by Hoda Kotb
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Amy Barnes
Lindsay Beck
Patrick Weiland
Diane Van Deren
Ron Clifford
Roxanne Quimby
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Sami, Abdel, Judi, and Jim
~
And for anyone who needs hope
INTRODUCTION
Ever asked it? With your nose pressed up against a mental crystal ball, your eyes squinting and your heart pounding, have you ever asked:
What will happen if I . . . ?
Fill in the blank: get a divorce, win the lottery, am diagnosed with cancer, quit my job, suddenly lose someone I love.
We’ve all wondered about a what-if and wished for time’s guidance. We want time to say to us, “Yep, you’ve made the right decision.” Or “Everything’s going to work out just fine.” But (hmph!) time won’t tell. Not until we take a first step. Time then takes over, slowly turning our what-ifs into realities. The days, months, and years eventually reveal, like a Polaroid, a clear picture of how significant events and decisions ultimately shape our lives.
From time to time, I’ll look back through the personal journals I’ve scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages. I was desperate to know whether one day I would feel happy again, that I would find love again, that I would survive. How intriguing to look back at those past fears now that I have the benefit of hindsight. It made me think, What if I asked other people to take a look back at their greatest challenges with a decade’s worth of perspective? What an interesting concept for a book. Plenty of us, including me, have struggled to take a first step toward an uncertain future. We’ve all prayed for the patience required to heal our pain, one excruciating day at a time. We’ve all wondered, in our darkest hours, how life could possibly change for the better.
Ten Years Later is about the journey six extraordinary people take with time. Each has experienced a game-changing event—perhaps a life-threatening illness or a catastrophic personal loss. Some of the challenges will make you wonder how the person got through the next ten minutes. Others will make you think a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to overcome the damage done. Following the game changer, you’ll find out what steps (or missteps) each person took and how each has fared over the next ten years. Did her decision turn out to be wise? How did he navigate the pain? Has she truly changed? Throughout the book, Time curls its pointer finger, beckoning Curiosity, “Come with me. See where I took this life.”
In my own life, I’ve had numerous personal and professional game changers. Some broke my heart, others made me braver. One of the earliest game changers happened along an interstate. In 1987, I was driving around the Southeast in my mom’s car, looking for my first job out of college. I had a degree in communications from Virginia Tech and a twenty-minute videotape résumé. I bought a new green suit for the one interview I so ignorantly assumed it would take to land a television reporting job in Richmond, Virginia. Well, I was off by about six suits and a hundred TV market rankings. Richmond told me no. Memphis said no. Three nos from Birmingham. My résumé tape got ejected from VCR after VCR, and my one day on the road turned into eight, then nine, then ten. “No, sorry.” The maddening cycle of ejection, rejection, and dejection started in Virginia and continued all the way down through the Florida panhandle. A total of twenty-seven news directors told me no. I was devastated. My dream of working in TV news was now looking more like a career in public relations. I turned the car around and headed north back toward Virginia. And then, somewhere in Mississippi, I took a wrong turn. GPS systems and cell phones did not exist; I was officially lost. As I drove around looking for a way to get back on track, I noticed a billboard for WXVT featuring the CBS Eye. The station was located in Greenville, a TV market I hadn’t considered. I figured, What do I have to lose? I drove to Greenville, digging deep for one last shred of hope. That very day, Stan Sandroni was promoted from WXVT’s sports director to news director, and he agreed to see me. In went my résumé tape, and out came the words I so desperately wanted to hear.
“Hoda, I like what I see.”
My wrong turn turned out to be one of the best mistakes I’ve ever made. Stan hired me after nearly thirty other people would not. Gutting out the challenge of rejection paid off. That chance meeting would prove to be a game changer in my life.
Ten Years Later profiles six people who’ve faced a series of life’s game changers and challenges—abuse, illness, addiction, grief, job loss. These people didn’t just fight their way through adversity, they forged better lives because of the battle. Their journeys are measured in the very small steps that painstakingly result in change and the big, bold leaps of faith that launch dreams. The book is meant to inspire you, wow you, motivate you, and move you—and maybe even do all those things within the same chapter. In the pages ahead, the courageous people who share their life stories have done so in hopes of enriching yours—now or ten years later.
AMY BARNES
I’ve met plenty of inspiring women on the Today show’s Joy Fit Club who’ve lost a significant amount of weight. But when Joy shared with me the profile of a particular club member, Amy Barnes, I knew she was special. In the short story Amy wrote about her journey, it was clear that her astounding 340-pound weight loss was not her proudest accomplishment. This woman wanted to share what she considered the more important message. She wanted people to know that she had shed and survived an even heavier burden.
In the spring of 2001, twenty-seven-year-old Amy Barnes was working as a paralegal at the Anoka County Public Defender’s Office, thirty miles north of Minneapolis. Her career was solid, but her personal life was vulnerable, not that Amy recognized it. There were too many distractions. She had two sons from different fathers, a cheating husband, and a hundred extra pounds on her five-feet-eight frame. On a sunny April day, Amy walked next door to the courthouse to pick up new client files. As she headed back to her office, a handsome man her age started up a conversation.
