , their youngest daughter, was nine months younger than me and we became inseparable freinds. A world of holly hock dolls, wet sand sandwiches smashed between two large cottonwood leaves, running through sprinklers, games of run-sheep-run, kick-the-can, red-rover, red rover, walking on crushed pop cans, home made stilts, bike rides to Memory Grove and Liberty Park, trips riding the Bamburger to Salt Airre, and LaGoon, and riding the trolley in downtown Salt Lake---it was a magical child hood.
The Camay movie theatre was only a few blocks away and admission was 5 cents for kids. Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies were favorites. We'd go home and try to sing and dance like all of them..
Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger were part of our make believe weekly adventures. Bambi was a tear-jerker and big hit. Holiday Inn, Yankee Doodle Dandee, Road to Morocco, Me and My Gal, Going My Way, Meet Me in St. Louis, were some of the many movies we saw.
Then came the war movies...many of them.--" Here Come the Waves," with Bing Crosby and Betty Hutton, "Sands of Iwo Jima," and "49th Parallel" were just a few. We were very aware of the war and intensely patriotic. We had rationing coupon books. Sugar was among the food that was rationed.
Now, I look back upon sugar rationing and think it would be a blessing if we had that today. Sugar pulls calcium from the bones, contributes to cancer, candida, heart problems, high cholesterol, alcoholism, behavior problems in children and the list goes on and on. However, when I was a child I loved sugar, craved sugar and ate tons of sugar.  Now we know that 16 grams of sugar per day is the maximum that children should eat a
day and 26 grams per adults.
As a kid we had Fats Gas station on one corner with all the penny candy anyone could ever want. On the other corner we had Zissi's root beer with 2 cent minature iced mugs of root beer. We were either at one corner or the other almost daily. It is no one wonder that now in my ancient years I have osteoporosis. I do take magnesium, Vitamin D-3 and Collagen 2 to help rebuild or maintain my bone density. and eat very little sugar.
(to be continued)
Father's fall off boilermaker at 40 feet, move to home with an out house and no bathtub, cooking on a coal stove. Married at age 21, widowed at age 32 when expecting 4th child. Remarriage and physically abused, had three more children that included twins, divorce, returned to college and earned degrees in Journalism and Ed. Psychology then worked as a coordinator of Women's Center, then as a school counselor, therapist. Remarriage. Wrote book "Defeating Depression & Beating the Blues. Became very ill with chronic fatigue, recovered and then found out I had liver cancer. Recovered on an alkaline diet without chemo . Started working on Ph.D in Holistic Nutrition. Husband had heart attack, then kidney cancer, coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure and then I became a widow again. I remarried, went on a mission, finished my doctorate in Holistic nutrition, wrote "Free Yourself from Chronic Fatigue & Fibromyalgia," worked in temple for seven years, studied Body Code and became certified in Emotion Code, got my certification in clinical hypnosis, and became certified in light therapy.