Success looks different for everyone! We all have a story. My story has become one I love! It hasn’t always been an easy fairy tale kind of life. I believe the story of ‘Johnny and Amber’ will be one to be CeLeBrAtEd for those that read this blog entry… I am celebrating our story every day! My goal is to include the hard parts in our journey too. It is all part of our perfectly imperfect life!

It is after the hardest parts of our journey where I have seen my husband, Johnny and I grow the most!! I don’t feel like my life is more valuable than anyone elses. I do feel like I have lived a lot at 38 years old and I look forward to many more experiences!

Twenty years looks like a real commitment and working together towards common goals. It also looks like good times and hard times! It is sharing the best and the worst of times! It is definitely something to be proud of! It is growing together and striving for more.

I have been thinking about writing this entry in dedication to my husband, Johnny and I’s twenty year Wedding Anniversary on June 30th, 2020 for a while. I would love to turn our life’s stories (thus far) into a short video someday soon!

I want to include some of the challenges, as well as, the triumphs! For me.. the most victorious part is that we still enjoy each other’s company and are best of friends!

Our love story began in high school. I ran around with the two youngest of Johnny’s five sisters. I was intrigued by their family’s German Mennonite culture. Honestly, I have loved learning about all walks of life since I was a kid.

Johnny was a quiet boy in my grade when I moved from Western KS to Lacrosse, KS when my Dad became a Deputy Sheriff when I was in the fifth grade.

I was in a bad roll over car wreck my sophomore year of high school. Johnny agreed to bring my homework as extra credit in Mr. Seltmen’s Chemistry class. I was on bed rest for a semester of high school while recovering from a broken pelvis from the accident.

I think I really started making eyes at Johnny when I was a freshman in high school. He was so cute and because he was kind of quiet I wanted to know more. I would consider myself an outgoing teenage girl. I was a cheerleader and tried just about every sport and extra curricular activity our small school offered!

Johnny made himself more noticed and started to be less shy in his late high school years. He played football. I think it’s fair to say he became a bit of a ‘party boy’ after his Dad (who was a used machinery salesman traveling internationally) unexpectedly passed away after having a heart attack our Jr. yr. of high school.

Johnny and I have put in a lot of hard work. Wanting and fighting to remain together, even after our kids are raised. With our history we know all to well that it can all come unravelled. We have had some really challenging circumstances.. even separating for a bit after our third son, Isaac was born due to infidelity on both our parts. We both have had our interruptions with alcohol and I struggled with an eight year addiction to prescription diet medicine during a good chunk of our time here in Salina, where we currently live. We have had challenges as business owners, career and financial struggle, amongst parenting, etc. We have sought professional help several times. I for sure would say parenting, mental health and addiction can present some of the biggest challenges in our lives. There is no shame in seeking a professional to help guide us!

We are currently in monthly talk therapy with one of the best therapist we’ve met, Bruce Dimick. I don’t ever want to discontinue our sessions with him. I am a few years free of prescription diet pills and we are closing in on being eight months free of alcohol!

John and I both grew up with mental health and addiction affecting our home lives. John’s Dad struggled with schizophrenia. My mom’s life’s motto is still, “work hard.. party hard”.. I am just going to say~ I think she could party a little less. There is no question both of each of our biological parents struggled with some of what life put in front of them. Nonetheless, both sets of our parents remained married till we were teenagers.

It wasn’t long after Johnny started bringing my homework that we were more than friends. We would watch the Wonder Years in the evenings when he got off work from Rick’s Food Store. We spent every moment we could together. One of my favorite memories during this time was Johnny buying me a promise ring with a $600 tax return he got from Rick’s Food Store. That $600 ring is my favorite ring! I recently wore it in pictures we had taken in honor of our upcoming 20 year Wedding Anniversary celebration!

By the time we were entering our Junior year of high school I realized I was pregnant. How could this happen to me? I was on birth control. My little sister was already pregnant. I was an absolute mess! I had prayed for my life to work out as “planned” .. I readily learned some of God’s greatest gifts truly are unanswered prayers!

Although, this was the start of some really challenging times in my life it was also a time I found just how determined I was!

I feel sad to say I was not as nice to Johnny after finding out I was pregnant. I considered having an abortion and wouldn’t even go to our Jr. Prom with him.

The good Lord stayed in my corner. I began to realize that I really loved Johnny and I could still be successful as a teenage mom. I was disappointed in myself because my parents were also teen parents and I knew they had had lots of struggles. I also knew how much I loved them and I was proud of how they were still successful in their lives. They had both pursued their education and were raising a busy family, including my sister, Nikki who’s a year younger and Rob and Prep who are five and six years younger than me.    

At some point I had a shift in my perspective. I was hell-bent on completing high school. Johnny and I both completed high school by being in a job study program.. so we could work to afford to live. We had moved to Bison, KS to a home we had been helping my parents renovate. I am sure that is where Keith was conceived. We used to sneak in a window there. Once, even being caught by my Dad while he was on duty! 

