Fact check: She came to Ridgeland almost 3 years prior than stated to live with me, work at Walmart and divorce her husband in Maben. She had absolutely zero intention of pursuing any sort of medical career.
Below is the lie, copied directly from https://enhancedwellness.com/our-staff/
Copied and pasted directly. See below for the full Fact Check:
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Amanda Carter
Board Certified Family Nurse Practitioner
Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner, MSN
Amanda was raised in Starkville, Mississippi, moved to Ridgeland in 2009 to pursue her goal of becoming a nurse, and in 2012, she graduated from Holmes Community College with an Associate Degree of Nursing. Amanda began her medical career as a Registered Nurse in gynecology/oncology and perioperative services at St. Dominic Hospital and later at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Throughout her 10 years in acute care, Amanda developed an interest in Primary Care and Functional Medicine. Seeing the reactive nature of medicine, rather than proactive prevention of illness, lead her to continue her education at Walden University. In 2021 Amanda earned her Master’s Degree of Science in Nursing and became a Certified Family Nurse Practitioner through the American Association of Nurse Practitioners.
Amanda joined the Enhanced Wellness Living team to serve patients with a holistic care approach. She enjoys educating patients on using positive lifestyle changes and nutrition to prevent and treat chronic illnesses. Her goal is to encourage community health and to help eliminate health disparities common in our current culture. Amanda thrives while providing individually focused care and making each patient feel like they are a member of her family.
Amanda is passionately involved in our community and regularly volunteers her time to support local causes. She is a member of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) and the Mississippi Association of Nurse Practitioners (MANP). In her free time, Amanda enjoys bicycling, working out at the gym, Enneagrams, and reading. Chat with Amanda!
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The Fact Check:
This lie is minor, but should be made public. If a person will lie about such small things when they don’t have to, can you imagine how tenuous their relationship with the truth is throughout their other dealings?
She claims to have moved to Ridgeland in 2009 to pursue her medical career. The reality is, she met me in 2003-ish while I was a student at Mississippi State.
She lived in Maben, and commuted to work. We worked together at Walmart in Starkville. She was the “department manager” of paper goods and chemicals. I worked as a clerk there and stocked those areas. At that time, she was married to her second husband, and she had two children, by two different men. Through some crazy things that occurred (which we will get into while debunking another fiction later), I ended up leaving school and going to work as a programmer/analyst in Ridgeland. This was in 2006. I was here in Ridgeland for 6 months working two jobs and saving to move her and her children here.
I did what I set out to do. I worked from 8 am until 7 pm at my programmer analyst job. Then drove an hour to where I was staying and did electrician work until 1 a.m. with a friend of the family in Magee, MS. The next morning, I would wake up early, commute an hour and start over again. I would visit her at her house on the weekend, and drive back extremely early on Monday morning. This was the pattern for 6 months, when finally I could afford to move her and the kids to Ridgeland.
When she came here, we lived at the Mark apartments on Lake Harbor. She was divorcing her husband at the time, claiming he was evil, a monster, a cheater, controlling and God-knows what-all. She was a victim. The same worn out story she has thrown on every new guy regarding the last old guy since before my time.
These things I believed, else I’d not have been with her at the time, and they may be true…but due to her behavior, I can no longer believe anything she has ever said to me. The basic fact of the matter is, she cheated on him with me. Then she ran off with me.
Of course, this was wrong of me, but she presented heavily that she was a victim and her and her girls needed “rescue.” She presented as moral, decent, good, and having suffered some hard knocks. Her email address at the time was even “godluvingal@yahoo.com” But that is off of the point… let’s return to the subject. We can discuss this stuff later.
So she moved to an apartment in Ridgeland with her two kids and I. The eldest of the two was in the 4th grade and we enrolled her at Highland elementary. The youngest was 5 years old and enrolled in the Little School Daycare on Northpark Drive. She transferred her Walmart job to the Ridgeland Walmart on Wheatley.
And so things were static for another two years. With me working as programmer/analyst and later as “Director of Information Technology” at a medical company in the area, and her a department manager at Ridgeland Walmart. Throughout this time, I’d told her numerous times she should go to school. I could help her. I could get her a job as an OTA, PTA, or whatever if she chose that route.
She did not want to go to school. Mostly out of fear. This is understandable. Her response was always “I can’t. I haven’t taken the ACT. I’ve got a correspondence diploma” she would find self defeatist excuses. So I would let it lie a few months, and when she complained of her job, I’d say again “Well, why not go to school? I can help you with the ACT enrollment, paperwork, FAFSA, all the things.” These discussions, and the pressure I put on her went on for at least a year. The same cycle of discussion.
I had gone to school for a number of years at this point, and was fairly an expert at the beauracracy and paperwork of it all.
Truth to tell, I did NOT like my “fiancé” working at Walmart. In her defense here, I knew she was too smart for that, and I’d seen many less intelligent people succeed in higher education. So I did not drop the subject.
Then, late in 2008 she decided that to contribute more to paying off her divorce, and paying off her Mustang that we had to buy because her ex husband got her buick repossessed, she would pick up a second job, part-time. Of course at this time, I was making twice what she was, even with her part-time work. So I do lay claim that I paid for a large part of her divorce and a large part of her Mustang. (TBH her mother paid more on her divorce than me, my “share” was around $8,000. And TBH I did not pay these things alone. We were a ‘we’ and everything was ‘us’. But since I made twice as much, I do claim my 66%.)
