by Paige Wetzel
From conception, Payton showed she would be the child with all the surprises. When we put her on the scale, doctors and nurses looked around at each other, then quickly ordered another scale. Both read the same thing: eight pounds, ten ounces! She was also the complete opposite of her big sister, Harper, who came out with a quiet curiosity about the world around her. Payton was antisocial right off the bat. After Payton’s first forty-eight hours, I think she would have elected to stay in the womb another week or two. She wanted to be held facing the person holding her. She didn’t care much about the rest of the world. She was just there to eat and take naps. After the first three weeks, I learned Payton was not going to be an easy baby. However, I was a much more at ease mother. There was no postpartum depression at all; I seem to have balanced out hormonally much faster. Payton was a high-needs baby—she had to be held, she was not a good sleeper, and she fussed a lot. She was not a kid you could just put in the car and drive around to get a nap in. I had a lot of rough days with Payton, but I knew that if I let her stay in her crib and cry for ten minutes while I gathered myself, it wouldn’t hurt either of us. Some days I cried as much as she did, and some days I cried looking at the heap of laundry, but I stayed motivated, knowing that every day I was closer to understanding her as a person, not just keeping her alive.
The peace in my heart during a major change was new for me. With Josh’s injury and Harper’s birth, I was constantly defeated by fear of the unknown. I didn’t know much about Payton, but I knew I would figure it out. I had a peace beyond my own understanding that could have only come from God.
JOSH
You would think that after our first child I would be more prepared mentally for the second, but I wasn’t. I was really excited about baby number two. I had fully embraced the title of “girl dad,” and I was going to rock it. Paige’s second labor was so different from her first. She was calm, and we were updated every step of the way. Even when it was time to push, it just seemed like the room was still very peaceful. But when Payton Ruth entered the world, I started crying even more than I did when Harper was born.
All the emotions from the day Harper was born came flooding back. I already knew I could be a good dad, but I wanted to be a great dad. After everything that had happened between me and Paige, I kept thinking about the kind of man that I wanted those two little girls to marry. I obviously have high expectations for whoever marries my girls one day, and I wanted to be an example of that. I wanted to show them how a man should truly treat and love a woman, something I would spend the rest of my life trying to master.
I was an emotional wreck the first couple of days after Payton was born. Everything made me cry, from Harper meeting her sister for the first time to bringing her to our brand-new home. Harper was so excited to be a big sister. Everywhere Payton was, Harper wanted to be right there asking to hold her, snuggle with her, or touch her. She honestly thought that Payton was her own baby. Seeing them together made me so happy. I could just stare at them interacting with each other, but then the room would get really dusty all of a sudden, and I just couldn’t stop from tearing up!
CHAPTER NINETEEN
RENEWAL
The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.
—Exodus 14:14
PAIGE
G.B. and Nan got to meet Payton, and they lived to make her smile. I have several great pictures of her looking up at G.B. and laughing while he played with her in her car seat. After his stint in the hospital just before Payton was born, G.B. could not stay out of the hospital. He never felt well and had to be under constant supervision because he would need more help than he thought he did. He passed away on March 30, 2017. After watching Josh overcome his struggles and having to fight very hard to live, it was a strange feeling to have such a sense of relief when I knew my grandfather wasn’t struggling anymore. However, this left me to do one the hardest things I have ever done: explaining his death to my three-year-old. While some saw it as controversial, as a military spouse I vowed to never shield my children from death. Death is the only guarantee in this life, and I could not pretend it didn’t exist.
We went to a final family viewing in the funeral parlor with just Josh, Harper, and me. She asked why G.B. was sleeping, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I told her, “He’s not sleeping, baby.
G.B. died, and he’s going to go to heaven, and we’re not going to see him anymore.”
“We won’t get to see him?” Harper asked.
“No, baby, he will be in heaven with Jesus.” She put her head on my shoulder and began to cry. Josh and I began sobbing seeing our sweet child react like this. As painful as it was, I was thankful she understood and, like always, had such a calm demeanor that we knew came straight from God.
My sister and I delivered the eulogy alongside a few of G.B.’s friends. So many people credit G.B. with their careers, athletic accomplishments, and even their relationships with God. Saying goodbye to him was incredibly painful, but I was reminded of a verse that I included in my eulogy, Matthew 25:23: “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’” My prayer for my own life is for that phrase to be said over me as I enter eternity with my Heavenly Father, just like it was with G.B. Beasley.
JOSH
The loss of G.B. was the loss of a great friend for me. There was no doubt he had always meant a lot to Paige, but he mentored me in both wisdom and humor when I joined the Army. He was the only veteran in Paige’s family, and I very much admired him for the self-made person he became. After G.B.’s funeral, we entered the first year of “consecutives” since 2012, with no major changes. In 2017, we lived in the same house, had the same number of children, and had the same jobs as we did in 2016. We were settling into life as we knew it as civilian people with two kids and jobs at the local university. It seemed nice and well packaged. Payton was still under a year old, but we were getting the hang of parenting two littles and the routine of getting Payton to daycare and Harper to preschool. I was finding career-boosting opportunities within Auburn Athletics. Paige was coming up on a full year as the director of volleyball operations. We had this routine down.
