FIRE IN HER EYES PODCAST
A podcast about women who persevered! Stories and conversations with and about resilient women.
FIRE IN HER EYES PODCAST
Get The Pen: The Perspective of Janine Folks on Healing Through Writing
In this episode of "Fire in Her Eyes," we explore the transformative power of storytelling with Janine Folks, a grief counselor, hospice chaplain, and author founder of Get the Pen. Janine opens up about her son AJ's miraculous recovery and how writing became her lifeline through adversity. Her story is a powerful reminder that miracles unfold in layers and that hope is never wasted. Listen in for a heartfelt conversation about faith, resilience, and the healing power of words.
Hello and welcome to Fire in Her Hides. This is a podcast about women who persevered through pain to find peace and purpose. So if you're looking for a little inspiration and motivation to sustain you through difficult times, join us as we share stories of women who were empowered through pain and transform struggles into sweet success. I'm your host, Tanya Skaronsky. Welcome to another episode of Fire in Her Eyes. Today I am honored to hear the story of a mother whose journey through uncertainty and faith became a testimony of resilience, of hope, and of miracles. My guest, Janine Folkes, is the founder of Get the Pen, a platform that empowers people to heal and share their stories through writing and publishing. She is also the author of several powerful books, including AJ's Miracle. It's the story of her son Adam's incredible journey of survival and thriving against all odds. Janine's voice is one of courage, faith, and encouragement for anyone who has walked through suffering and wondered if God still answers prayers. I'm so excited to welcome her today to share her heart, her words of wisdom, and the miracle that continues. Janine, thank you for joining me.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this. Thank you. Thank you for all you do.
SPEAKER_00:My pleasure. I love stories of mothers who demonstrate fierce love and resilience. And I truly believe a mother's love can move mountains as yours did. So can you take us back to the beginning? What inspired you to first pick up the pen and start writing AJ's Miracle 20 years ago?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I had always been a writer anyway, uh, for as far back as I can remember. As a child, I remember asking for two things for Christmas and birthdays: a typewriter and a pair of roller skates. And I don't, I was always fascinated by typewriters. I've had several growing up, and that was back in the day when you had the ribbon. And then it was the big deal when they had the whiteout ribbon where you could backspace and make corrections, and then the red ribbon where you could highlight red ink. And so that's how far back my writing goes. And as a teenager, I started writing poetry, and um I put it away, never did much with it because writing exposes a part of you that sometimes you are shy about letting people see your heart in that way. So I put it away because it felt so private, so intimate that it wasn't something that I would just put out there for people to see. And then um when I got older, like in my late 20s, I picked up you know, writing again and I found I was cleaning up and I found a box of my old writing and started reading it, and it touched me, and I thought, why did I stop? Why did I stop doing this? And it reignited something in me, and I just wanted to write again. And then and it's a kind of a long story leading up to AJ's miracle, but I was a writer first, and I someone picked up some of my writing because I started sharing it, and I was approached by a local newspaper. They asked me to write a column like every other week, and at that time I was thinking, how am I gonna come up with material to write every other week? I didn't think I could do it, so I was thinking maybe once a month, I don't know, but I accepted it and I was just writing the flow was going, and I was writing actually every week and multiple columns a week to the I had so many accumulated that I could skip a month and still have something to submit every week. And while I was doing all this, um got married, had children, and then all of a sudden, my son started acting strange. He he became very ill. And it was mysterious, his illness, uh, the lesions on his brain. And I remember being uh, you know, at the bedside thinking, you know, I'm gonna pause writing because I was writing inspirational things, and I was wondering, how am I gonna inspire people right now? Because this is hard, and I needed my energy for myself. And one of my mentors, she called me uh because she knew what was going on with my son, and she said, You're writing all this down, right? And I was thinking, no, I thought it was too sad to write, and then another part of me thought that it would was like exploitive, like I don't want to exploit this situation, but I realized that writing about it in real time was therapeutic and it helped me process my own emotions and dealing with the situation. And originally when I was writing, it wasn't intended for the public, it was for my own healing, and by the time the ordeal was over, I thought maybe this will help someone, maybe I can share it with the world, and that was how that came about. It was me chronicling what was happening, and I still have the journals with where you can see the tears and the blurred lines from tears falling on the pages as I wrote, and it was just a way for me to process what was happening because we were in that hospital for about three months, and after the first week or so, visits from family start to wane. People go back to living their lives while we're they forget about you in the hospital. And I mean, we missed birthday parties, we missed a whole summer uh by being in the hospital, and people go about their lives and they kind of forget. So getting my pen was that was my friend at the time. That was my confidant and who I could express myself to because there weren't very many people around as I was going through this.
