The Drawer of Loose Dresses

A woman I had been nodding at for almost a year in the waiting room of my mother's cardiologist sat down next to me last October.

She said, I can't do another one of these mornings by myself. Do you mind if I sit here?

I said no. Please.

An hour later, when they called her name and she stood up to go back, she had said one sentence to me that has not left me since.

I am writing this because for 18 months before that morning I had been quietly carrying 2 people, and I did not have a word for what was wrong with either of them.

My father, 71, in the memory care wing 40 minutes from my house.

And my mother, 59, in her own kitchen, disappearing in a way no one could name.

That woman in the waiting room gave one of them back to me.

My name is Rachel.

I live an hour outside Cleveland with my husband and our 2 kids.

My mother, Linda, is 59.

She is a retired second grade teacher who read to a room full of 6 year olds for 31 years and could hold every one of them in the palm of her hand.

She raised 3 of us mostly on her own after my father left, and she did it without ever once letting us see her tired.

My father came back into our lives, older and softer, about a decade ago, and my mother, this is the kind of woman she is, was the one who set up his memory care and drives out to sit with him every Wednesday.

So that was the arithmetic of my life a year ago.

A father who was leaving slowly in one building.

And a mother who was supposed to be the strong one, quietly coming apart in her own house while she held everyone else together.

I want you to hold the picture of who my mother was, because the woman I had been driving out to see this past year and a half was someone else.

I drove home from her house that afternoon with the radio off the whole way, trying to work out when the change in her had actually started.

I don't know exactly when it started.

That is the cruel part of it.

There was no single morning where a healthy woman went to bed and a sick one woke up.

It came the way dusk comes.

You don't see it fall. You just look up at some point and realize you can't read anymore.

The first thing I noticed was the dresses.

My mother has always dressed beautifully. Tailored things. A belt at the waist. She had opinions about a hemline.

Last spring I was helping her put laundry away and I opened the top drawer of her dresser and there were 6 dresses in it I had never seen.

All new. All a size up. All loose, cut to hang straight down from the shoulders so nothing touched her middle.

She had been buying them quietly for months.

She'd been hiding it.

I stood there with my hand on that drawer and I understood, all at once, that my mother had been getting dressed every morning around a stomach that by 5 in the afternoon made her look 6 months pregnant.

She never said a word to me about it.

She just bought bigger dresses and stopped taking pictures.

Once I saw the dresses, I saw everything.

I saw that she had stopped hosting Sunday dinner, the thing she had done every week of my entire life, and had started "just doing something small at your place, honey, if that's alright."

I saw that she left every gathering early. Always a reason. Always a good one.

I saw her unbutton the top of her slacks in the car on the drive home from my house and think I hadn't noticed.

I saw her fall asleep in her chair at 2 in the afternoon, a woman who used to grade papers until midnight.

I saw her stand in the doorway of my kitchen with her car keys in her hand and forget, completely, what she had come in to say.

I saw her come back from her Wednesday visits with my father and sit in her car in my driveway for 10 minutes before she could come inside, gathering herself, because she was running on empty and had nothing left to run on.

She laughed all of it off. She always laughed it off.

But I watched her get quieter about it, and then a little frightened, and then she stopped mentioning it at all, which was worse.

I had been telling myself it was her age.

I had been telling myself it was menopause.

I had been telling myself it was the strain of my father, of caring for him, of the drive.

I had been telling myself she was fine, because 6 different doctors had told her she was fine.

I had been telling myself a lot of things.

So I sat down at my own kitchen table one night after the kids went up, and I read every page of the folder of test results she keeps in her purse.

She had seen those doctors. That is the part that still makes me angry.

She had bloodwork. She had a colonoscopy. She had a scope from the top and a scope from the bottom.

Every result came back inside the normal range.

One doctor told her it was IBS and gave her a fiber powder.

One told her it was "just menopause" and offered her an antidepressant.

One told her, and I was in the room for this one, that she should "try to relax and lose a little weight."

My mother nodded and thanked him.

In the car afterward she gripped the wheel and said the thing I will never forget.

She said, if I could just KNOW what's wrong, I could fight it. Not knowing is what's killing me.

I think about that sentence more than almost anything anyone has ever said to me.

Not knowing is what's killing me.

She had spent her whole life fighting for other people. She would have fought this too. Nobody would give her something to fight.

That was where we were the morning that woman sat down next to me in the cardiologist's waiting room.

My mother was there that day for something small and unrelated, a flutter they wanted to check, nothing serious.

I was in the waiting room on my third cup of terrible coffee, not in a good way at all.

The woman's name was Carol.

She was about my mother's age. Silver hair, cut short. A tote bag with a paperback in it.

