Melissa’s Story – One Step at a Time by Leila Ferrari

Melissa was a competent, friendly business-owner of a highly successful small restaurant on the coast of southern California. At that time, several of her children were still part of the business and she often had repeat customers. These repeat customers included my parents, who even in those difficult years of their lives, always felt welcome and as if they had a place in her restaurant. The following is Melissa’s story in her own words.

~ ~ ~

Back when in Michigan we had five children, a husband who took care of things, he worked, and I stayed home. Things were going along really well; we did all kinds of things. And then he dropped dead. I felt that I didn’t have an identity before we were married because I was such an introverted person. After we got married, I developed an identity. After my husband died, I lost my identity for a while. We were young, we struggled.

You follow a pattern: you go to school, you get married, you have kids, you work, and you carry on. When my husband died, the pattern broke. I didn’t know anybody and I had a lot of kids. I didn’t know how to act, whom to be. I didn’t have the pattern to follow any more. I knew that my husband’s brother lived in California, so I thought moving here would at least keep the kids close to some of their dad’s relatives. That didn’t really work. He didn’t really want to be bothered with us. So we took off on our own.

It was really difficult in the beginning. I went to a doctor who had me on practically six different pills—pills to keep me happy, pills to keep me awake, pills to put me to sleep. It just wasn’t working. I knew I needed to talk with a counselor. The doctor said no, that I didn’t need a counselor. Eventually I knew a change was needed. The doctor got really mad when I went into his office and told him I’d flushed all the meds down the toilet. He said if I didn’t do what he said, my children would end up in an orphanage and I would be in a mental institution. All this from a doctor. Just a regular doctor. That was an appalling episode.

I finally did work with a counselor, which in a way was like counseling myself. She listened and I just never stopped talking, until it was all out. I started to hear everything I was saying, to sort it out. She was a help and I began to feel on top of the world. I thought I could do anything and that’s when I opened the restaurant. There was a tremendous amount to learn, including how to talk to other people. At that point, I was still a total introvert. I learned everything in my head but it took about fifteen years of work to get it to the inside.

After the counseling, I felt really cocky; that I really could do anything. But that process of having to do the work to get from my head to the insides caught up to me. In the beginning, I felt ashamed of who I was and what I was doing. I had to fight various emotions, was almost ashamed of having opened the restaurant, wouldn’t tell anybody who I was, was with a friend who suggested going to my restaurant, so then I had to tell her it was mine. It took quite a while to gain what I call my identity again, that is, to believe on the inside that I’m a valuable person. What a process. For a long time, I coped well on the outside but still had gaps on the inside. As I got to know people, no one would have guessed that things were still troubling me. It’s definitely a process.

I would be discriminated against everywhere I went, especially with my three young sons. Even your friends treat you differently. I felt discriminated against by various friends because I wasn’t