“It was his smile, it was his eyes, it was the way he smelled, it was his voice,” Amy recalls. “He was just smooth. He was well groomed and very well spoken. This was in the midst of me finding out my husband was having an affair. I had low self-esteem, and all of a sudden this really hot guy is paying attention to me.”
(We’ll call “this guy” Robert throughout.)
“I had this stack of file folders in my hand and he asked if he could help carry them back,” she recalls. “He was a gentleman and nice, so he helped carry them back, and he saw that I worked at the PD office.”
The tall, well-built Robert asked Amy for her number. She told him no; she was not interested.
The next day at work, a huge bouquet arrived for Amy.
“There must have been two to three dozen red roses, and all the card said was, Dinner?”
Robert called right as the flowers arrived. “I told him, ‘Thanks, but no.’ ”
He called Amy’s office every day for a week. She finally said yes to lunch. Robert drove them in his luxury sedan to the Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park along the Mississippi River.
“He went into the trunk and pulled out a blanket and thi
s huge picnic basket,” she says, “and we had a picnic in the park. That was our first date.”
Amy grew up just thirteen miles northwest of the park in Elk River, Minnesota. She describes her parents as hardworking and her upbringing as loving and middle-class. She and her younger sister were raised to go to church and to get an education. In 1992, Amy graduated from high school and enrolled for a year in a small Christian liberal arts university in Saint Paul. By nineteen, Amy had met and begun dating her first boyfriend. She then transferred to Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud on a golf scholarship. But in 1994, at twenty-one, Amy became pregnant, making her ineligible for the grant. She lost her funding and her boyfriend, who was not interested in a relationship with his new son, Marcus.
“He was twenty-five and told me he didn’t want to be a dad. He said, ‘I’m not ready to be a dad.’ I told him that being a dad was not a matter of convenience,” she says, “and you either choose all or nothing. And he said, ‘I choose nothing.’ ”
Amy got a part-time job on campus and a full-time job as a single parent. Ten months later, she met her second boyfriend. Over the next two years, school, work, a relationship, and the baby kept Amy very busy. In May 1998, she graduated with honors from Saint Cloud with three degrees—a bachelor of arts in criminal justice, minority studies, and human relations. She walked across the stage carrying her diploma and nine months of baby beneath her black gown. She gave birth to her second son, Terrell, a month later. Amy spent the next two years working toward a master’s degree and raising her sons with Terrell’s father. In June 2000, she got an MA in psychology and a certificate of marriage; she wed Terrell’s dad after dating him for six years. But soon after, trouble began. Amy says her parents clearly taught her right from wrong, but for some reason, she kept making bad decisions when it came to men.
“I found out he was having an affair,” she says, “and we were married for less than a year.”
Amy admits the affair was not a shock. She says the relationship was broken from the start. She describes her then-husband as a frequent drinker and herself as a pushover. He was an absentee partner, but she welcomed help with the boys whenever he came home. She’d also become obese, gaining seventy pounds with Marcus and another seventy with Terrell, who weighed nearly thirteen pounds when he was born. Plus, Amy had a history of bad relationships with food.
“I’ve been on a diet since I was fourteen. My mom has been on a diet since I can remember,” she explains. “There was never a time that I wasn’t taking a diet pill, that I wasn’t trying some crazy diet.”
At 335 pounds, Amy was not only physically heavy, she felt the weight of the world on her shoulders as a working mother of two. She separated from her husband in April 2001 and began kickboxing at a local gym in an effort to lose weight.
That same month, she crossed paths with Robert, who was paying a traffic ticket fine at the county courthouse. Amy would have no way of knowing what a high price she’d pay for agreeing to have lunch with him in the park. Their relationship progressed quickly. Within six months of their first date, Robert moved in with Amy and her six- and three-year-old sons. She was happy to have a family, of sorts, to nurture.
“God put me on earth to be a wife and a mom,” she says. “There’s nothing that brings me more joy.”
Amy felt self-assured in her new relationship.
“I stopped going to the gym and we ate out a lot. He made me feel secure the way I looked already, so losing weight wasn’t as much of a necessity at that point. It was, ‘I love you just the way you are, just the way you look; you’re absolutely perfect.’ ”
Over the next few months, Amy’s weight began to grow and her world began to shrink. She wasn’t troubled by either change.
“I know now looking back it was all a control thing,” she says. “He would call me ten times a day. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m going out with my girlfriends this weekend,’ and he would say, ‘No, I really want to spend time with you.’ Abusers slowly try to close you off from your friends and family, but you don’t realize it when you’re in it.”
Within a year, Robert’s reactions intensified. He questioned Amy’s every move and motive.
“The mental and emotional abuse started. I don’t really remember when it transitioned from ‘I love you. You don’t need to go to your mom’s’ to the name calling and the checking the caller ID and seeing that my mom called, and being insecure about what we talked about, or, ‘Why were you on the phone with your mom for twenty-seven minutes?’ He would check the logs and check the caller ID to see who called. Then it got to the point where he would escalate things and accuse me of talking to another man,” she says. “He would actually get more mad if he didn’t see any phone calls come in, because then it was me deleting evidence that I was talking to my mom, or a friend, or some other guy. He would say, ‘I know you talked to somebody. Who did you talk to?’ It got to the point where people stopped calling the house because they knew the repercussions that I would face just based on their two- or three-minute check-in phone call.”