So she went to work at Penn’s fish house on Lake Harbor. While working at Walmart. This two job stuff went on for a short while… I was at home with the kids, and she was out working… then she quit Penn’s and went to work at Michaels over in the shopping center where the Chuck-E-Cheese was (or is?) in Jackson.
Throughout this time, I was constantly pressuring her to go to school. I did not like being at home alone all the time with the kids. I wanted a family. So I pressured her, not in a mean way, but in a very proactive, positive manner. “You can do it. I can help. You’ve got this. I can hold the fort, keep things stable, take care of the kids while you go. You can go for as little as two years and get a single job making more than you are making at two, and then spend more time at home. You’re smart. Etc. Etc.”
So after much….much…MUCH cajoling and overcoming objections and getting her to not listen to her “friend” that told her constantly “school is dumb. You can’t do it. I would never do that. It’s hard” I was able to get her to at least start considering the idea. She started to wonder what she could do….
We were married in May of 2008. Going on two years of Walmart after we moved down here. Shortly thereafter she started looking for a different career path. She decided she wanted to be a teacher, so she applied to a job as a teaching assistant. She did not get that job. She then decided that “nursing was the life for her” and got a job as a Nursing Assistant at St. Dominic and started school.
In 2009 several things happened. She got pregnant (It was planned), and we bought a house. The housing tax credit from the 2008 crisis helped us square up the debts from her divorce and car….
So away she went. Working as a nursing assistant manning a desk at St. D, while going to school and being pregnant. Away I went, playing one-man-dad-mom, cooking and cleaning, tending kids, while working a grueling 70+ hour job with no legitimate time off (I was constantly getting work calls and communiques until 1 a.m. and people started contacting me again at 5 am).
I won’t lay claim to being the one-and-only parent. I was not the one to do the laundry, I was not the one to get them sent off to school, nor was I the one to manage the kids appointments and school needs.
But I cleaned continuously, helped with the homework daily, put kids into baths and bed nightly. Worked with Santa alone. Cooked nearly every night. Was the one to tend the kids when they were sick. Those few things… getting them up, managing appointments, school needs, and doing the laundry… this was pretty much the limit of her contribution. At night and on the weekends she was simply….gone. She did clean, to a degree when she was home (which was seldom), and this generally meant stuffing things out of sight, but I did do a large of the cleaning. (though she, to this day, claims she did everything)
Now, to give her some amount of credit, she did man the house as a mother while she was on FMLA after having a child,. a period of around 9 months…maybe up to a year. But even during this time… I let her go to bed at 7:30 PM, and I tended baby until 2 or 3 am, rocking a baby bouncer in front of my recliner, rocking a baby in the recliner, carrying a baby in a reverse baby backpack while I played skyrim or oblivion (giving the baby the illusion of continuous walking, or so I thought..) Thus giving her 7-8 hours of sleep…interrupted by breast pumping/feeding. And then I would be back at work at 8 a.m…though she claims this routine never existed, she “did everything by herself” (even though there are many witnesses to this being an egregious lie)
And I did not mind. I will stress this here. I DID NOT mind doing the things I did. Had she not proven to be absolutely horrendous, I would never have complained. We were an ‘us’ and I was glad to grind away while she worked hard, and/or “bettered herself” to help ‘us.’ But again, I’m dangerously close to going off subject, so let’s resume.
This is the true story of how and when she came to Ridgeland and got into nursing. I’m not really sure why lying is such a cornerstone of her existence, but if she tells me grass is green, I really would go check. I don’t know why she would say she “moved to Ridgeland in 2009 to pursue her nursing career” when she could accomplish the exact same effect without outright lying by simply saying “she began her nursing career in 2009 at Holmes.”
Oh, I have contentions with the Starkville statement too, though it’s not verified. I believe she was from West Point, not Starkville. She went to school in West Point until she got pregnant at 15 and had her first child and left high school. She lived in Columbus for a time, then went to live in Millport, Alabama and was a waitress there. Then she moved to Pheba, then on to Maben and worked at Walmart in Starkville like 30 minutes away.
At no point, as far as I can tell, was she “from Starkville” until about two months before she moved to Ridgeland. But whatever, I suppose she’s ashamed of West Point. And again, though I hold no negativity towards someone for not claiming parts of their past… there are ways to deal with that without actively lying about it. But chronic liars lie, and there’s no escaping that.
Then again, maybe she was born at a Starkville hospital, I cannot recall and there’s some tenuous connection. That is a far cry from being Raised in Starkville. But as long as I knew her, she claimed she was from West Point, she grew up, attended school and got pregnant while there…and I only saw this change to Starkville when her “biography” was posted. So who knows without a birth certificate. I can only go off of what she said during the bulk of our years together. I won’t die on this hill, as I do not intend to represent as facts things that I don’t fully know. She may be, in fact, a born native of Starkville though she did not ‘come up’ there; I just can’t say.
Also, I will point out here that this Starkville business is very, very minor and may be subject to shades of meaning as in “the Starkville area” or “near Starkville”; but I am endeavoring to be as thorough and complete as possible with my work.
Now, when it comes to volunteering and community work… I don’t know how much of that she has done since it only happened after we split, she had never been passionate about anything community driven…only passionate about partying and drinking with her b.f.f. but I can tell you from 15 years of being together… if she took up volunteering, It is window dressing if at all, plain and simple; and part of the mask.
And as you will see throughout this blog… you DO NOT want to have her make you “feel like a member of her family.” Trust me on this. You will see the why of this as the site progresses.
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