She set the bag down, put her face in her hands for a second, and then she looked up at me and asked if she could take the seat.

We talked for the better part of an hour.

It was the conversation 2 people have when they have each been quietly carrying the same weight alone for too long and finally find someone else carrying it too.

She was there with her sister.

She told me her sister had spent 4 years the way I was describing my mother. The bloating. The fog. The exhaustion no one could explain. Every test normal. Every doctor kind and useless.

I told her about my mother. About the dresses. About the doctor who said lose a little weight.

Carol went quiet for a minute.

Then she said something I have thought about every single day since.

She said, everybody kept telling my sister it was her age. It wasn't her age.

She said, when a woman goes through menopause, her body stops making the estrogen that used to guard her gut. Estrogen is the guard at the gate. When it drops, small cracks open in the wall of the gut. And the things that had been kept in check for decades, the overgrowth, the die off, the quiet bloating, they multiply through those cracks.

She said, the bloating and the fog and the tiredness weren't menopause. They were what got in when menopause dropped the defenses.

I asked her what her sister did.

Carol said, this is the part that matters, so let me be careful about it.

She said everything her sister had tried before had only ever done half the job. The cleanses killed things but left the wall open, so it all came roaring back inside 2 weeks. The probiotics just fed the fire and made her twice as bloated. Nobody ever rebuilt the wall.

She said the thing that finally worked was the first thing that did both at once.

I leaned in over the arm of that plastic chair and asked her, straight out, what it was called.

The brand was called Symbia.

Carol said it was a liquid you take under your tongue, 2 milliliters in the morning, and that it was built in 2 halves that run at the same time.

The first half, she said, is the cleanse. Wormwood, black walnut, clove, oregano oil, black seed oil, pumpkin seed. That's the part that goes after what got in through the cracks.

The second half, she said, is the repair. Sea moss, ginger, DGL licorice, zinc L-carnosine. That's the part that rebuilds the gut wall her hormones had stopped protecting.

And here was the whole thing, she said. The repair rebuilds while the cleanse is still killing.

Not after. During.

You cannot repair the garden while it's still overrun with weeds, she said. Pull the weeds and walk away and they grow right back through the same broken soil. This pulls the weeds and rebuilds the soil at the same time.

That was why every cleanse had failed her sister. They had all pulled the weeds and left the ground open.

She said it the way a woman who has watched someone she loves come back tells another woman who is still waiting for that.

She wasn't selling me anything.

She was just telling me.

Then they called her name and she squeezed my arm and went back to her sister, and I sat there in that waiting room and I finally, for the first time in 18 months, had a word for the thing.

I am, by nature, a careful person. I do not put things in my mother's body on a stranger's say so in a waiting room.

So I went home and I read.

I read for almost 3 weeks.

I read about the gut wall, how it is really only one cell thick, held together by tiny junctions, and how when those junctions come apart, undigested food and everything else leaks through, and the immune system starts attacking things it never used to attack.

I read that this is why women in their fifties suddenly can't eat foods they've eaten their whole lives. The wall opened. The body started treating dinner like an intruder.

I read about what happens to that wall when estrogen falls off a cliff, which is exactly what it does in a woman's fifties.

I read every ingredient in both halves, one at a time, until I understood what each one was actually there to do.

I read that wormwood and clove and black walnut and oregano oil were the old, plain, unglamorous cleanse herbs, the ones women's grandmothers used every spring, before we all decided we were too modern to need them.

I read that the clove matters because it handles the earliest stage, the part most cleanses miss, and if you miss it the whole cycle just starts over in 2 weeks.

And then I read the second half, the part almost nothing else on the shelf bothers with. Sea moss, the soothing gel that coats a raw gut wall. DGL licorice, a protective coating over the lining. Zinc L-carnosine, which closes the tiny gaps between the gut cells, the same gaps Carol had drawn in the air for me in that waiting room 3 weeks before.

I read about the liquid, that it goes in under the tongue and absorbs in about 15 minutes, instead of being a pill that has to survive stomach acid and then get absorbed through a wall that is already damaged, losing most of its strength on the way in.

For a gut that is already inflamed, the pill is the wrong delivery. That made plain sense to me.

None of what I read was a fireworks story. It was the opposite of one.

It was a careful, patient explanation of a thing that had been happening to my mother for 18 months, that 6 doctors had waved off as her age.

I called my mother and I read her the whole thing over the phone.

She was quiet for a while.

Then she said, order it. I'll try anything. You know I will.

The box came on a Thursday, and I drove it out to her house myself and set it on the counter next to her coffee maker before I let myself say one word about it.

I want to be honest with you about how it went, because a clean story would be a lie and you deserve better than a lie.

