This is Mikaela. She was born in Berlin, Germany and moved somewhere new nearly every year of her childhood. Her father was in the military. He encouraged individuality and independence and was a good father, instilling structure in his children’s lives. Her mother is a Native American from the Hopi tribe. She was also an alcoholic. Mikaela’s parents divorced when she was very young and she lived with her mother on and off growing up. Once around age five she was left alone with her two siblings while her mother went away for several days with a boyfriend. When she was 7 she watched as her mother got beat up by the same boyfriend over and over. Her father and stepmother, fearing for her safety, organized to kidnap her from school to get her out away from the violence and substance abuse. When she was 9 she began to rebel, she pulled a knife on another girl when she made fun of her mother’s addiction and broke into neighbors house. Her father could not handle her behavior and sent her to live with her mother again and when she walked into her mother’s apartment she saw the same abusive boyfriend sitting on the couch. A while later her mother suffered an appendicitis and the boyfriend refused to take her to the hospital until she was seriously ill. Her mother left him soon after. During this time they were evicted from several apartments and at one time were homeless. Her father would send her mother money but it was never spent on her, she went to her 6th grade dance wearing her mothers oversized dress and shoes and didn’t have new school supplies. When she was ten her mother left her and her brother again for nearly a week. The only thing to eat in the house was oatmeal and frozen popcorn shrimp which she suffered food poisoning from. She still can’t eat shrimp to this day. About a year later, her mom left her home alone once again while she took her brother out to party together, forgetting that it was Mikaela’s 11th birthday. Mikaela called her father on a payphone and asked to be taken back, when her father picked her up she was wearing shoes withe holes all the way through, their first stop was to buy a brand new pair. At thirteen Mikaela started to experience post traumatic stress. She started experiencing debilitating depression, hearing voices, and having flashbacks and attempted suicide several times. She eventually had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for a couple of weeks. Mikaela went to live with her mother a couple more times in highschool, watched her mother suffer through abusive relationships and alcoholism and spiral downhill, often she would have to carry her inside after a cab dropped her off, too intoxicated to walk. Living with her mother was difficult and she would fall into a depression while with her, resorting to cutting herself to taking pills to cope. She tried a final time to live with her mother but was often left unattended, given marijuana as a babysitter while her mother went out to party. At 16 she started to do better in school and was settled in with her father, step-mother and grandmother but she never truly felt like she belonged. She finally decided that she needed to remove herself from her situation in order to start healing and ran away at age seventeen. She ended up finding a group of people who were heading to the WTO protests in Sacramento California. After that she ended up in Santa Cruz where she lived with a group of about 30 or so young people who had also escaped unfavorable circumstances. They built a hidden little shanty town in the redwood forest above the ocean. They called themselves “Forest punx” They didn’t wear make-up, didn’t shave, didn’t do drugs, and foraged all natural organic foods from local dumpsters and farms. There she learned to start thinking for herself and ideas about feminism, anarchy, and social justice were explored. She learned that she could be involved in changing things in the world through activism. She learned that she could have accountability for her own life instead of blaming herself and others and that she was bigger than her past. She looks back on this time with great fondness as she retells me about her adventures and how she went from being an insecure depressed teenager to reshaping her thinking and finding a voice and taking control of her own life. During this time she tried to reconnect with her mother, she organized a trip to the reservation with her. Her mother promised she wasn’t drinking but during the trip she got intoxicated and abandoned Mikaela in Arizona. Mikaela had to call her family to help her get back to California. After a couple of years of living in California she had a terrifying incident with a group of Nazis. Her and her friends were brutally attacked, they narrowly escaped as the Nazis attacked th car busting out all the windows and trying to pull people from the vehicle. Her home was tainted and she felt the need to leave for a while so she headed to Portland to visit friends and family. There she met her husband Bryan at a birthday party. They fell instantly in love and traveled across country together, hitchhiking from Portland to Baltimore. In Baltimore they were bike messengers and lived happily together. She became pregnant at age 20 and although they were young they were excited to be parents. Bryan proposed and they began to plan their life as parents. When it came time for the baby to be born she labored in pain for four days. The baby had lost oxygen and had miconium poisoning. She was told the baby would be severely handicapped. A few days later Mikaela’s baby suffered a large seizure and was put on life support. At nine days old Mikaela and Bryan made the harrowing decision to unplug her from the machines and let her go. Now Mikaela wears a necklace every day with her daughter’s name “Paikea” on it. After the death of their daughter they could not cope with the empty nursery and decided to try again. Their daughter Hunter was born a year after Paikea’s death. Shortly after Hunter was born they decided to leave the violence of Baltimore and headed west to Santa Cruz and then to Portland to be near family. After living in Portland, Oregon a few years, Brian was offered a job transfer for the bike company he works for now in Ogden. Mikaela loves her community and is the founder of the award-winning popular blog “Indie Ogden.” She has a rotating staff of up to fifteen contributors. For a short time she was cyber-bullied because of the blog and was told she was not worthy to be a blogger because of her education, income and looks-mainly that she had tattoos. Someone then started a Facebook site called “Take down Indie Ogden”. Mikaela and her blog were so supported by the comments of those who backed her up and what she was doing that the site was later taken down. Mikaela has worked hard to re-shape her life and to always look at the positives. Together her and her husband have created a loving and healthy home for their children and she no longer feels burdened by her past. Mikaela has recently reconnected with her mother who now lives on the Hopi Indian reservation in Arizona under the condition that she is clean and sober. She and Bryan are raising two healthy beautiful daughters Hunter and Scout.

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