Marcus and Terrell became leery of the increasingly volatile Robert.
“They would walk away and go in their rooms,” she says. “They would just kind of disappear.”
Eventually, Robert’s war of words gave way to more potent weapons. He began to use his fists. He fired the first salvo on a drive back from a funeral in Indiana. Robert and Amy dropped off his brothers in Minneapolis. When Robert got back into the car, he accused her of sleeping with one of his brothers, even though both had stayed with an aunt, not in the hotel with Robert and Amy.
“He literally, with a closed fist, punched me three or four times in the face,” she remembers. “Then there was an ‘I’m sorry.’ A honeymoon stage, like, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again.’ That honeymoon period was probably the longest, because it was the first time he hit me. It was probably two or three months. That was long. After that, a honeymoon period could last anywhere from two weeks to three days.”
Robert rarely hit Amy in the face or arms, to avoid causing obvious bruising on her body. She recalls a day when Robert returned from a trip and became enraged when he found no calls logged on her cell phone. It sparked a particularly brutal beating.
“He hit me on the same leg for two hours. It was like him hitting a punching bag. Every single time I said, ‘I didn’t talk to anyone,’ he would hit me. He would rest from hitting me and move on to the name calling, the name calling, the name calling, and then he would start back in on my leg. It was so bad the next day that when I got out of bed, when I stepped on the ground, I collapsed onto the floor,” she describes. “My leg was so swollen that I couldn’t wear pants. My pants didn’t fit on that side, so I had to wear a skirt.”
I ask her if she ever tried to leave the room during the two hours.
“Ha. No. When he first hit me, I got up off the bed and I said, ‘That hurt. Stop.’ He yelled, ‘Sit the F down.’ The way he said it, I just listened. Because I’m thinking, If I don’t, it’s just going to be worse. So I’ll just sit down and it won’t be as bad. There were three other times during that tirade that I tried to get up,” she says, “and the second time he screamed at me, and the third time he grabbed me by the back of the hair, pulled me back onto the bed, and told me not to get up again. A lot of people ask people in abusive relationships, ‘Why do you put up with it? Why do you stay?’ And it’s because you can prepare yourself. You can mentally and emotionally and physically prepare yourself, and you always think that if you don’t go along with what they’re doing or saying, it’s just going to be worse. So, if you can just calm them down and pacify them by doing whatever they want, or saying what they want to hear . . . You’re willing to do anything just to make them stop.”
Amy had four academic degrees, two little boys, and zero self-worth. Despite the abuse, she stayed with Robert.
“He has done everything from throwing a punch, a kick, he has strangled me, he has burned me with cigar
ettes,” she says. “But I think the worst of everything that he has ever done—and I think a lot of women who have gone through domestic violence would also say this—is the emotional and mental abuse. He would get physically tired from beating me, so a beating could last ten minutes or a half an hour. But the name calling and the words that stung, that could last three or four hours. The worst thing—beyond the name calling for hours at a time—that he did all the time was spit in my face. That to me is the most disrespectful.” She pauses. “I can’t even explain it. I would have rather had him punch me in the face than spit on me.”
Amy at 395 pounds in 2003. Anoka, Minnesota.
(Courtesy of Amy Barnes)
Amy hated herself and her life, which had spun out of control. Her crutch and comfort was food. If an entire large pizza felt good, a whole ice cream cake for dessert felt even better. Amy gorged herself in the bathroom with the door shut or loaded up at the drive-through.
“I ate a lot in my car,” she says, “or I ate a lot when Robert was gone or the kids were in bed.”
Robert spent several days at a time away from home for work. Amy knew some of his relatives were involved with drugs but did not think Robert was, until one afternoon when she forgot her lunch and drove the two miles from work to eat at home. Her sons were in day care. Even from the garage, she could detect an overwhelming and unfamiliar smell. Amy walked into the kitchen and saw Robert and two of his relatives sitting at the breakfast counter.
“I’ll never forget looking at the counter, and there was a sheet of newspaper, and it had a mound of white powder on it and I knew it was cocaine,” she says. “That was the smell. They were cooking crack.”
A horrified Amy says she “lost it.”
“First of all, I worked at the public defender’s office, and I had heard and seen what happens to people who are caught with drugs. Plus, if it’s in my house, they could take my kids away. I screamed, ‘What are you doing?!’ I ran to the counter and I picked up the piece of paper and started running across the kitchen and up the stairs. I was three-hundred-plus pounds. The powder is blowing off the paper. I went running up the stairs, and he’s running after me, and right when I got to the bathroom, I did this”—she tilts the imaginary sheet of newspaper downward—“into the toilet. I did it without thinking of the ramifications. My whole thing was, If someone finds this, they could take my kids away. I could go to prison. It was all over the place. I can still see the look on his face.”