Donna-Marie Gregerson has been through hell and back.
The Indigenous Enderby mother suffered five tragedies in a row. Her boyfriend died in a car accident in December 2018. The following month, she lost her grandfather, the person who raised her. A few months after that, her boyfriend's dad was diagnosed with cancer and given four months to live, and she cared for him before he passed away in August of 2019. Then in October 2021, Gregerson's son's father passed away. She lost her oldest son six months later, on the same day she got accepted into college.
Through this tragic series of events, it's a wonder that Gregerson is still standing — but she's determined to take care of her mental health and provide for her youngest son, even if she has to do it alone with so many family members now gone.
Overcoming childhood trauma steeled Gregerson for the hardships she's had to face in the last several years, but her mental health journey has been far from easy.
"I was managing my childhood trauma and able to be a hardworking citizen as well as a mom considering everything I'd been through. It wasn't until the fourth significant loss in two and a half years that really affected my mental health," Gregerson told The Morning Star.
"I was literally walking into walls because of the amount of stress my body was enduring. I was depressed, couldn’t even remember people’s names I worked with, my perception was off, it was too complicating to think of how to cook. I could only do real basic steps and not too many at a time. Even my driving was affected. It was such a scary time."
With trauma from the near and distant past affecting her, Gregerson decided she needed to take a step back.
She prioritized her mental health, going to therapy and meeting with her psychiatrist regularly. She even decided to invest in eating healthy to improve her mental health.
But paying for healthy meals meant she wasn't able to afford making payments on her car, and she's now at risk of losing the vehicle, which is a lifeline that keeps her connected to her son's school, her son's epilepsy appointments and autism assessments, her community and her healing journey.
However, help for Gregerson is being crowd sourced. A GoFundMe online fundraiser was launched to help raise the roughly $10,000 she needs to pay off her car so she can continue to get to school and her appointments with doctors, therapists and psychiatrists. So far the GoFundMe has raised $1,610.
Gregerson has big dreams of helping others having learned about trauma through the gauntlet of tragedies life has thrown her way.
She's turned her past trauma into a career pursuit. While studying psychology, she is working with Community Futures to build a trauma-informed coaching business, via a business plan program called StartUP. She also wants to start up a men's rehabilitation centre and a No Youth Left Behind initiative in the future.
Gregerson has learned a lot over the course of her mental health journey and has come a long way since she was diagnosed with major depression and "didn't want to live anymore."
Asked what she has learned throughout her hardships over the years, Gregerson said: "I used to think that I was doing well, but I think my ego was helping me survive. I was working hard at making goals career-wise, having a home and a car and just being stable in that sense. But I wasn't ever truly happy inside...Now I've learned that I was more confident, but my self-love wasn't there, and so I was out of balance. And now it's like self-love, self-worth, just building, accepting me for who I am."
Gregerson recently spoke on the Invisible Cape Parenting podcast, where she discussed the challenges of single parenting from a trauma perspective.
