Candy Canes and Coke, a Memoir (Book 1)

By P.M. Robins

Candy Canes and Coke: The first book in a two-part memoir, followed by Rescued by A God I Didn't Know.

If you want to believe in second chances…
If you want to believe that God can change your life…
If you need an example of "if she can, I can…"

You'll find inspiration in this true story.

Strong woman rising: a memoir of a well-meaning, divorced woman, mother of three and her desperate struggle to break free from a destructive 25-year journey to claim the life she was meant to live.

No longer wanting to hide from her fears, she asks God for help, and it changes her life! Thatʻs all it took to change her trajectory: make a choice, commit to that choice; and forbid fear to rob her from her God given gifts.

She realizes her God, since she was a child, has saved her over and over again to live her destiny. This is one woman's testimony of what God can do, in spite of it all, and when you allow Him too.

She embraced her fears and her hardships, then let it go, and watched it transform her life.

If you want to know that you're not alone and that you can change the trajectory of your life, no matter how many mistakes you've made, read on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Momi Robins-Makaila
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393831242

Book preview

by

P.M. Robins

Copyright © 2020 Momi Robins-Makaila.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the website address contact form.

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

Foreword and Editor’s Note Amber Meeks

Front cover image by Masina Sausi.

Printed in the United States of America. First printing edition 2020.

Momi Robins-Makaila

Momilani Enterprises

Kapolei, Hawaii, 96707

www.momirobins.com

WITH GRATITUDE,

Thank you, God, to whom I owe all the glory, and to my family who have believed in me, and helped me to believe in myself. 

EDITOR’S NOTE

As the creator and founder of Faerling Edition it is my vision to recognize and establish a voice in the world that radiates the love that lives at the core of humanity. It is my belief that this boundless love teaches us compassion and forgiveness. No one person can truly understand where an individual’s journey has taken them, or where it will lead, but we can share in honesty and love, so we can learn from one another.

In my own writing I seek to follow journeys of self-discovery and strength. The history of my own family’s immigration to the United States is the root of my inspiration. I truly believe that honoring them in my current project When we Were Orchards will capture the indebted gratitude I have for their strengths, struggles, and sacrifices.

It is the same understanding that led me to my collaboration with Momi Robins and taking part in Candy Canes and Coke. Momi’s vision for her memoir spoke to me as a writer and as a woman. Her journey is a confrontation of all the mistakes we can make as people, but she turned a painful past into a promising future.

Blended youth, pure and carefree

No one wise enough to see

Seeking refuge and escape fill the depths of need

Old lives of troubled pathways create a willingness to heed

Hindsight holds no power to rewind

A thief and a scoundrel, synonyms of time

Allegory of tears accompany goodbye

Comfort comes in the funeral of its lie

Illusion of love was its only truth

Uncovered, unveiled, by an unwelcomed sleuth

Entranced, for morsels, a fourth of a decade

Scars of Melancholy force revolt and escape

Discomfort of unknown paths we venture to take

Remnants of yesterday, we forsake

Babies in the cold no longer

Blanketed by forgiveness make us stronger

Wisdom: the fruits of despair

But, sweetness in the taste, await us there

Gallantly facing future journeys

Collect my riches, restfully appease

Of courage and strength, he availed to me

Armored by experience, we were set free

Thank you for sharing in my story. If you’re interested, I’m happy to offer you my first, Christian Romance Novel,

First Love,

absolutely

FREE

I’ll offer you another opportunity to get your

FREE DOWNLOAD, at the end of this book.

FOREWORD

ON OCCASION, GOD HAS blessed me with the addition of people in my life who not only change the way I see the world, but enrich it and leave behind an instant impression on my heart and soul.

In October of 2010, I met Momi Robins, a local woman from the Wai'anae Valley. Our chance meeting occurred when the both of us chose to attend a course offering sponsored by Kamehameha Schools and the Department of Education. As teachers, we would be given professional credit for our studies and practices. As fate would have it, Momi and I were both drawn to the idea of getting better acquainted with the islands we called home and how that understanding would help our students. Although Momi has lived on O’ahu a lifetime, and the island has only been my home for five years, we both understood the impact a place could have on a person. Within the few hours we met, we had learned so much about each other. As a class we shared stories in culture and identity, but it was on the second day, during our trip to The Bishop Museum, when Momi and I would get the chance to have lunch and find out just how much we truly had in common.