SPEAKER_00:What did the process of watching Adam grow from this fragile toddler and the pediatric intensive care unit to the independent man that he is today? What did that teach you about resilience and faith?
SPEAKER_01:Wow, that that is a loaded question. And it's a good question. And it's something to think about because I was always very protective of him after what happened because I did have to protect him in the hospital. So I kept just a close eye on him, uh, watched his behaviors and always looking for signs of something abnormal. It almost made me paranoid because sometimes you don't know if it's gonna come back, if that, if the lesions will return, is is this gone for good? Um, you still have that in the back of your mind. But AJ was so smart. Uh, my mother made a comment before she said, I think when after AJ had those lesions on his brain, I think he got a bionic super brain because the his thought process was amazing, and it wasn't like a normal child's thought process. And um just he he managed to do okay in school, and I was very proud when he graduated. He was a quiet kid, and then but he would do things that I didn't know about, he was more social than I realized, and he even um participated in a pageant and won. And I was shocked in the audience because for his talent, I said, What are you gonna do for talent? I didn't know of any talents that he had besides roller skating, and he danced, and I didn't even know he could dance, and I was just in awe, like, where did you learn this? How and how did I not see you practicing your dance? But I was proud because even though he did things, he, you know, worked on things that I wasn't aware of, but I was just very proud of him for allowing himself to develop and find hobbies that he liked. So it was pretty remarkable to watch him grow up. And it made me want to just protect him, but he showed me that he didn't really need uh the protection that I thought he needed. He's pretty independent.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Um, I'm not a writer, but I imagine that writing requires a certain amount of vulnerability if you want your words to come across as authentic. What would you say was the hardest part of writing AJ's story? And what was the most healing part?
SPEAKER_01:The hardest part was sometimes when you tell your truth, it exposes others. And that's where I had to be careful. I learned to be okay with exposing myself and talking about my feelings, but when there are other people involved and you kind of write their role in your story, and they may or may not agree with your perspective on what things they did. And for example, his father, who uh we were, you know, my husband at the time, he sort of checked out, or at least that's how I felt, because he wasn't. I I was day and night at the hospital, and he was occasional whenever you know he could. And yes, he was working and everything, but I felt abandoned. So I had to be careful in sharing that because I did not want to uh vilify him or hurt him. And I think that was one of the things, like a thin line I will have to walk is just other people, uh how they how I felt they impacted me, and then you know, putting that out there, and then they feel like you're making them look bad and that kind of thing. So that part was very hard to tell your truth without shaming others, I guess you could say. But I I don't know how I got to the point where I didn't mind being transparent with people because um I know that I'm not alone, and maybe there are others who might be going through the same thing who can identify with me, and maybe it will help them and help them to know that they're not alone. I think that was the healing part for me, um, being able to connect with others who could identify with what I was going through.
SPEAKER_00:So, what would you say was the most healing part of writing the book?
