Today we’d like to introduce you to Madison Hales.
Hi Madison, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
Hi there! My name is Madison Hales I am 19 years old, living in Syracuse, UT. I am the third oldest of 8 children – four brothers and three sisters. I spent most of my childhood growing up in Lehi until the age of 13 when I moved to Highland. My dad is self-employed as a general contractor so growing up he was gone a lot of the time. My mom helped run my dad’s business, while also homeschooling us kids.
By the time we moved my mom was doing a business under Doterra so we were put into our first school, Mountainville Academy charter school. The school only has 500 kids in total with K-9th so I built strong relationships with the students as well as the staff that to this day I still have. I grew up loving anything related to arts; dance, piano, painting, theater, etc.
Any excuse I had to invite family to come to watch me perform on stage and dress I would take it. I actually was given the chance to teach a dance class during my 8th and 9th grades at Mountainville. Once I graduated there, I attended Lone Peak high school where I was a part of the school’s drill dance team my sophomore year. I had always danced at a studio up until that year and chose to do drill instead so I could be involved and I could afford it.
Since being the third oldest my parents raised me to be very independent so by the age of 8 I was already babysitting my younger siblings, and by the age of 12, I was paying for any extra activities and clothes. Because I had to pay for all of my activities, I could no longer find the time to work in order to pay for my studio dance team which was why I had to quit.
I only did a drill for one year because the time didn’t seem to pay off and I didn’t feel as though I was improving as a dancer. Looking back, I wish I could’ve stayed at my dance studio as long as I could but I guess that is just life. Throughout my years at Lone Peak, I had many boyfriends and now I wish I would’ve just gone out on more dates with a lot of different people (don’t tell my mom that haha!)
In my sophomore year, I didn’t have a lot of friends because I was always with my one best friend, but as we grew apart I started meeting new people going into my Junior year. I didn’t have a ton of girlfriends for whatever reason, so I spent my time mostly hanging out with guys which had its pros and cons. The pandemic hit in March of my junior year which for everyone and myself included was just a weird time in life.
However, I loved being able to spend a lot of time with my family making dance videos, constantly eating out, driving up the canyon, etc. When May of 2020 came around, I and my younger sister and her friends decided to take a road trip down to St. George and while I was down there I decided to download a dating app so I could meet more people. Instead of going out on dates with a lot of people I ended up meeting my future husband.
Michael and I started dating in June and at the end of the month, he went to work at a boy’s camp in Wyoming and was there until the middle of August. While he was away I spent most of my time working. The only jobs I had growing up were; in construction for my dad, nannying for my younger siblings after school, or selling homemade salsa to our neighbors.
In May of my junior year, I got a job as a customer sales representative where I learned I had great skills in sales. I worked there for a little over six months. When my senior year came around I was not excited to be back. I wasn’t the greatest when it came to school, and I didn’t have many friends so it seemed pointless to be there. Because I was raised to be super independent I had saved up enough money and I ended up moving out of my parent’s house a couple of weeks after turning 18.
I had enough credits so I graduated from high school about 8 weeks after my move. I lived with two roommates in the vineyard up until Michael moved in with us about two months later. Due to covid, I ended up losing my job which resulted in not having a steady income for a little over a month. Michael had also lost his job and his car had broken down so we were barely scraping by.
At the end of December, we got a job knocking door to door selling Kirby vacuums. In January of 2021, I and Michael moved into a KOA cabin located in Springville, UT. It was about 400 square feet but we were happy to have our first little home. We got engaged down in St. George on February 13th just 8 months after dating. We were married at the White Shanty in Provo on April 12th, 2021. We honeymooned in Park city for a few days which we loved!
After we got married we moved up to Huntsville on Pineview reservoir and lived in a basement apartment of Michael’s grandparents where we stayed until August. During the summer I was working as a teller for America First Credit Union and Michael was working as a paint stripper.
In June there was a malfunction with one of the paint machines that Michael was using, and got paint shot into his hand. He was given immediate surgery which they thought was all he would need, but he ended up having to go back into another surgery in January of 2022.
When August came around Michael decided he wanted to attend BYUI in the fall so we packed up all our things and moved to Rexburg, ID. Michael was a full-time student so I was working from home full-time doing customer sales calls. When December came around Michael was given a great opportunity to work as an electrician with one of my dad’s friends, so we again packed up and moved back down to UT.
Unfortunately because of Michaels’s secondhand surgery, the election position didn’t work out. However, he was offered a Life Coach position at a Residential Treatment Center that he attended as an adolescent in Layton. Somehow Michael convinced me to get a puppy so we picked a golden retriever who is now 8 months old.