The first 2 weeks, she felt nothing in particular.

I had read enough to know this works from the inside out, the wall starts closing long before you can feel it close, quiet before it is loud. The damage had come slowly and then all at once, and I knew the repair would come back the same way. So I watched. And I waited.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly.

The first thing was a phone call, about 10 days in.

She called to tell me, almost embarrassed, that she'd gone the whole day without unbuttoning anything.

She said, I had toast this morning and I didn't blow up like a balloon by lunch. I don't want to jinx it.

I told her not to jinx it. I didn't make a thing of it. I had read enough not to make a thing of one good day.

The second thing was around week 3.

I drove out on a Sunday and she was wearing one of her old dresses. The green one with the belt. Buttoned. Belted at the waist.

She saw me see it and she put her hand flat on her own stomach and she said, very quietly, it went down. Rachel, it went down.

I said it looks beautiful, Mom.

I did not tell her I cried the whole way home.

The third thing took longer, and it was the one I had stopped letting myself hope for.

Around week 6 she called me on a Tuesday afternoon, a Tuesday, not our usual Sunday, and she was breathless with it.

She said, I read a whole chapter of my book last night. A whole chapter. I knew what happened. I could tell you what happened right now.

The fog, she said, had lifted like a window opening.

She said, it's like someone turned the lights back on.

By month 2 she was hosting Sunday dinner again.

She stood at her own stove in her own kitchen and made the roast she used to make, and she stayed on her feet the whole afternoon, and she did not fall asleep in her chair, and at the end of it she stood at the door and hugged my kids and she was, all the way, herself.

The Wednesday after that, she drove out to sit with my father, and she came to my house afterward, and for the first time in a year she did not sit in the driveway gathering herself.

She walked in the door with energy left over.

My daughter, who is 9, said it in the car on the way home from that Sunday dinner, without any idea what she was saying.

She said, Mom, Grandma's back.

I had to pull over.

I sat on the shoulder of that road with my hazards on until I could see well enough to drive the rest of the way home.

She went back to one of those doctors about 5 months in.

Not the lose a little weight one. A new one, a younger woman she'd found who actually listened.

New bloodwork. A long conversation. My mother told her everything, the 18 months, the 6 doctors, the dresses, the drops, all of it.

The doctor listened to the whole thing and then she said something my mother repeated to me twice on the phone that night because she couldn't believe she'd finally heard it.

She said, whatever you're doing, it's working. Your gut markers look better than they have any right to at your age. Keep doing exactly what you're doing.

Nobody had ever told my mother she was doing something right.

For 18 months everyone had told her she was fine while she fell apart. This was the first person to look at her and tell her the falling apart had been real, and that it was reversing.

She got off the phone with me and, she told me later, she sat in her car in the parking lot and cried the way you cry when something you were sure had left you comes back instead.

I want to be clear with you about what did this, because I am writing to people I have never met.

She added one thing to her mornings, 2 milliliters under her tongue, and that is the thing that changed.

Yes, she rested more, because for the first time in 18 months she had a reason to hope, and the reason was the drops working. Yes, she ate the way a woman with an inflamed gut should eat, because the drops had finally let her gut hold food again. Every good thing that came after came downstream of the dropper.

That is how it always goes when a person who has been drowning quietly finally gets thrown a rope. The rope comes first, and everything else follows it up out of the water.

All I can tell you is this.

She added one thing she had not been doing before.

She kept everything else exactly the same.

And the months that followed were a different life than the 18 that came before them.

That is exactly what happened. I would not soften it for you.

My mother has been taking it every morning for almost 10 months now.

Just 2 milliliters under the tongue with her coffee. That is the whole thing. No powder to mix, no afternoon dose, no schedule taped inside a cupboard door.

She keeps 6 bottles in the cabinet. She is not a woman who runs out of something that gave her her life back.

She calls it "my drops" and she is a little superstitious about them and I don't blame her one bit.

I am telling you all of this because I think you might be where I was that October morning.

Watching someone you love slowly stop being the person you know.

Watching her get quieter about it. Watching her buy the bigger dress and stop being in the pictures.

Watching a doctor smile at a normal test result while the woman attached to the result disappears in front of you.

If that is you, if you have been carrying a quiet, frightened question about a mother, or a wife, or a sister, or your own self, I want to tell you exactly what to expect.

Week 2, the bloat starts letting go, and the loose dress stops being the only one that fits.

By week 3, the dress she'd given up on buttons at the waist again.

By week 6, the fog lifts like a window thrown open in a stuffy room, and the lights come back on.

By the second month, she is hosting Sunday dinner again, on her feet the whole afternoon, not asleep in her chair, all the way herself.

That is the sequence. That is what it did in my mother, and it is what it does.