SPEAKER_01:Just releasing it, getting it out of my head, and being able to cry through it. And, you know, people will say that crying doesn't make your problem go away, and that is true. Crying doesn't change your problem, but it changes you, it allows you to release uh toxic energy from inside of you, and uh, you can go in a room privately, and I did that quite often to just cry as a cathartic release and being able to write about what was happening, it was a cathartic release for me. I I didn't write it because I wanted to sell a million copies or because I wanted to be a famous author. I wrote for therapy, honestly, and I believe writing is therapeutic. And when you write for yourself, you know, you can violate all the rules of grammar and and and all the rules of writing, violate them all and just you know, share your voice authentically, just like we're talking right now. That's just write that, write in that way. And that that was healing. So even if you're not a writer, you can use writing to release those feelings. And and you hear often they will, you know, when you're angry or sad, you can write a letter to someone who may have hurt you. Just write it. You don't have to deliver it to them, you can destroy it, put it away, but there is some healing in releasing those thoughts and feelings, even on paper.
SPEAKER_00:That's so true. So you say that miracles don't always look like sudden transformations, but often unfold step by step. Can you share some of the moments that felt like milestones in AJ's miracle journey?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so AJ he did he just declined every little by day by day, he started to lose abilities. So it was a gradual decline. Maybe first he stopped talking, then he stopped crying, and different, he stopped walking, little things uh he stopped doing. And then when things turned around, when he started to heal, one day I was giving him a bath and he kept moving like it hurt. And the nurse said that's probably his nerves waking up, which even though it looked like he was in pain at the same time, it was a good thing because that he can feel again. And then maybe a few days later, one day he cried. And he hadn't, which crying is normal for a two-year-old, but when your child, when you haven't heard his voice cry in months, you know, weeks, that was a big deal. And it was a very gradual process of him coming back. So we didn't wake up one day and he was fine. It was just a process, step by step. Little by little, things started coming back to him. And even um growing up, going to elementary school, going to kindergarten, I was always checking with the teachers. How's he doing in school? Because the neurologist told me that he would not be highly functional. So I had to verify with his teachers, is he picking up on things? Is he learning to read? Are his uh motor skills on task? And and he was always doing well. So every time you know he passed to a new grade in school, that was something that they said would never happen. And then he went to high school. He he got interested in 3D animation and anatomy. He studied, he liked he was fascinated by just the human body and human anatomy, and he would create characters uh with the 3D modeling and animation, uh, just very brilliant things. So everything he does for me is a miracle. Um, when he started driving, and this is a kid that they thought would never walk or talk, and he's doing all of those things. So um every accomplishment for him is a miracle.
SPEAKER_00:I think the beauty of the adversity you faced is that it probably carved deeply into your soul the capacity to find beauty and the simplest of things that the average person takes for granted and doesn't even pause to think about it. Absolutely. How does it feel to look back now, two decades later, and see how far he's come since that time?
SPEAKER_01:It's surreal. And sometimes I have to remind myself that it happened. And that's another reason I'm glad I read wrote the book, because uh when I decided to like reboot or give this book life again, I read through it again and I felt every emotion like I was back in that time, in that moment. And I had, you know, over time you forget things. And and I even tell him, I remind him of how how blessed he is that he is able to do the things that he's doing, because at one time they did not think you would be able to function, that you would require assistance with everything, even eating, walking, all of those things, but you you're functioning independently. That is remarkable. I have to remind him because he was only two at the time, and I don't think he realizes um how he beat the odds. And every time I look at him, it is a reminder of what is possible, and I do believe that we have power to reroute our lives, and I'll give you an example of how I feel like I'm convinced that I rerouted his life when he was um in the hospital when he was two. He they had to get him a special wheelchair that supported his neck and his trunk. He had become like a like a ragdow. He he had no trunk control, he could not hold up his head. So his wheelchair had to prop him up and hold him up. And one day I noticed him starting to contract. And when I saw it, I said, oh no, we're not, we're not gonna contract. So I would straight, I did my own, I guess, like physical therapy, and I spoke to his body and I and I would talk to his body and straighten out his hands, straighten his arms out because it was just starting, and you see the children, you know, you see people who, and and I'm not saying everybody can prevent those things, but I made a decision that I wasn't gonna let that happen to him. So I would do little stretches with him and talk to him and tell him, you know, he's gonna be okay, and you know, we're gonna straighten your arms out. And and I believe his body listened to me. And and now he he's not, you know, he has no signs of any of that.