Both of our moms helped take care of our son, Keith. He was born on October 12th of our Senior year. I worked as a nurse’s aide and Johnny had a job for ASM woodworks doing renovation type work. I took classes and became an aide as soon as I turned sixteen and could. I thought I was going to follow in my mom’s footsteps and become a nurse like her. I later realized I get too nervous seeing blood or people not breathing. Instead, I chose to go to Cosmetology school like my little sis, Nikki. We had grown up helping in my Aunt’s salon, Off the Top in Hays, KS. My aunt is still doing hair in Hays and my sis does hair in Wichita! I did work as an aide through the last part of high school and all through cosmetology school.

Before graduating Johnny and I had obtained a $3,000 bank loan to get married… in addition to a home loan for our first place we were residing in by the time we graduated! We were able to go on a honeymoon to Jamaica, using funds from our bank loan. Surprisingly, our hometown banks were willing to lend us money.

As crazy as it is.. we had planned our next son, Landon’s pregnancy and were secretly pregnant with him when we got married a month out of high school. We wanted two kids, a boy and a girl and we were going to live happily ever after.

Once again the good Lord had a different plan. As I was graduating Cosmetology school I found out I was pregnant with our third son, Isaac. I cried. I had been working with the SBA to obtain financing and open a hair salon in our hometown, LaCrosse.

Isaac was born in the mix of it all. I opened my first little hair salon, Tangles and it was becoming a success.. I was earning enough to feel good about it. Johnny was working his way up in the corporate world and obtaining credentials in Business Management paid by the company, Colortyme rental store he was working for. He was recognized at a big convention we attended, as the Store-of-the-Year for their sales his first year managing!!

We had already experienced some struggle because I had some health problems during pregnancy. I was dealing with pre eclampsia- pregnancy induced hypertension.. also known as high blood pressure, along with other challenges that come with being a teen mom. I ended up having our kiddos early and also had to have C-sections due to previously having a broken pelvis from the car wreck. We incurred a lot of medical debt while having babies and the health complications that came with. We managed to make small payments to Hays Medical Center for several years till it was paid off.

About a year into having Tangles open I relocated to bigger location. Both locations had flat roofs and proved to be hard to deal with, having leaky roofs. We muscled through all of that.. fixing things as we could. After all, that’s all we knew in our family’s backgrounds.

We didn’t find out the gender of our third son and were hoping for a girl. While I was on bed rest at the hospital at the end of my pregnancy with him I had the craziest experience. There was a sweet lil’ gal who came in to do a sonogram and she looked up at me and asked, “what’s the boy name you’ve chosen?” I was devestated.. thinking I wouldn’t get to raise a daughter. We had counceled with our doc during my whole pregnancy.. planning to have my tubes tied (even though I was in my twenties) because we knew that it already was going to be an uphill climb raising three kids.

Little did we know that our next adventure was underway. My cousin, Angie who I had been around quite a bit growing up had came into a hard time in her life, struggling with addiction. She approached my parents to stay with them, along with her first born child, Aleah. Within a few months of them residing with my parents we were approached to take care of Aleah. We reluctantly agreed, knowing it could be more financial strain.

We ended up getting durable power of attorney because Angie wanted to leave KS. We needed something that was legally binding in order to take care of Aleah. Aleah did have some medical challenges and development delays to overcome.

Before we knew it almost a year had passed.. suddenly Angie was in town wanting to see Aleah. We ended up getting child protective services involved.

Around the same time we had two teen girls, Allison and Haley who were our babysitters in our lives. Haley approached me at my salon one afternoon explaining she needed somewhere to stay. Her dad had had an outburst over a check he had written (for an oil change) that Allison had lost. The local police and sheriffs, including my Dad had been there numerous times for domestic situations. In this particular situation they had told the girls to just find somewhere to stay for the time being. Haley came to our home and Allison was staying at a friend’s house.

We were already working with St. Francis to become licensed foster parents in Aleah’s behalf. St. Francis could monitor Aleah’s situation and set perimeters for her birth giver, Angie. Even though we had durable power of attorney it ended up protecting Angie from saying she abandoned Aleah. It also protected us from saying we had kidnapped Aleah. It was just the beginning of a long legal battle!

As this process was unfolding we simultaneously began working on getting a case filed in Haley and Allison’s behalf. It is our understanding that nothing happened locally because it costs the county money. We worked for six weeks to get a case filed in our neighboring co. where St. Francis was located.

We met with social workers weekly, attended talk therapy, along with so many other responsibilities! I remember getting up and cleaning our home immaculate weekly before our meeting with our social workers.

We had purchased a beautiful brick home in our hometown for our growing family. It took two years on the market when we decided we wanted to relocate to open a larger salon. My husband completed Cosmetology school. Haley and Allison aged out in foster care. We finally were able to follow a bigger dream that we had for our family.

We once again worked with the SBA to obtain financing to open a larger salon location in downtown Salina. After finally having a binding contract on our home in LaCrosse we moved into a quaint townhouse that was just enough to accommodate our family. We had the townhome licensed to continue fostering Aleah because she was in the states custody until her birth givers parental rights were terminated. The amenities at our new-to-us home ended up being AwEsOmE. The groundskeeping, tennis court, swimming pool, etc. Our family has five and a half years of great memories there.

