I Said Yes: My Story of Heartbreak, Redemption, and True Love (10 page)

I felt alone. I had little Ricki and I was grateful for her. No doubt she was a gift, a blessing. But I was lonely. Lost. Desperate. Girls my age were in college, deciding on majors, planning for their futures. They were spending Friday nights and weekends at the movies or hanging out at parties or going on hot dates or shopping for cute clothes or studying for exams and concerning themselves with what they were going to do when they grew up. I felt unsettled. I didn’t know what I wanted or what I wanted to do with my life other than take care of my daughter. I was struggling as a new mom and didn’t have anyone my age to talk to about it.

I longed for attention. I had little to no self-respect, and I had so much pent-up grief that needed an outlet, a healthy one, so I wouldn’t come undone. You’d think I’d turn to God, but I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Or I just didn’t know how. Besides, I wanted personal companionship, real-life people I could talk to and do fun things with. Not knowing where to
turn, I started hanging out with a fast crowd that liked to have a good time. And in the process of trying to divert attention away from feeling empty, I made some foolish decisions, ones I am not proud of.

I was also still trying to decide what I wanted to do. I thought about opening a boutique or giving fashion a whirl. I didn’t know. Speed Channel reached out to me sometime in 2006 to host
Three Wide Life
, a TV show about the lives of race-car drivers off the track. It was fun and I was grateful for the opportunity. But after doing a few episodes and having to memorize pages and pages of scripts, I realized it wasn’t a great fit. Life as a single mom resumed its course. I spent most of my days with Ricki and visited regularly with the Hendricks so they could get to know their precious granddaughter. Ever since she was a baby and also as she got older, I would show Ricki pictures of her daddy and always made sure she knew how much he loved her. I know the Hendricks did the same.

When Ricki was around two, I continued to plod along in a funk. I was floating, trying to piece together a life without any solid direction. A friend of mine lived in Nashville, and I thought it’d be great to spend New Year’s there. I wanted to get away, find some space outside of Charlotte, outside of the days that seemed to weave right into the next without much distinction.

I loved everything about Nashville. The music (it was everywhere, and not just country!), the people (good old Southern charm and hospitality), the artsy vibe (the neighborhood where my friend lived was full of hipsters)—most of all I loved the anonymity. Though Charlotte is far from a small town, the fact that the accident occurred within the NASCAR
family made such huge headlines, sometimes it felt like there was this blinding spotlight on me, especially after giving birth to Ricki. In Nashville, nobody knew me. And frankly nobody cared. I didn’t feel the pressure, as I did in Charlotte, to act a certain way to fulfill grieving-widow protocol or standards, not that I even knew what that meant.

As I flew back to North Carolina, I knew I wanted to move to Nashville. I needed a change, a fresh start. Maybe the move would clarify some direction, help me sort out who I was, what I wanted to do. Outside of giving birth to Ricki, it was the first thing that I had gotten excited about in a long time. Unfortunately, not everyone shared my enthusiasm.

Things between the Hendricks and me were pretty tense at the time. They didn’t want Ricki away from them. And though I respected and appreciated all they’d done for us, I was in my early twenties and a mom, for Pete’s sake. I had to make some decisions on my own. Unfortunately, my own mother also disagreed with my decision. “Don’t do it,” she warned, mentioning something to the effect that I wouldn’t be able to run away from myself. Her response was disappointing. Nobody could understand how I was still reeling from the overwhelming chain of events that had transformed me from a giddy and relatively carefree youngster-in-love to tragically losing the love of my life, nursing a pregnancy, and becoming a single mom at the age of nineteen.

I wanted to breathe. I needed space. I wanted to stop crying myself to sleep each night and having to put on a happy face as soon as my alarm sounded so I could watch
Sesame Street
and play dolls with Ricki without her wondering what was wrong with Mama. Something had to give.

And so I took a calculated risk and moved to Nashville, where I spent two years and learned a lot about myself. For starters, I wasn’t a total waste of a human being. I was on my own. Though Dad helped support Ricki and me, I took an eight-dollar-an-hour retail job and lived simply, giving to my daughter just the basics like food and clothes and indulging in occasional fun outings at Gymboree-type places. We went without the excess we were both used to back in Charlotte. Also, being together in a new world bonded us. I felt I finally had her to myself.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know it takes a village to raise a child, and I can’t say thank you enough to my parents, the Hendricks, and others who pitched in and helped. But there was something so different, special, and intimate when life was just about Ricki and me. I fell in love with her all over again. We went to the park almost every day. It was awesome to watch Ricki attack the playground, sailing down the slides, whipping around the monkey bars like a pro. She was fearless and adventurous, just like her daddy. At night, we’d curl up in my bed. I’d read through a stack of bedtime stories until her eyes got heavy. Though she had her own room, Ricki would often fall asleep in mine. I didn’t enjoy being accidently kicked in random places throughout the night, but snuggling with her was the best. I savored those moments, brushing her blonde locks with my fingers as she drifted off to sleep. Knowing she was right beside me brought comfort. It made missing Ricky just a little bit more bearable.

I often took Ricki down to the pool in our apartment complex where I started chatting up a girl around my age named (of all names) Emily. She introduced me to other girls
who I immediately clicked with and who liked me for me. Plain ol’ Emily Maynard. I wasn’t big-bucks Emily, or special-connections Emily, or please-get-me-tickets-to-NASCAR Emily. I liked being regular Emily.

My friend Emily, a successful and very driven real-estate agent, encouraged me to think about becoming a real-estate agent. I laughed. At least at first. But then I figured, why not? I signed up for a two-week class, frying my brain with legal terms and pulling many all-nighters studying.