I want to say one thing plainly, to every person reading this.

You are not imagining the dimming.

You are not being dramatic, and you are not making it up, and you are not the difficult one.

You have been watching something real happen to someone real, and being told, over and over, by people with a chart in front of them, that nothing is happening at all.

Her doctor has been watching the chart.

You have been watching the woman.

Trust what you have been watching. You have been right this whole time.

But I know what it did in my mother.

I know she is back at her own stove.

I know she is in the pictures again.

I got up from this kitchen table and refilled my coffee before I wrote the next part down, because the next part is the practical one.

Here is the last thing, and it is the reason I felt safe letting her try it at all.

Symbia comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

If it does nothing, for any reason at all, including just changing your mind, they send the money back. Every penny. Empty bottles accepted. No questions, nothing to prove to anyone.

That is the whole policy.

And one honest word about stock, so you are not surprised.

This is not a shelf product you will always find waiting for you.

It sells out. Not because it is some small outfit that can't keep the shelves full, but because women who feel the difference come back and buy it 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, for their sisters, for themselves.

Right now, whatever got in through those cracks is multiplying. Tomorrow's bloat will be a little worse than today's. That is just the biology of it.

So if you go, and it is in stock, that is the moment. It comes with the 30 day money back guarantee, so the only thing you can lose is the disappearing.

👉 Go see if Symbia is still in stock. https://trysymbia.com/go

That is all I have.

Thank you for reading this far.

I hope, somewhere today, your own Carol is sitting down in a waiting room next to you, about to say the sentence that gives your person back.

Rachel.

P.S. If you carry one thing out of this letter, carry the timing.

Every cleanse my mother's friends had ever tried killed something and then walked away, and 2 weeks later the bloating came back through a wall that nobody had closed behind it.

The reason this one held is that the wall closes while the cleanse is still running. There is no open 2 week window for it all to come flooding back through.

Not after. During. That is the whole difference, and it is also how 6 doctors could look straight at my mother and see nothing at all.

It was never about her age.

P.P.S. The policy, in case you skimmed, because it is the reason I let her try it at all.

It runs 30 days. Any reason at all, including simply changing your mind.

You do not have to prove a single thing to anyone, not about her bloodwork, not about how she feels, nothing.

Empty bottles accepted. Every penny back. That is the entire policy.

And it does sell out, not because it is a small outfit that can't keep the shelves full, but because women who feel the difference come back and buy it 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, for their sisters, for themselves. That is what happens to a thing that works.

👉 If someone you love is quietly buying the bigger dress, go see if it is in stock before those cracks widen any further. https://trysymbia.com/go

P.P.P.S. Here is who I am actually writing to.

If you have opened a drawer and found clothes you did not know she owned, this is for you.

If she has started leaving the party first, always with a good reason, this is for you.

If she unbuttons her waistband in the car and thinks you did not see, this is for you.

If she falls asleep in a chair at 2 in the afternoon after 31 years of grading papers past midnight, this is for you.

If she has stood in your kitchen with her keys in her hand and lost the sentence she walked in to say, this is for you.

If 6 doctors have told her every result is inside the normal range while you watch her go out like a lamp, this is for you.

And if you are the one carrying 2 people quietly the way I was, an aging parent on one side and a fading one on the other, this is especially for you.

You are allowed to be the person who finds the answer. You do not have to wait for a doctor to hand it to you. I found mine in a plastic chair, from a stranger with a paperback in her bag, on the worst morning of a very long year.

P.P.P.P.S. Last Thursday my mother came to my daughter's recital.

She wore the green dress, belted at the waist, and she got there 20 minutes early so she could have a seat in the front row.

I sat 2 rows behind her and watched the back of her head instead of the stage for most of it.

Afterward she stood in the lobby with my 9 year old hanging off her arm, laughing at something my husband said, and a woman I have never met took a photo of the 3 of them.

She is in that photo. She is in the middle of it. The drawer of 6 loose dresses upstairs in her house has not been opened since March.

👉 trysymbia.com/go

I found the drawer last spring.

There were 6 dresses in my mother's dresser I had never seen. All new. All a size up. All cut to hang loose so nothing touched her middle.

She'd been buying them quietly for months.

She'd been hiding it.

I stood there with my hand on that drawer and understood, all at once, that my mother had been getting dressed every morning around a stomach that by 5 in the afternoon made her look 6 months pregnant.

She never said a word to me.

She just bought bigger dresses and stopped being in the pictures.

My name is Rachel. My mother is Linda, and she is 59, and for a year and a half I watched her disappear while every doctor she saw told her she was fine.

I shut that drawer and drove home, and by the time I pulled into my own driveway I had started counting backward through the whole year.

