That is a great question. I am nobody special. I am a wife and mother of 4 children. I love Jesus and all things Life giving. Our life was crazy with a large family and then Aug. 22,2017 happened.

My name is Heather. There are so many things I want to share with you but I’m going to try and stay to one thought in a post. No promises though. Ok, grab a coffee, tea, wine, or whatever you drink and join me as I share who I am with you.

I would say, that until Aug 22, 2017 my life was pretty normal. Well, as normal as anyone’s life is at any given time. I have one older brother and one younger sister. We moved around at lot in my childhood. Which I think leads me down two different ways of thinking. One recurring thought I have, I want to have a stable home or a stable school district, or at least city for my kids to grow up. But I find myself getting itchy for new…people, homes, new me? I’m not really sure what that itch really is but it is pretty annoying.

In my 20’s I would get a little jealous over the long friendships I saw around me. It’s kinda funny to think about life that way now that I’m a little older. I have known my husband for almost 22 years. We, as a family have made one really big move from one city to another about an hour away from where we started. But outside of moving houses, which we did way to often, we have lived in our Michigan town 12 years. We are invested here now…well for the moment.

Back to August 2017. I had just been hired as a teaching assistant within our district. In a preschool class. I had never really ever thought I would enjoy being in a classroom, let alone in that age group. I was actually thinking about going to collage for teaching. I had been taking some required classes for a certificate to work for the state run program I had been hired for. I was pretty excited and really starting to feel like a grown up. Because having and raising 4 kids doesn’t make you feel grown.

Going back to work had been a big decision for our family. So that summer we had a super fun 40th birthday party for my husband. My mom, sister and niece made the long car ride from North Carolina to spend time with us. I have some good memories of that summer. We live by a river that have some great biking trails. That summer, as a family we had made a few trips. Pushing me out of my comfort zone. I’m a lot of a scaredy cat. No joke! Riding bikes in the woods freaked me out. But my husband and kids loved it, so we did it.

My memories are pretty clear, in pieces. My oldest son had made the freshman soccer team that summer. I remember some of that experience. I remember the game was on our wedding anniversary and the game had been hot so we opted to go to dinner the next night instead. I have broken memories of biking with my husband. To me it feels very much like a dream, real but not really dream like real.

Matt tells me we did go biking on the day of the accident. So the memories I have could be from that day. Or the could be from another trip. The dream like memories I have from that summer, really the whole summer, I can’t date. There are older memories I have were I can remember the house we lived in to give a time frame of when that memory situation happened. Does that make any sense? Trying to describe what I am experiencing is so hard to put into words that make sense to someone not in my head. Sometimes it’s easy often it’s not. And I like words!

I have what I call my “awake day” September 19. That is the first time I really remembered who I was. I was sad because it was my youngest daughter’s birthday, and I understood, on some level, I would not be seeing her that day.

That was the moment the man, I would later fall back in love with and understand to be my husband, and his mom knew that I was in there somewhere. I say it that way because the reports the doctors had been giving them had not been good at that point. He tells me I had been responding to yes or no questions with blinks, and I remember that but not very clearly

#TeamGavrilides TBI Survivor