SPEAKER_00:That's wonderful. So beyond AJ's story, you created Get the Pen. What inspired you to start this platform?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I when social media, I was very reluctant to start getting on social media. My children, they were teens at the time, they were on it, and I said no. So in 2009, I decided to get off Facebook, and it was like a whole world opened up. I found like my people I went to high school with, and you find all these people and connect with them. I thought it was amazing. I still do when it's used uh correctly. And I started um making social media posts, like inspirational posts of just thoughts that I had. And um there was a deacon from the church who would always comment, and he would say, like, get the pen, you need to, we need to take this on the road. This needs to be in a book. And and I would get a lot of feedback on the posts, and every time he kept saying, get the pen, get the pen, so that's where I got get the pen. And that's just literally getting your pen and writing. And um get the pen, the meaning is so manifold because we all have stories, and I think that we need to capture our stories. We are literally writing history. If I had not written AJ's Miracle, I wouldn't be able to capture that and share it with someone else, even for myself to remember where I came from, how far we've come, what we went through, what we survived. I was able to capture that and I can revisit it. And that's why I I want to get the pen to inspire people to capture their stories, because in 10 years, you may go back and read this and it may help you 10 years from now. I've written things years ago that when I read them today, it helps me in the present day, even though it was written years ago. So I think we we are historians when we write, whether it's in a diary or whether it's something you're gonna share with the world, we need to capture stories, and that's my my mantra, get the pen. So get your pen. And you don't have to be a writer, you don't have to be an author, but you can capture your story. And I've worked with people who I have one gentleman who was actually illiterate. Um, he didn't finish high school, he he grew up with a mother who was a drug dealer, and his first memory as a child was being four years old and untying his family after they had got robbed during a drug deal. And that was his first memory. He wanted to write a book about his life, but he couldn't write. So, what he did, I told he would record himself telling the story, send me the recordings, and then I transcribed those recordings and we created a book. So even though he wasn't a writer, he was still able to tell his story. We captured it, and the book has done very well and touched a lot of people, giving them insight on the life of a child who didn't choose the drug world. He was just born into it. He didn't ask to be in that family, but growing up in that family exposed him to a world that most people might not know about or might judge from the outside. So he got a chance to tell his side of the story in his book. And that was capturing history. And so if we look at it like that, we are all historians and we all have stories that should be captured. Uh, so when we retell the stories, even retelling it to ourselves, we can inspire ourselves, even if we don't inspire others. But if others take the time to read to read, they would be inspired too.
SPEAKER_00:I think what's beautiful is that you getting the pen not only was part of your healing, but now you're sharing that gift with others and empowering them on their own journeys. So thank you for that. What do you wish people understood better about grief and faith?