Plugging through the course took every ounce of energy, but I did it. I got my real-estate license as well as a job with a local agency named French, Christianson, Patterson. This stint didn’t last long. The economy was in a slump and I ended up showing houses to creepy guys who wanted to discuss sales “over dinner” or “over a drink.”

Times got tough. I realized Mom, as always, was right. I could have moved anywhere. I could have planted myself in Paris or Manhattan or California, and ultimately my situation would have stayed the same. I would carry with me that same emptiness I’d been trying so hard to avoid, ignore, or fill with meaningless things. I couldn’t replace that vacuum in my soul with anything. Ricky wasn’t coming back. A successful career wouldn’t plug it up. Fun outings with friends and even cute guys wouldn’t make a difference. My heart was longing for an identity. Not in things or people but in Christ. I’d learn this later.

When I moved to Nashville, I went to church regularly and started praying more often. Sure, a lot of them were of the please-help-me variety, but the point is I maintained an open line of communication with God. I felt drawn to Him, still, in
light of some bad choices I had made since Ricky had passed away. The pull I felt toward God was so strong, but I didn’t dive deep, though I wish I had. That’s probably my biggest regret—I truly believe that a deeper relationship with Him would have kept me from making the wrong decisions, or at least made me pause long enough to question what I was doing and why.

I prayed to find relief from the ache in my heart. I missed Ricky something fierce. Sometimes I’d wonder if he was mad at me or if he even liked the person I’d become. Other times, I’d dream about what life would look like if he were still with me. We’d be married, of course, living in Charlotte, having had or on our way to having baby number two. Ricki was starting to notice when I was sad.

I’ll never forget putting up Christmas decorations one year. Though the holidays were always tough and the last thing I wanted to do was belt out some fa-la-las and be jolly, I was determined to make the season as magical as I could for my daughter. That was the least she deserved. So that year I had bought a cute little tree as tall as my daughter, a stack of web tutorials (this was prior to Pinterest, can you believe it?), and a box of festive decorations that I, with confidence, precision, and skill, prepared to artfully adorn on the aromatic pine sapling. I started this festive project by wrapping beaded garland and sparking lights around the tree. It only took a few revolutions before I ended up with a tangled web of snarled and knotted wires. Trying to unscramble the mess proved pointless.

I got so frustrated, I turned into the Hulk, ripping the garland apart and helplessly watching beads fly every which way, falling to the floor like pellets from a BB gun. And the lights? A few choice words and many broken bulbs later, they found
a new home in the trash can. Well, eventually, after sitting in a pathetic, mangled heap in a corner after being thrown there. Sobbing, I sat on the floor scattered with a layer of sharp needles and lone beads.

Ricki was in the other room and came running when the commotion broke out. She looked at me sympathetically, placed her chubby little-girl hand in mine, and said with compassionate insight well beyond her years, “Mommy, you miss Daddy, don’t you?”

“Yes, Ricki,” I sighed. “I sure do.”

And I always will.

I grew up a lot in Nashville. I appreciated my independence, the bonds I formed with neat friends, and the realizations I made that change wasn’t about geography—that the same problems, the same painful realities, the same inner conflicts I wrestled with would stay with me wherever I went. Moving back to Charlotte wasn’t a bad idea. I knew Ricki missed her grandparents. And though I had made some good friends, I wasn’t married to the idea of staying.

A month or so later, I drove east on Interstate 40, heading back to North Carolina with four-year-old Ricki sleeping soundly, surrounded by two years’ worth of stuff spilling out of boxes. I had carefully placed Ricki’s new pet, a shiny goldfish, in a glass bowl between my legs, careful not to prompt any spillage. As I drove into the early morning, just as the sun was making its grand appearance, tears fell. I clutched the steering wheel with trembling hands as the waterworks gushed. The
ugly-cry kind. Oh sure, I was ready to return to Charlotte, but I was going to miss the home, my own space, I had created in Nashville. I called my friend Emily and others on the way, reminding them how much I appreciated them and how much I was going to miss them.

Wally Lamb wrote, “The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”
^*
A seeker. That was me. I had taken some risks. Tried new things. Opened my heart to friendships. Stumbled at times, eventually regaining my balance. And learned. I still didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I was beginning to discover who I was. Baby steps. Microscopic, but progress nonetheless.

*
Wally Lamb,
The Hour I First Believed
(New York: Harper Luxe, 2008), 697.

six

G
uess what, Emily?” my friend Nikki, who I had met on my eighteenth birthday, asked with a sheepish smile as she sat at my kitchen table watching me put away groceries. Not really waiting for me to respond, she quickly burst out, “I nominated you for
The Bachelor
.”

As my jaw dropped, so did the carton of eggs I was trying to balance while shoving a gallon of milk into the fridge. “What are you talking about?” I demanded, annoyed that I had to clean up a million tiny pieces of shattered eggshells and puddles of slimy yolk.
The Bachelor
? I knew the show well, of course. It was a guilty pleasure I watched regularly, usually tuning in with my girlfriends, wine glasses in hand. We’d take turns making jabs at the contestants on the show.

The whole setup seemed kinda weird. Why on earth would any self-respecting woman desperately vie for some schmuck’s attention and affection on national TV with twenty-some other women doing the same with the same guy? Though the show was fantastically entertaining, the concept was too unorthodox for my taste. Thanks, but no thanks, Nikki. I’d had enough drama in my life, and I liked the current temperature,
settled and calm. Well, at least that’s where my head was at that time.

I’d been back in Charlotte for a few months and just started a job as an event coordinator for the Levine Children’s Hospital. I was in charge of managing fund-raisers, selling tables for galas, and organizing awareness initiatives for the pediatric intensive care centers. I loved working for this organization, especially being able to help others.