This is what we’d been waiting on—life on our terms. No one was left with all the parenting duties because the other one worked too far away, neither one of us was in a delicate medical state that would require emergency hospital trips, and our adapted home was making all the difference in safety and convenience in everyday life. After so many years of big events happening to us, we were finally in charge of what we did with our lives. But autonomy and control also have an ugly side effect—complacency. As we pushed through 2017, Paige and I both settled into being people we didn’t like.
I think every wounded veteran, and maybe even every person who’s ever experienced trauma, must inevitably come face-to-face with questioning their purpose on earth. While in recovery, every veteran has that moment of asking, Why am I here? Why did this happen to me? While at Walter Reed, I was able to answer those questions easily: I fought to recover for my guys who were still overseas. I felt like every milestone I achieved was able to lift up someone else.
But now it was just us—me and my three girls—and our biggest issue was just getting through day after day. Life was happening around me, and I felt like a spectator, not a participant. This same questioning I had at Walter Reed came to me like an epiphany, except I didn’t suddenly have the answers to cure a disease, write a great song, or know how to put a man on Mars. It was an epiphany of quick questions in succession.
The same questions—Why am I here? Why did this happen to me?—assaulted my thoughts, except now, we didn’t know the answer. Paige and I went to work and came home from work, without ever pausing to question what we were doing. While we were in a much better place emotionally with each other, it didn’t help us understand why we were so tired even after we got decent sle
ep, or why we felt the need to work on an off weekend or a vacation. We tried a million things to just feel better, but nothing was worth repeating. We had given up on taking care of our bodies, which led me to try sleep studies and new sockets for my legs, but nothing was helping. At the end of the day everything was so much harder for me than it was for anyone else. After a while it was all I could think about.
PAIGE
Life was going by us at a hundred miles an hour. I was frustrated about being frustrated, beating myself up over feeling like I had already defeated this once. I have always been the more attentive spouse when it comes to feeling like things are getting out of whack. I would try to talk to Josh about never eating dinner together, missing church a lot, and working when we didn’t necessarily have to. Josh spent a lot of time justifying what he was doing and saying that there was no way around it. Our jobs were stressing us out as if they were life or death. We both love Auburn and everything that the university and the athletics department have given us, but at the end of the day, no one was getting shot at by the Taliban. This was not life or death. There was all this pressure to get it done, but then I’d look back wondering if I’d accomplished anything at all.
We spent the better part of 2017 like this: I’d wake up already irritated about something (Payton didn’t sleep well, Josh snored all night, I hit snooze too many times… ), I would walk around the house grumbling and griping at my children and husband as I got everyone ready for school, and finally we would be out the door. By the time I got to work, I felt behind. As an operations person, 80 percent of what I do is time sensitive. I would look at my to-do list and feel completely overwhelmed and incapable of getting it done. I would get started on one thing only to suddenly realize it was time for practice or a meeting. Then I would rush to the next location, knowing I was getting more behind but relieved that I temporarily didn’t have to face my to-do list. I was excited about watching practice, but it only reminded me that it was not the haven that it used to be for me. I truly loved coaching—helping people get better at volleyball by way of overcoming obstacles and learning leadership in real time. In my operations role, I didn’t get to do that firsthand anymore, which led me to becoming bitter, jealous, and judgmental and wishing I was doing something else. After practice, I would return to my office and my disaster of a to-do list. I lost weight, sleep, and self-esteem from insurmountable anxiety. I constantly woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat, realizing I didn’t schedule something that was needed in the next forty-eight hours or less. I would wake up wondering, Where is the greener grass people talked about once they settled into a career, life, marriage, parenting?
Inevitably, Josh and I grew apart for different reasons than the last time. Last time, we didn’t like each other and daydreamed about a life where we didn’t have to deal with each other. This time we were desperate for each other but couldn’t find the time for just the two of us. We were both under so much stress and now trying to raise two children. I jumped on every opportunity to escape my responsibilities, while Josh wouldn’t let go of his long enough to have a conversation. November hit, and the month was a breaking point for me. Josh was working the football and basketball seasons while I was still traveling with volleyball. For five straight weeks, we accidentally left our kids at school multiple times, we got fast food for every single meal, and I even had walking pneumonia and didn’t realize it.