Once I saw the dresses, I saw all of it.

The Sunday dinners she stopped hosting after 30 years.

The parties she left early, always a good reason.

The slacks she unbuttoned in the car and thought I didn't notice.

The afternoons she fell asleep in her chair, a woman who used to grade papers until midnight.

The times she stood in my kitchen with her keys in her hand and forgot, completely, what she'd come in to say.

She laughed all of it off. She always laughed it off. Then she got quieter about it. Then she stopped mentioning it at all, which was worse.

I told myself it was her age.

I told myself it was menopause.

I told myself she was fine, because 6 doctors had told her she was fine.

She'd had the bloodwork. The colonoscopy. The scope from the top and the scope from the bottom. Every result inside the normal range.

One doctor said IBS and handed her a fiber powder.

One said "just menopause" and offered her an antidepressant.

One told her, and I was in the room, to "relax and lose a little weight."

In the car afterward she gripped the wheel and said the thing I can't forget.

If I could just KNOW what's wrong, I could fight it. Not knowing is what's killing me.

She'd spent her whole life fighting for other people. Nobody would give her something to fight.

I carried that sentence around for months, and then one October morning I carried it into a cardiologist's waiting room 40 minutes from her house and set it down next to a stranger.

The answer came from that stranger.

I was on my third cup of bad coffee when a woman about my mother's age sat down beside me. Silver hair. A paperback in her tote bag.

We talked for an hour, the way 2 people talk when they've each been quietly carrying the same weight alone for too long.

Her sister, she said, had spent 4 years exactly the way I was describing my mother. The bloating. The fog. The bone deep tiredness. Every test normal.

I told her about the dresses.

She went quiet. Then she said the thing I've thought about every day since.

Everybody kept telling my sister it was her age. It wasn't her age.

When a woman goes through menopause, she said, her body stops making the estrogen that used to guard her gut. Estrogen is the guard at the gate. When it drops, small cracks open in the wall of the gut, and the things that had been kept in check for decades, the overgrowth, the quiet bloating, multiply through those cracks.

The bloating and the fog weren't menopause, she said. They were what got in when menopause dropped the defenses.

I asked what her sister finally did.

She said everything before had only done half the job. The cleanses killed things but left the wall open, so it all came roaring back in 2 weeks. The probiotics just fed the fire.

The thing that finally worked, she said, did both at once.

It was called Symbia.

A liquid you take under the tongue, 2 milliliters in the morning, built in 2 halves that run at the same time.

The first half is the cleanse. Wormwood, black walnut, clove, oregano oil, black seed oil, pumpkin seed. It goes after what got in through the cracks.

The second half is the repair. Sea moss, ginger, DGL licorice, zinc L-carnosine. It rebuilds the gut wall her hormones had stopped protecting.

And here's the whole thing, she said. The repair rebuilds while the cleanse is still killing.

Not after. During.

You cannot repair the garden while it's still overrun with weeds. Pull the weeds and walk away, they grow back through the same broken soil. This pulls the weeds and rebuilds the soil at the same time.

That was why every cleanse had failed her sister. They'd all left the ground open.

She wasn't selling me anything. She was just telling me.

Then they called her name, and she squeezed my arm and was gone, and I sat there and finally, for the first time in 18 months, had a word for the thing.

I drove home from that appointment, opened my laptop at the kitchen table, and did not really close it again for most of a month.

I'm a careful person. I read for 3 weeks before I let my mother try anything.

I read about the gut wall, one cell thick, held by tiny junctions, and how when those junctions come apart, undigested food leaks through and the immune system starts attacking things it never used to. I read that this is why women in their fifties suddenly can't eat foods they've eaten their whole lives. The wall opened.

I read every ingredient in both halves until I understood what each was for. The clove, I learned, handles the earliest stage most cleanses skip, and if you miss it the whole cycle just restarts in 2 weeks. The sea moss and the DGL and the zinc are the second half almost nothing else on the shelf bothers with, the part that actually closes the tiny gaps between the gut cells, the same cracks the stranger had drawn in the air for me 3 weeks before.

I read that the liquid absorbs under the tongue in about 15 minutes, instead of being a pill that has to survive stomach acid and get absorbed through a wall that's already damaged, losing most of itself on the way. For an inflamed gut, the pill is the wrong delivery. That made sense.

I called my mother and read her all of it.

She was quiet a while. Then she said, order it. I'll try anything. You know I will.

The box came on a Thursday and I drove it out to her house and set it on the counter beside her coffee maker myself.

I'll be honest about how it went, because a clean story would be a lie.

The first 2 weeks, nothing.

Around day 10 she called, almost embarrassed, to say she'd gone a whole day without unbuttoning anything. I had toast this morning and didn't blow up like a balloon. I don't want to jinx it.