This last April me and Michael were able to go through the LDS temple and get sealed together just a couple of days after our one-year anniversary. Up until July we were living in a small studio apartment when Michael’s bosses came to us and told us that there was a house that they needed someone to live in for at least a year. So we are now living in 5 bedroom house that sits on four acres of land. Michael is still working as a Life Coach and I am working on getting my Real Estate License.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Being the third oldest out of 8 kids definitely had its challenges. By the age of 8, I was babysitting my younger siblings as well as my younger cousins. My dad worked out of town for most of my childhood which really affected my mom.
She was trying to help run the family business. teach us, kids, since we were homeschooled, while most of the time she was pregnant. Their marriage struggled because of this and unfortunately, they weren’t the greatest at hiding it. Our four older kids would often be refereeing most of the fights or at least in the middle of them.
This caused me to have a severe people-pleasing personality. For example, if the house wasn’t clean, Mom would come out of the office and yell at us for not being clean which would cause her to be in a bad mood when my dad got home, resulting in a fight. So we kids were always stressed about making sure the kids weren’t crying or the house wasn’t messy so Mom wouldn’t get stressed out.
When I went to my first public school, Mountainville Academy, my friendships weren’t always the healthiest. I was always putting everyone above my own needs and never having any emotional or physical boundaries. There was a boy who I liked that wasn’t the greatest kid.
Throughout my first two years at school, we were constantly going back and forth between hating each other and then liking each other. Towards the end, he was bullying me and all I wanted was for him to like me so I would do whatever I could whether it hurt me or not.
Even though I felt sick about doing it I ended up sending him inappropriate which was just awful. It didn’t make me feel good about myself and he still ended up bullying me. Because of this and all the pressure to please all of my friends and family and feeling as though I couldn’t control anything in life, I stopped eating and turned to self-harm.
Luckily there were no serious attempts but it was so overwhelming. My people-pleasing habits carried with me into college and I soon realized I wanted to try therapy. I asked my parents if I could and they told me that I should pray more often, and create healthy habits and it would all go away.
My parents had tried therapy a few times in the past and it never worked so they so any reason why I should go in. It also didn’t help that my dad didn’t believe that a therapist could help you with anything and that it’s selfish to put yourself first, so I stopped asking them.
It wasn’t until halfway through my sophomore year when I met with the bishop of my church he was asking about my mental health when I briefly mentioned how I wanted to try therapy but my parents shut me down. If it weren’t for my bishop I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. He looked at me and said, “I know the struggles that your parents have and how It probably affects you,r kids.
I am putting you into therapy and marriage counseling for your parents.” When I started going I got a lot of crap from my dad saying that I shouldn’t be using the church’s money to go to therapy, and that is super selfish which sucked hearing from my dad. When I first went into my first couple of sessions I thought I was going in for my depression in middle school, and I didn’t realize that all of my emotional dependencies came from my family.
Don’t get me wrong I love my parents to death and they taught me so many great lessons in life. Throughout my relationship with boys in high school, is where my people-pleasing side would be amplified. Towards the end of my junior year when I met Michael, is when I really started to hold my boundaries better with not only boys but also with my family.
My parents weren’t fond of Michael at first; he had a tattoo and had attended a rehab facility as a teenager to overcome substance abuse. As a “Molly Mormon” so to speak I was a little caught off guard when I met him and struggled to understand the reason I kept dating him. But after watching him surround himself around such good influences and be honest about his mistakes and learning from them it soon became apparent to me that I was misjudging him based off of his past mistakes.
When he got back from his Boy Scout job in Wyoming, at the end of August we ended up sleeping together, and soon after we broke up for a couple of weeks. When I told my parents about what had happened they weren’t happy with me. At first, we knew it would be better if we didn’t speak with each other for at least a few months after the breakup, but after a few weeks had passed we realized that is not what we wanted.
I hid the fact that I wanted to stay with Michael from my parents because I was worried about how they would react. They did end up finding out which led to a lot of heartaches. I dealt with a lot of shame from not only my parents but also my siblings. The house became too toxic to be in for my mental health to the point of feeling numb.
My therapist advised that the best option for me and my family was to get out of the house, so I did. It was a long, hard five months feeling as though I was unwanted and worthless. I did a lot of therapy to work out my own issues so that I and my family could start building a new and better relationship.
It has now been two years since all of that and I am happy to say that our relationships with my family have grown stronger and healthier. I’m grateful to have had those experiences as it has really shown me that someone’s mistakes do not define or exempt them from unconditional love. I still have a lot to work on but I am hoping for the best.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As I said earlier, I am currently working on getting my Real Estate license in hopes to work alongside my father-in-law. I have many different career interests such as; esthetician, wedding planner, and life coach but for now, I will be a Real Estate agent.
What makes you happy?
I am grateful to have a husband who has the same outlook on life and wants to be retired at a young age so that we may experience what this life has to offer. I find a lot of happiness in traveling and knowing that I am not wasting my time. I find so much joy in working on social media and encouraging others to be confident in themselves. I love all things outdoors and spontaneous!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @Maddie.wangsgard