SPEAKER_01:Grief and faith. Well, they go together, that's for sure. And uh working in hospice and having my own personal losses too, we deal with grief every day. And one thing we know for sure is that we cannot prevent loss. We can't stop loss from happening. Um, and like I said, people have been dying since the beginning of time. Death is not a new phenomenon, it's not a new thing to this world. People aren't designed to stay. And that was a statement my mother made to me. And at the time I didn't like it. She's she just she said, I'm only passing through. And she said that to prepare me. I mean, she's still alive, but when she said that I didn't like it because it reminded me that one day she's not going to be here. But that was her way of letting me know that she's not meant to be here forever. And I have I need to understand that. And I think if we talked more about grief and life uh and prepare each other, prepare our children. I I try to prepare my children, you know. This I want this, I want, you know, this, this, and this when I'm not here, because I know I'm not gonna be here forever. And I try to prepare them, even AJ, knowing that I won't be here forever. I wanted to equip them to be able to survive without me. And I think that's the best gift we can give each other because it takes the edge off of grief, is knowing that we have a certain amount of time that we're here and we don't get to choose that length of time. Uh, I I've been doing hospice for 20 years and I started out with pediatric hospice, and I think the most difficult is when children pass away because it just goes against everything. And even though I dodged a bullet with my son, I did experience survivors remorse. After AJ got better, my niece Amanda got diagnosed with cancer. And I remember saying, after AJ, God did a miracle for AJ. He's gonna do one for Amanda. And I was just I was visiting her because I knew what it was like when you're in the hospital and nobody visits. So I would visit and call her parents, encourage them, send them money because I know sometimes when you have to take off work, you need money. Eventually, Amanda died, and I had a difficult time processing that and felt bad. Well, I got my miracle, why didn't they get theirs? So I had to learn that every battle doesn't belong to me, and that one didn't belong to me. And I I did I wrote a piece called Life is Too Short because I did a eulogy for a 30-day-old baby. And I realized whether if you live 30 days, two years, 20 years, 70 years, 90 years is never long enough. When we love people, we want to keep them with us always. So with grief, and we're always gonna have grief. Every day we have grief because we've all lost something or someone, and and even the things we have now, we won't always have them. So grief is a part of life. Faith offsets the pain of grief because faith gives us hope and we have to have hope. So even in our loss, we have to believe that we still have a purpose. So faith and grief have to go hand in hand. They they're like the yin and yang, they they offset each other, and we can't live without either.
SPEAKER_00:For listeners who are in a place of waiting, praying for their own miracle now. What encouragement would you give them?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I would say, and this is a common phrase, trust the process, do your part, do what you feel like you're supposed to do. Be present for who you need to be present for. Stay connected to uh your power source with God, uh, whoever, you know, whatever your faith is. Stay connected and in contact. And what I mean by that is I'm always thinking and and I call that prayer, talking to God always, you know, whenever I need something, whenever I'm worried about something. I may not say it out loud, but I'll think it and I will feel that God hears me. So I'm always in communication. So I you should if you're waiting, stay in communication with God, however you communicate with him or her, stay connected so that you don't feel alone. And we can't always rely on other people to help with the deepest pain. And sometimes God is the only one who can. And there is a scripture that says, be still and know. Be still and know. And sometimes we have to be still and know that he is God because we use a lot of energy. Scurrying around, scrambling, trying to figure things out when sometimes we should pause, be still and know. And I believe answers will come to us, guidance will come to us when we sit still long enough to hear. Because when we're rushing around and we're distracted trying to solve things, we cannot hear from the divine because our eyes and our minds are on everything external when the answers come from inside. So if you're waiting, be still and know. And I just believe that guidance will come through that.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Having personally had um my youngest son and the ICU on more than one occasion, I remember how that brought me to my knees. The feeling of pain, the feeling of watching my own son struggle and what I would do to trade places with him, and I couldn't. The waiting was hard, the uncertainty was hard. And trying to be still was very hard because I wanted to get out of that painful place I want I was in. And sometimes, like you said, all you can do is just sit in it, sit in that silence and just try and find peace. That's all you can do in moments like that.
SPEAKER_01:If and like you said, it is hard because we're fixers, right? We fix, and and so that is hard, and it's a very vulnerable position. But that's what faith is. If we knew all the answers, we wouldn't need faith.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's so true. Um, if you could go back and speak to the version of yourself 20 years ago, holding on to hope in the midst of uncertainty, what would you say to her?
SPEAKER_01:I would um oh, I'm trying not to because I I remember her that I would tell her that I'm so proud of her because um because I felt so abandoned, but I did a good job. I did a good job. You know, I'm just this memory just came to me because like I mentioned, um you know, my I was married at the time, my husband. I was at the hospital, you know, and I started running out of money. And and because I'm there day and night, I could I had to stop working, and I needed, you know, wanted something to eat, and I called, you know, he wasn't answering his phone. So I called his job. And the job was oh, he took the night off to be at the hospital, but he wasn't there, so I didn't know where he was, and I just remember how I felt so not only dealing with my son, but dealing with the person who was supposed to support me, just disappearing on me. But I stood firm and um I would tell that version of myself how proud, how proud I am. You did a great job.