Around week 3 I drove out and she was wearing one of her old dresses. The green one. Buttoned. Belted at the waist.

She put her hand flat on her stomach and said, very quietly, it went down. Rachel, it went down.

I didn't tell her I cried the whole way home.

Around week 6 she called me on a Tuesday, breathless. She'd read a whole chapter of her book the night before. She knew what happened. The fog had lifted like a window opening.

It's like someone turned the lights back on, she said.

By month 2 she was hosting Sunday dinner again. She stood at her own stove the whole afternoon, didn't fall asleep in her chair, and was, all the way, herself.

My 9 year old said it in the car on the way home, with no idea what she was saying.

Mom, Grandma's back.

I had to pull over.

I want to be clear about what did this. She added one thing to her mornings, 2 milliliters under the tongue, and that was the thing that changed. She rested because she finally had a reason to hope, and she could eat again because her gut had stopped tearing itself apart. Every good thing came downstream of the drops.

She changed one thing and kept everything else the same. And the months that followed were a different life than the 18 before them.

That's exactly what happened. I won't soften it for you.

She takes it every morning now. Just 2 milliliters under the tongue with her coffee. She keeps 6 bottles in the cabinet, because she is not a woman who runs out of the thing that gave her her life back.

If you're watching someone you love get quieter, buy the bigger dress, stop being in the pictures, while a doctor smiles at a normal test result, I want to tell you exactly what happens.

Week 2 the bloat starts letting go. By week 3 the old dress buttons at the waist again. By week 6 the fog lifts and the lights come back on. By the second month she's back at her own stove, all the way herself. That's the sequence.

But you are not imagining the dimming. You are not being dramatic. You've been watching something real while people with a chart told you nothing was happening.

Trust what you've been watching. You've been right this whole time.

I am going to get up from this table in a minute, but not before I write down the practical part.

Symbia comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

If it does nothing, for any reason, including just changing your mind, they send the money back. Every penny. Empty bottles accepted. No questions.

One honest word about stock. This isn't a shelf product you'll always find waiting. It sells out, not because it's some small outfit that can't keep up, but because women who feel the difference come back and buy 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, their sisters, themselves.

Right now, whatever got in through those cracks is multiplying. Tomorrow's bloat is a little worse than today's. That's just the biology.

So if you go and it's in stock, that's the moment. It carries the 30 day money back guarantee, so the only thing you can lose is the disappearing.

👉 Go see if Symbia is still in stock. https://trysymbia.com/go

I hope, somewhere today, your own stranger is sitting down beside you, about to say the sentence that gives your person back.

Rachel.

P.S. If you take one thing out of this, take the timing.

The repair has to happen during the cleanse, not after it. Every cleanse her friends ever tried killed something and then walked away, and 2 weeks later the bloating came back through a wall nobody had closed.

Not after. During. That is the whole difference, and it is also how 6 doctors could look straight at my mother and see nothing at all.

P.P.S. The policy is the reason I let her try it at all.

It runs 30 days. Any reason, including simply changing your mind. Empty bottles accepted. Every penny back. You do not have to prove a single thing to anybody.

And it does sell out, not because it's a small outfit that can't keep the shelves full, but because women who feel the difference come back for 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, their sisters, themselves.

👉 If someone you love is quietly buying the bigger dress, go see if it is in stock before those cracks widen any further. https://trysymbia.com/go

P.P.P.S. Here is who I am actually writing to.

If you have opened a drawer and found clothes you didn't know she owned, this is for you.

If she leaves the party first now, always with a good reason, this is for you.

If she unbuttons her waistband in the car and thinks you didn't see, this is for you.

If she sleeps in a chair at 2 in the afternoon after 30 years of grading papers past midnight, this is for you.

If 6 doctors have told her every result is inside the normal range while you watch her go out like a lamp, this is for you.

You are allowed to be the person who finds the answer. You do not have to wait for a doctor to hand it to you.

P.P.P.P.S. Last Thursday my mother wore the green dress, belted, to my daughter's recital, and she got there 20 minutes early so she could sit in the front row.

I sat 2 rows behind her and watched the back of her head for most of it.

In the lobby afterward a woman I have never met took a photo of the 3 of them, my mother in the middle, laughing.

She is in that picture. The drawer upstairs in her house has not been opened since March.

👉 trysymbia.com/go

The last good photo of my mother before all of this was taken at my son's christening, 4 years ago.

She's in a blue dress, laughing at something off camera, one hand on my father's shoulder.

I keep it on my phone. For a year and a half it was the only way I could remember what she used to look like, because the woman I was driving out to see every Sunday was somebody else, and I could not have told you exactly when the trade had happened.