Something in my heart imposed on me and obliged me to step out of my comfort zone. I felt a compelling need to meet Momi, something about her intrigued me, and when I felt God’s hand at my back; I let Him lead. After our morning session through Hawaiian Hall, I asked Momi to join me for lunch, and to my relief she had been hoping I'd ask; she later confessed to me that she had felt the same desire to know me, but her life’s experiences kept her more reserved. Over lunch we had become instantly connected, a feeling that was rarely felt by either one of us; we were not the type of people to take a leap of faith that had the possibility of leaving us hurt by people we didn’t know.

In the beginning we gave the usual introductions, and we talked about teaching and the course we were taking. The previous night’s discussion had laid the groundwork for conversation and we instantly sought to understand each other's stories. Momi and I were both ‘hapa’. This connection had sparked the night before as we had both admitted to feeling lost in our childhoods due to the split in cultural identities. I told Momi what it was like growing up in Eastside San Jose in California, and she told me about life on the Wai’anae Coast. Soon we had come to the realization that our similar histories and compassion for children had led us to teaching and wanting better for those, who like us, had struggled in challenging communities, but somehow teaching was just the beginning. We both wanted to reach the masses by sharing our stories.

I confessed to Momi that my life's purpose was to share my family’s stories through writing, and that I had come to Hawaii to complete graduate studies in Cultural and Comparative Literature at UH Manoa, in the meantime, I was continuing to teach high school English and Spanish and establish myself as a copy and book editor. These must have been my magic words to Momi because she proceeded to confess that she had written down her story and was looking for an editor, and there it was- the answer to why we had been drawn to one another. God had placed each of us in the other’s life to achieve goals we could not do alone. I could tell that Momi was nervous, scared, and excited. She had only let two other people read her memoir, her best friend Christine (who loved her story and was brought to tears by the life she had never known her best friend to have) and her uncle (an experienced editor who couldn’t get beyond the raw content to see it as a testimony of her life). Momi was caught in the midst of two completely different reactions and needed an unbiased opinion. I encouraged her. I was her target audience and there was definitely a need for the stories she wanted to tell.

Over the next month, I would read through Candy Canes & Coke and allow Momi to decide if my opinions were valuable enough to continue as her book editor. I found myself engulfed in the story that Momi had so openly shared-1 read it twice (and two more times after that). I now understood why we had been brought together, our beliefs about life experiences and how they should be communicated to the world were the same. We believed in being completely honest and its power to strengthen 

communication; we believed in a type of honesty that many would find raw and discomforting. Momi had grown up wishing someone had been more open with her, and I had had the privilege of a mother who never turned away my questions no matter how much pain reliving her past caused her. Momi and I saw the value in lives that struggled and strengthen in order to teach compassion and forgiveness.

Candy Canes & Coke addresses a full spectrum of hardships that today’s society is plagued with, and here in Hawaii they appear compounded due to our close proximity, but it’s a worldly epidemic. Patricia Momi Robins needed to heal herself and found freedom in telling her story. She needed to understand the role she played in the escalating drama that had become her life, and in return she discovered forgiveness and compassion in place of guilt and blame. After years of inputting marketing data for a cruise line, Momi realized that the secure living she was making wasn’t enough, and she wanted to contribute to her community and leave her mark on the world.

Momi attempted to balance life as a fulltime mom while working from home and attending U H West O’ahu as a Sociology Major. When the right time presented itself, she took a job with the Department of Education in 2000 and completed graduate studies in Initial Teaching focused in Special Education. She happened across her new career at the recommendation of a friend, and ten years later she continues to love the role she plays in the lives of middle school students. Momi’s life work as a teacher and writer flourishes from her compelling desire to understand how and why people allow themselves to settle for a life they never intended to live. Momi’s work strives to understand, not just her life, but also a world of lives that settle for underdeveloped communication and abandoned dreams. She imagines how many relationships could be saved if communication overpowered anger, fear, doubt, and denial.