The contract on our home ended up falling through because the buyer had fallen ill. We ended up taking a huge hit on our credit, having to be approved to deed it back to the bank.

Upon arriving to Salina in winter of 2008 we quickly began one of the hardest climbs of our lives, building our business during a recession. We depleted all of our working capital before even getting our doors open. We learned a lot! We now understand that you don’t just jump in to things because someone is well spoken. .. or maybe you do because being naive can actually be a gift. Otherwise, we would possibly never even try!

We had financed through the same bank that our developer had directed us too. We even had his attorney review our contract- foolishly not taking his advice to add that if the building wasn’t above a certain occupancy our lease payment would be reduced. We remained the only functional business in the building during our two and a half years there.  As I type this I cringe.. how could we be so silly to not realize the spot we were getting in?

We didn’t even realize the importance of deadlines in contracts, in order to be open in time and to be financially in a good spot.

I am beyond proud to say we made lemonade with more lemons than I ever felt we had been dealt! Against all odds and not really knowing anyone here in Salina we grew and continued to grow. We were proud to be nominated by our business consultant and chosen by our KS governor (within two years of being open) as Emerging Business of the Year.  We went to our state capital in Topeka and were recognized in a ceremony.

Then, we were feeling the pressure! It was clearly a struggle to learn how to be profitable while paying commission to those that worked with us, wearing so many hats while caring for our young family! One of the biggest obstacles was the lack of signage and being able to be seen due to the design of our storefront. We approached our landlord (same person who was developing the building) about signage that had been promised. It was stated in our contract that signage would be provided.. the sign never came through. At that point it was a huge struggle because the cost to operate was continuously rasing, such as our Common Area Maintenance fees.. for commons that we were helping maintain and other areas that we truly didn’t even access.. such as an elevator to the second floor. We were advised by an attorney, who was a client of Johnny’s to withhold rent until the sign was installed.

A few weeks later on a Tuesday morning, the start of our work week when Johnny and another stylist arrived to open the salon the locks had been changed and the windows were covered with brown paper with our landlord’s phone number. We contacted law enforcement. The officer that worked the scene that day is a good client of mine to this day. We called our bank.. only to learn they were aware of the situation and had liquidated a large portion of our bank funds. We had both a business and personal account at the same bank.

It wasn’t until another downtown business owner witnessed our belongings being thrown in the dumpster that it was deemed a theft. We worked with our small bus. ins. for months to be compensated. We learned that the legal term for what we went through is called a wrongful eviction. I would say I believe in karma and I also have forgiven the person who did this horrible action to us. We ended up in a better situation in more ways than one! It took us four months to find and renovate a new location, where we still operate our business on the busiest intersection in Salina, according to demographic counts. We had very kind clients (who I believe were a God send) pledge collateral for us to quickly get reopened while we worked feverishly around the clock to remodel our new space and to be reimbursed by ins.

We’ve faced bankruptcy, had to borrow money in ways we’d never want to and lived on welfare. I am not embarrassed at this stage of life to share any of these hard things. We are human and it’s kept us humble and will continue to keep us humble! 

We also have persevered and are in one of the best position we’ve been in our lives. Our kids had the opportunity to attend private schools, St. Mary’s and Sacred Heart and now our oldest son is entering his Jr. yr. at a private college, Bethany College. These opportunities have shaped our kids and the values will stay with them for a lifetime. I am ever grateful that we managed to make it happen! The sacrifices we’ve made are definitely worth it!

We’ve still managed to get in some travel and family vacations. We are celebrating the day to day that most consider common and mundane. Every day living is worth living to the best of our abilities.

After several challenging life experiences and always feeling like the bottom was going to fall out at any given moment.. I have realized that we must make the best of every situation. No one else is going to do it for us. Two things we were told by two different attorneys during our legal battle for our daughter and the legal battle for our business both stick out to me. One said, “the best prediction of future behavior is to look at past behavior.” The other said, “You may think you’re in the worst time of you life until the next worst time comes along.” These are both no bullshit kinda statements and they have proven to be very accurate..

It is my belief that as people we must choose who we interact with carfully, learning their character and underlying values and we also should believe the best is yet to come.

I woke at 6am today and worked on writing this entry till 8am. The one break I had at work I rewrote the introduction. I took a power nap after work around 7pm and made it my goal to have this entry completed by midnight tonight. I plan to add some pictures that I had already had rounded up. I will edit and add more soon… Maybe I can possibly make it happen while on our 20 year anniversary trip to Lake of the Ozarks next week… If I can find time to get the rest of the photos rounded up before we leave.

I am happy to say Johnny and I are both working on some personal goals with our next phase of life in mind. Mine includes becoming a well-known, accomplished writer/blogger! 😉😘

My biggest advice to anyone in a relationship/marriage is to dream together, work together towards common and individual goals, and be kind!

Remember you are halfway to anywhere you want to be.. the first step is making up your mind!

Yours in Style, Amber ♥️