My name is Rachel. My mother is Linda. She is 59, she was a second grade teacher for 31 years, and she raised 3 of us mostly alone without ever once letting us see her tired.

This is the story of how I got that woman back, and it started with a drawer.

So let me take you upstairs into her bedroom, on an ordinary Saturday in April, with a laundry basket on my hip.

I found it last spring, helping her put laundry away.

The top drawer of her dresser. Inside it were 6 dresses I had never seen.

All new. All a size up. All cut to hang straight down from the shoulders so that nothing, anywhere, touched her middle.

She had been buying them quietly for months.

She'd been hiding it.

I stood there with my hand on that drawer and I understood, all at once, the whole shape of the thing.

My mother, who had opinions about hemlines, who belted everything at the waist, who dressed beautifully her entire life, had been getting up every single morning and dressing around a stomach that by 5 in the afternoon made her look 6 months pregnant.

She had never said one word to me about it.

She just bought the bigger dress and stopped standing in front of cameras.

Once I saw the drawer, I couldn't stop seeing the rest.

The Sunday dinners she'd hosted every week of my entire life, quietly handed off to "something small at your place, honey, if that's alright."

The gatherings she left early, always a reason, always a good one.

The waistband of her slacks, unbuttoned in the car on the drive home, when she thought I wasn't looking.

The chair she fell asleep in at 2 in the afternoon, a woman who used to grade papers until midnight.

The doorway of my kitchen, where she'd stand with her keys in her hand and lose, completely, whatever she had walked in to say.

The way she'd started saying "I'm just tired, honey," in a voice that had stopped believing itself.

I told myself it was her age.

I told myself it was menopause.

I told myself it was the strain of caring for my father, who is in memory care now, whom she still drives out to see every Wednesday.

I told myself she was fine, because 6 different doctors had looked at her and told her she was fine.

I told myself a great many things.

I drove home from her house that afternoon and pulled her folder of test results out of my bag at my own kitchen table, and I read every page of it twice.

She had done everything right. That is the part that still makes me angry.

She had the bloodwork. The colonoscopy. The scope from the top and the scope from the bottom. She sat in the waiting rooms and filled out the forms and answered the questions.

Every result came back inside the normal range.

One doctor told her it was IBS and gave her a fiber powder.

One told her it was "just menopause" and reached for the prescription pad and offered her an antidepressant.

One told her, and I was in the room for this one, I heard it with my own ears, that she should "try to relax and maybe lose a little weight."

My mother nodded. She thanked him. She has beautiful manners even when she is being failed.

In the parking lot she sat behind the wheel and didn't start the car for a minute, and then she said the sentence I have carried ever since.

If I could just KNOW what's wrong, I could fight it. Not knowing is what's killing me.

She had spent 59 years fighting for other people. She would have fought this too, tooth and nail, if anyone had been willing to name an enemy.

Nobody would. They just kept telling her she was fine while she came apart in front of me.

I drove her to one more appointment that October, a cardiologist 40 minutes from her house, and I sat down in the waiting room with a paper cup of coffee and no expectations at all.

The person who finally named it was a stranger in that waiting room.

My mother was in for something small and unrelated, a flutter they wanted to look at, nothing serious, and I was on my third cup of terrible coffee, not in a good way at all.

A woman about my mother's age sat down beside me. Silver hair, cut short. A canvas tote with a paperback in it. She set the bag down, put her face in her hands for a second, and then looked up and asked if the seat was taken.

We talked for the better part of an hour.

It was the conversation 2 people have when they've each been quietly carrying the same weight, alone, for far too long, and finally find someone else carrying it.

Her name was Carol. She was there with her sister.

She told me her sister had spent 4 years living exactly the way I was describing my mother. The bloating that made her look pregnant by dinner. The fog that swallowed words mid sentence. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep touched. Every test, every time, normal.

I told her about my mother. The dresses. The doctor who said lose a little weight.

Carol was quiet for a moment. Then she said the thing I have thought about every single day since.

Everybody kept telling my sister it was her age, she said. It wasn't her age.

Here is what she told me, as best as I can put it back the way she put it to me.

When a woman goes through menopause, her body stops making the estrogen it used to make. And estrogen, Carol said, isn't only a hormone that runs your cycle. It's also the guard at the gate of your gut.

For decades, that guard keeps the wall of the gut sealed and strong. Whatever's in there, the overgrowth, the quiet imbalance, the things a body carries and keeps in check, stays checked.

Then, in your fifties, the guard walks off the job. The estrogen drops. And small cracks open in the wall of the gut.

And everything that had been held back for 30 years starts multiplying through those cracks.

