Happiness Nicole He was just 10 years old when he woke up one summer morning to find his mother crying on the living room floor with blood running down her face.
Her father, who had hit his wife with a glass ashtray, was running through the house clutching her purse before being escorted outside by his sister’s boyfriend. Felicity’s sister was on the phone with 911.
‘(My dad) wasn’t saying much to us kids as we watched the chaos… and my mom was sitting on the floor and crying, “Why me?” and her head was split open and there was blood running down her face,’ she said now. 46 years he recalled to DailyMail.com from his home in Chicago.
Her parents’ marriage was tumultuous, and as a result, so was Felicity’s childhood with one sister and two brothers.
‘My mom and dad… got married when they were 16. They had my sister when she was 16, moved in with my grandparents and then moved out on their own and my grandparents raised my sister a lot, because I think there was a lot of drugs and partying and stuff like that,’ she explained.
Felicity Nicole was just 10 years old when she woke up one summer morning to find her mother crying on the living room floor with blood running down her face.
“My mother wasn’t one to participate in that. She was more or less the babysitter. But, my God, she loved him. I don’t remember my father being around much when I was little, but when I do remember him, he was high.”
Most 10-year-olds would be screaming or having an emotional breakdown at the heartbreaking scene Felicity witnessed that summer day, but she recalled reacting very differently.
“That’s how I knew I was different… I didn’t know I was a healer back then, but… there are so many ways a 10-year-old can handle this. I mean, she breaks down and says, ‘Oh my God, Mom,’ she screams, she collapses, she cries,” she explained.
‘I was very well prepared. I went to the bathroom, grabbed a bunch of toilet paper, walked over to her and started wiping away the blood.
“And I said, ‘Mom, everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.’ For me, those were some of the first signs that God was putting me on this path of being a healer, of being a teacher.”
After this terrible event, she grew up without her father. He “disappeared” from their lives for 12 years, only appearing “from time to time to give money (to her mother),” Felicity shared.
After that day, Felicity didn’t see her father again for about 12 years and her mother “shut down mentally and emotionally.” He is pictured with Felicity’s son Evan as a baby.
Felicity’s parents married when they were 16 after her mother became pregnant and they moved in with her grandparents. Pictured are Felicity’s father (back left), her father (back right), her grandmother (front left) and her mother (front right).
Her parents’ marriage was tumultuous and as a result, so was Felicity’s childhood with a sister and two brothers. Pictured here, Felicity with her brother Tommy and cats Frieda and Sammy.
Meanwhile, Felicity’s mother “shut down mentally and emotionally” and her daughter did not blame her.
“Given the circumstances, she was not a drug addict. Her vices were coffee and cigarettes, and she worked,” the 46-year-old told DailyMail.com.
Felicity writes about her powerful story in her memoir, Pieces Of Me
‘So we did the best job as kids of learning how to deal with chaos, dysfunction.
‘It was bread and no butter… food was scarce, we were poor. Sometimes we had a working toilet, sometimes we didn’t, sometimes we had to bathe in the washhouse sink.
‘The ceiling fell in and we had a big hole in the ceiling of our living room.’
Before Felicity began doing her “healing work,” she would describe her childhood as “fun,” but would later realize how “toxic” it was.
“We didn’t know how to get by, we had no food. The house was dirty,” she explained.
‘She (my mother) would just sit on the couch and smoke. It made me sad to think about it now, because I would have taken my children to therapy, I would have done it differently.
“But at that time, in the ’80s, it wasn’t something that was done. I was wetting the bed at 10 or 11… There was something there on a deeper level.”
“As kids we did the best we could to learn to deal with the chaos, the dysfunction,” Felicity told DailyMail.com. Pictured is her childhood home.
“(My mother) would just sit on the couch and smoke. It makes me sad to think about it now, because I would have put my kids in therapy,” Felicity shared.
Felicity now helps other women struggling to reclaim their lives and find their purpose through mentoring and coaching as part of her own business, She Is You.
Felicity recalls in her memoirs: Parts of methat his father, Richard, “liked women and drugs more than anything on Earth,” and that his mother, Erin, suffered “many fits” of rage, infidelity and aggression over more than two decades before he “finally cracked her head open with the glass ashtray,” nearly killing her.
His drug-based lifestyle would eventually lead to his death.
“I remember him smoking marijuana because I remember asking him what kind of cigarette that was,” Felicity said.
‘And my sister learned how to roll a joint at age four from a Kmart receipt.
‘He was a cocaine user and we know he shared needles because he was later diagnosed with hepatitis C.’
Now Felicity draws on her childhood experiences to help other women.
Following the deaths of her father and mother within months of each other in 2013, and the breakup of her first marriage, Felicity restarted her life at the age of 36 as a single mother of a young child.
“I started rebuilding myself in 2013, mentally and emotionally, just doing affirmations, Googling videos and listening to meditations and stuff like that. That was just to give me the courage to rebuild myself, to say, ‘Hey, I can do this,'” she said.
Felicity (pictured dressed for a school dance) recalls in her memoir that her father, Richard, “loved women and drugs more than anything on Earth,” and that her mother, Erin, suffered “many fits” of rage, infidelity and aggression.
In her book, she writes about her parents’ relationship and how it affected her. She is pictured here at the age of 21, before she was married.
Felicity and her family and her sister’s ex-fiancé, whom she still considers family, are shown here during Christmas when she was in fifth grade.
Through your business, She is youFelicity helps other women who are struggling to reclaim their lives and find their purpose through mentoring and coaching.
When asked what advice he would give to those at a crossroads, he replied: “I would say you have to listen to your heart. Get out of your head and into your heart. What does your heart tell you? Because this is our kingdom, this is where God lives, this is our intuition. What does your heart tell you to do?”
“And from there we would break it down because you have to be logical. Your heart may tell you to move to France, but if you don’t have the money, then we have to get there.
“But what I would say is that if someone is trapped like I was, it comes down to… how hungry are you to live? Because I’ll tell you, once you get out, you have to start from scratch, and it’s hard.
“You have to be hungry because you’re going to have to work very, very hard. And you’re going to have to prepare for emergencies and have emergency money and prepare for setbacks. And there’s no such thing as ‘I can’t.’ It doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. It just doesn’t exist, because I wouldn’t be where I am today if there was.”
Felicity’s book Pieces Of Me is now available.