“All is quiet in Ashley Wheeler’s house at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. With her 5-year-old son, Zethan, at school and her husband out of the country, she has the family’s dog, Combo, and the remnants of the morning news to keep her company.
The Wheelers moved to Chelsea about three years ago. Traveling and living in different cities has been the norm for Ashley and her husband, Zelous, a professional baseball player for the Tokyo Giants. A Childersburg native, Zelous’s career has taken them to New York, Milwaukee, Baltimore and beyond.
‘I have traveled with him since I was 19,’ Ashley said. ‘We were high school sweethearts.’
Friendly and soft-spoken, Ashley is the type of person who makes a stranger feel as if she has known her for much longer. Maybe Ashley’s house isn’t always so quiet—surely not when her young son is at home—but it’s easy to imagine Ashley having great fellowship with her family when it’s not.
What’s difficult is learning Ashley’s backstory, a childhood she cannot revisit without tears coming to her eyes. The traumatic experiences of witnessing her father abuse her mother clouded her young years and trailed her into adulthood.
The physical violence started early in her parents’ relationship, before Ashley and her brothers were born, and continued to snowball. ‘She was beat while she was pregnant with each one of us,’ Ashley said of her mother. ‘It continued our entire childhood. One reason I like to travel and spend lots of time with my child and make a lot of memories is because I don’t have pretty much any as a child.’
The family moved around, sometimes in and out of shelters to make ends meet if Ashley’s father had left them again. When he was around, the fear of what he might do to her mother was all-consuming.
An incident that Ashley said still haunts her today involved her father knocking out her mother’s teeth. Even during the worst times, though, Ashley doesn’t remember ever seeing her mother retaliate.
‘I never understood why it was happening,’ Ashley said of the abuse. ‘Sometimes, I blamed myself and thought it was my fault. That’s traumatic as a little kid. You shouldn’t have to see or go through something like that.’
As she grew older, Ashley realized her father was battling demons—mainly alcohol and drugs—that had nothing to do with their family, the people who bore the brunt of his anger.”
View the whole story here: https://www.shelbycountyreporter.com/2020/11/05/healing-by-helping-nonprofit-founder-shares-why-helping-domestic-violence-victims-is-her-mission/