SPEAKER_00:I think oftentimes we don't realize just how strong and resilient we are as women until we face adversity.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. There's um there was a song, you know, and and I grew up in church, so I know a lot of church songs, and there's there's a song that says um I surrender all. And it took on a whole new meaning because I said this easy to sing, I surrender all, until it's time to actually surrender. Oh and I said, you know, people, we sing this song and you don't even know what surrender is, you're just singing a song, but when you go through through something like that, that's when you you see, oh, this is surrender, and I don't want to surrender all. I don't want to, but when you're in that back in that corner, you realize you have no choice but to surrender all because you've kicked and screamed, laid in the floor, rolled around, and and it that didn't fix anything. So you realize you've done everything, you threw the tantrum, but we're still here. And then you say, Okay, I'm gonna try surrender because all the other stuff didn't work. So, so I'll surrender. And and it just brought a whole new meaning to that song. And I said, We have to be careful what we we sing and what we think. You think you can surrender all until you have to, and that's when you find out what you're made of.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I look back at um my own journey and the challenges I've faced, um, moments of darkness, moments of uncertainty, where I came up with a hundred what-ifs. I was so fearful of all of the what-ifs. But looking back, 99% of the time, none of those what-ifs unfolded. It was something completely different. And it's nice to look back and see the growth that occurred through all that fear and the uncertainty. What's next for you, Janine? What's next for AJ? And what's next for Get the Pen?
SPEAKER_01:Well, for me, I I am now I'm fine, I'm an empty nester, which is great. So I have this new found freedom to do whatever I want. Uh, my children are all adults and they're self-sufficient, which is an accomplishment in itself, uh, with some mixed emotions. I'm happy that they're all successful in their own way. They pay their own rent, they pay their own bills, they feed themselves. And there was a moment when I was driving home from work and I realized nobody needs me, which is good. Like they they really don't need me. But that means I did my job. And that was the whole point of all of it was to help them to not need me. Um, and and that's bittersweet because you miss them. I I spent years with of my life with them, and a lot of times I'll tell them, I miss us, I miss us all being together. But now they have their own families, their own homes, and I'm very proud. So now with this freedom, uh my next goal is to write, I want to write a science fiction futuristic novel. I've always written inspirational, but I want to create characters and still be inspirational in a different way through through science fiction. Uh, so that that's what I want to do in travel. Uh AJ, he he just moved into another apartment. He's upgraded from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom. Now he has an office and he's busy with his life and and living life, and I'm very, very proud of him. He he wants to go back to school, which I believe he's gonna be doing soon. But meanwhile, he works and he drives a semi. He he makes good money, he's doing very well. And and get the pen. I I don't will get the pen. Well, of course, we're gonna still promote telling stories, whatever that looks like. Um it is time consuming oftentimes, like with the gentleman who uh did the recordings and and I did the trend, that was a very tedious process, but we did it. And I and so I get other people who want to do that, and I I know my limits. I I can't commit that much time, but I can give suggestions to people. So just as a um consultant uh to other writers who want to self-publish or share share their stories, I'll do a lot of that. And I am up to 25 books now. The only one book that I really want to do uh now after AJ's miracle is called Many Mansions. And that's that's my science fiction project that I'm working on. But I'm pretty much taking it easy and I am enjoying that.
SPEAKER_00:Janine, thank you for sharing AJ's story, your journey of faith, and the hearts behind Get the Pen. Your words remind us that miracles still unfold in layers over time, and that hope is never wasted. So, to anyone listening today who is holding on to their own breakthroughs, let this conversation be a reminder that you are not alone, that God still works in ways seen and unseen, and that your story matters. You can learn more about Janine's work and her book at getthepen.net and remember that miracles continue. Janine, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your story with us. You will undoubtedly inspire many of our listeners.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for spending time with me today. If you enjoyed this content, please make sure you subscribe to this podcast and leave a quick review to help us share the message.