Momi’s memoir, her recollection of the past, confronts her sins. She uncovers a side of herself few people are willing to see let alone confront and admit too. She has come to terms with the choices she has made in her life, and beyond that she shares them with a judging and unforgiving world, a quality of bravery that I commend her for. Candy Canes & Coke is a testimony to purge and reclaim her life in hopes of leaving behind a legacy better than the one left to her. Momi was young and in love at thirteen with Kevin, but she could have never have imagined how deep the depths of their love would take her. What she had believed to be an innocent, although all- consuming, love quickly became a toxic force that would test the boundaries of her faith and strength. Her heart-wrenching journey through loss, jealousy, insecurity, and abuse stem from a fear of living life without the one she loved, but Momi’s harsh reality proves that not all good people were good for each other.

Experience has made Momi an authority in the destructive cycle that consumed most of her life. She openly shares the aftermath of her broken home and the loss of her childhood innocence. At the dawn of adolescence, she was forced to fend for her own; she became resilient, but her independence was lost when she discovered a relationship that would require her to relinquish everything she had hoped to be. Instead, she focused on securing the love she felt she needed. In Kevin, Momi finds an ability to love without limits. She and Kevin allowed their love to take them wherever it wanted-into pure adoration and an abusive hell. As young lovers lacking guidance and proper models for communication, Momi and Kevin continuously ride the ups and downs of love and life without an initial understanding for how it would establish their foundation as a couple, and later, as a family.

Throughout Momi's accounts of her past, she interacts with the reader in hopes to share with them the insights she acquired along her journey. She admits fault and returns to show growth for a more positive future. When Momi realizes that the unstable and destructive conditions in her life have come full circle on her children, she decides to make a permanent change. She never foresaw the return of her broken past in her children, and she tried deliberately to prevent it from happening. The reality was, that as she attempted to find herself, her children were lost. While a young Momi had turned to Kevin, her own son turned to drugs-another lesson Momi would learn from and find strength in, so she could help save her son.

Momi shows true remorse for missing the signs that her own son needed someone to talk to, especially when he didn’t understand the life he was living in every day, and while Momi and her children are now learning to communicate positively, openly, and constructively as a family, they hope that their struggles will strengthen others. As a teacher Momi is also aware of the increasing rate at which children are abandoning dreams, complying with the demands of significant others, and experimenting with sex, drugs, and alcohol, all as a result from not having more open and honest communication at home.

As a veteran teacher I can fully understand Momi's need to share with the world the growing need to encourage open communication with students and children. Every day we are confronted with students who are lost or afraid to dream. They need more compassion and understanding that will help them understand who they are and where they come from. They need opportunities to sit around and talk story without repercussions for their curiosity; they don’t want to be denied or passed along, but given the chance to talk out the thoughts and feelings plaguing their realities.

Genuinely most people, especially our youth, are looking and waiting for the people who will have an instant impression on their lives-someone who understands where they’ve come from, where they've been, and where they’re going. Momi and I have fostered, what I would consider, a true friendship based on a common understanding and belief that it is not our place to judge and condemn one another for our pasts, but to listen, learn, and support each other in the present, in order to ensure our futures.

Amber J. Meeks

FAERLING™ EDITION

PROLOGUE

I am a thirty-eight-year-old, Part-Hawaiian woman. I don’t know where or how I fit into this world.

I am a single mother of three children.

I am a special education teacher.

I must move my children out of the home we live in because I don’t earn enough money to pay for it.

I blame everyone else for the problems I have.

In fits of anger and rage, I see red.

I scream and curse foul words at my children-my gifts from God -my flesh and blood.

On a mission to pay him (the infamous ex-husband) back for his every transgression during our ill-fated marriage; I rip his heart out with vicious, soul-attacking name-calling and mind games.

I rage like a mad woman on crack.

I don’t have the relationship with my parents I wish I had.

I loathe my body. My hips, my lips, my hair, my derriere-are all bigger than I’d like.

The guilt of doing anything for myself overwhelms me enough, so I lie and hide when I do.

The worry about money, and not having enough of it, consumes my thoughts.

I am afraid to speak my mind for fear I will be rejected.

I worry so damn much about what others think of me that I let it dictate my behavior.

I am paralyzed with fear by worries and it dictates my life.

I worry about being alone.

When I feel like I'm losing my mind, and my life is spiraling out of control, I jam my first two fingers down my throat to throw up the contents of my stomach. I do it again until my throat burns with fire, and only the sight of blood can satisfy the insatiable appetite of despair.

I am a