After the football season ended at the SEC Championship game, I asked Josh to inventory his year. After some thinking, he summed it up as feeling like he was both torn and running on fumes. He had a great love for Auburn Athletics but also felt completely bogged down in its daily demands. His phone could never be ignored; his work laptop was always open. He never came up for air. When I asked him what was important to him in life, his response was similar to mine: having a strong relationship with God, raising our children to the best of our abilities, and influencing people in a positive way with his story. Yet we had skipped church for who knew how many Sundays and even stopped praying at night together for the entire semester. We didn’t spend time with our girls, we only bathed them (occasionally), fed them, and put them in bed. Influencing people? Not happening. The to-do list outweighed all human interaction. Josh agreed that these were real issues but didn’t think there was actually a solution to it. His responses had a flavor of defensiveness and discouragement. As earnestly as he could, he would tell me, “I’m doing all of this for you guys. I want to provide for my family, and that’s what I’m trying to do every day.” I was so confused. I respected Josh for how hard he worked. More than that, I was so unbelievably grateful that he had found a second career when we were certain the only thing he would ever be good at was infantry Army. But at the same time, I seemed to be the only one who remembered that our jobs didn’t require military-level commitment. Yes, SEC sports was a high-pressure industry, and you were constantly getting ready for the next game or season, but no matter how hard you worked, you could never leave the office with everything done. So, where was the line? How much was too much? How long could I do my job if Josh was going to work at this rate? How long could he last in his job if he never says no to anything or asks if something can wait? It’s not that I had any kind of solution, either, but day after day I thought, Surely this isn’t it.
The year came to a close, and even though Josh and I knew we desperately needed 2018 to be better, we hadn’t come to a decision together about what we needed to do. Regardless of how we could respond as a family, I knew my attitude was the first thing that had to change. Nothing was going to change until I started treating my responsibilities as great opportunities. After spending the holidays reflecting on my own growth, I decided to begin my year by participating in the “21 Days of Prayer and Fasting” program at our church. Every January and August, our church completes twenty-one consecutive days of 6:00 a.m. prayer that takes place at the Church of the Highlands campuses all over the state and online. Josh and I had participated in the event before, but it was mostly a way for us to form habits for our New Year’s resolutions, not get closer to God. This time, I was determined to stand in the gap for my family and seek a plan for the future.
I asked Josh to participate with me and told him of my new dedication to the next twenty-one days. Every morning at 6:00 a.m., Josh and I committed to thanking God for everything He had given us and asked for forgiveness for treating it like a burden. I brought to God my anxiety over my job and how I wanted to steward my tasks at work as opportunities better. A college volleyball player only gets four years in our program, and I didn’t want them all to remember me for obsessing over my tasks and not making time for them.
Once 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting ended, small-group semesters began. It seemed as if every time we turned around, someone was telling us to join a small group. Whether it was based on running, cooking, coffee, reading, Bible study, parenting, loving on homeless people, or prison ministry, we were constantly told to find meaningful relationships within our church. I felt like this was the next step, and that any other step would move me backward.
My dilemma was getting Josh to jump in, too. I gently brought it up a few times, but Josh always responded by looking into the distant future, when we weren’t so busy. So, I decided to trick Josh into going to this small group on the first day. On a Monday night, I informed him that we had a “church thing” that night and that I had already gotten a babysitter for the kids. When we were on our way to our leaders’ house, I told him it was actually a small group that would meet every Monday night until spring ended. Josh said, “Paige, are you serious? Mondays? You know Mondays are my busiest days.” I asked him to just give it this one night, and if he absolutely hated it, he would never have to come back.
JOSH
When we pulled up at these strangers’ house, I was annoyed and a little resentful. I felt like we were past the days of signing up for things without consulting each other. I really didn’t feel like the problem was in our marriage, and
if I had had more time on the car ride, I would have asked Paige why she volunteered us for a semester of “fix your marriage.” I thought things were going well between us, that we were just overworked, which is why adding something to our schedule made no sense to me. However, Paige said that if I hated it, I didn’t have to come back. Since the group was for married couples, I didn’t want to make Paige look abandoned, but I was going to try to find out how mandatory my attendance actually was.
Much to my surprise, this wasn’t a marriage group at all. It was a curriculum called “Freedom” that was for anyone. In fact, men went in one room and women in another, but we discussed the same things at the same time. It was going to be tough to slip away from a structure like this. Mingling half-heartedly with the group, I briefly thought that I might be coming off as rude. It’s not that I was against small groups—Paige and I had talked about joining one a million times—I just wish I had known more about it beforehand. As we were getting started, I decided I would at least be friendly and speak if I was called on.
When we got in the car after the first meeting, I already had a ton of things going through my head. We started at the very beginning of the Bible talking about the downfall of man with Adam and Eve. Of course, I knew this story: The serpent, Eve eats the fruit, Adam eats the fruit, they both realize they are naked and try to hide from God. But I guess I had never paid attention to how it all happened. Genesis 3:5: “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Surely I had read that before? I guess I had never really thought about the fact that Satan didn’t use evil to make someone stumble. He used their desire to be like God. From there we had a huge discussion about how much people sin just trying to out-God each other. We become competitive and discouraging and unaccepting. That made total sense to me. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had probably been on both sides of that. I wanted to know more. I wanted to dig into the workbook that I hadn’t even been sure I was going to buy when I had arrived two hours prior.