The bloating. The fog. The bone deep tiredness. The sudden inability to eat foods you've eaten your whole life.

Those weren't menopause, Carol said. They were what got in when menopause dropped the defenses.

I remember the feeling of that landing. After 18 months of you're fine, a stranger in a waiting room had just, in 90 seconds, described my mother's whole life to me and told me it was real.

I asked her what her sister finally did.

She said, this is the part that matters, so let me be careful with it.

Everything her sister had tried before, she said, had only ever done half the job.

The cleanses killed things, but they left the wall wide open, so within 2 weeks everything came roaring back.

The probiotics just fed the fire and made her twice as bloated.

Nobody, in 4 years, had ever rebuilt the wall.

The thing that finally worked, Carol said, was the first thing that did both at once.

I leaned in over the arm of that plastic chair and asked her, straight out, what it was called.

It was called Symbia.

A liquid, she said. You take 2 milliliters under your tongue in the morning. It's built in 2 halves, and the whole point is that the halves run at the same time.

The first is the cleanse. Wormwood, black walnut, clove, oregano oil, black seed oil, pumpkin seed, the old, plain, unglamorous herbs, the ones our grandmothers used every spring before we all decided we were too modern to need them. That's the part that goes after whatever got in through the cracks.

The second is the repair. Sea moss, the soothing gel that coats a raw gut wall. Ginger. DGL licorice, a protective coating over the lining. Zinc L-carnosine, which closes the tiny gaps between the gut cells. That's the part that rebuilds the wall her hormones had stopped protecting.

And here, Carol said, is the whole thing.

The repair rebuilds while the cleanse is still killing.

Not after. During.

You cannot repair the garden while it's still overrun with weeds. Pull the weeds and walk away, and they grow right back through the same broken soil. This pulls the weeds and rebuilds the soil at the same time.

That, she said, was why every cleanse had failed her sister for 4 years. They had all pulled the weeds and left the ground open. There was always a 2 week window for it all to come flooding back.

She wasn't selling me anything. She had no reason to. She was just a woman who had watched someone she loves come back, telling another woman who was still waiting.

Then they called her name. She squeezed my arm and went back to her sister.

And I sat there in that plastic chair and, for the first time in 18 months, I had a word for what was happening to my mother.

I am a careful person. I do not put things into my mother's body because a stranger in a waiting room said so.

So I went home and I read. I read for almost 3 weeks.

I read about the gut wall, how it is truly only one cell thick, held together by tiny junctions, and how when those junctions come apart, undigested food and everything else leaks through, and the immune system, confused, starts attacking things it never used to attack. I read that this is exactly why a woman in her fifties can suddenly stop tolerating bread, or dairy, or foods she's eaten happily for 50 years. The wall opened. The body started treating dinner like a trespasser.

I read what happens to that wall when estrogen falls off a cliff, which is precisely what estrogen does in a woman's fifties.

I read every ingredient in both halves, one at a time, until I understood what each one was actually there to do. I read that the clove matters specifically because it handles the earliest stage that most cleanses skip, and that if you skip it, the whole cycle simply restarts in 2 weeks.

I read about the liquid, that it absorbs under the tongue in about 15 minutes, instead of being a pill that has to survive stomach acid and then get absorbed through a wall that is already damaged, losing most of its strength on the way in. For a gut that is already inflamed, the pill is simply the wrong delivery. That made plain sense to me.

None of what I read was a fireworks story. It was the opposite of one. It was a careful, patient explanation of a thing that had been happening to my mother for a year and a half, that 6 doctors had waved off as her age.

I called her and read her the entire thing over the phone.

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, order it. I'll try anything. You know I will.

The box came on a Thursday, and I drove it out to her house myself and set it on the counter beside her coffee maker.

I want to be honest with you about how it went, because a clean story would be a lie, and you deserve better than a lie.

The first 2 weeks, she felt nothing in particular.

I had read enough to expect that. This works from the inside out, the wall starts closing long before you can feel it close, quiet before it is loud. The damage had come slowly and then all at once, and I knew the repair would come back the same way. So I watched. And I waited.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly.

The first thing was a phone call, about 10 days in. She called almost embarrassed to tell me she'd gone a whole day without unbuttoning anything.

I had toast this morning, she said, and I didn't blow up like a balloon by lunch. I don't want to jinx it.

I told her not to jinx it. I didn't make a thing of it. I had read enough not to make a thing of one good day.

The second thing was around week 3. I drove out on a Sunday and she was wearing one of her old dresses. The green one, with the belt. Buttoned. Belted at the waist, the way she used to wear it.

She saw me see it. She put her hand flat against her own stomach and she said, very quietly, it went down. Rachel, it went down.

I told her it looked beautiful.

I did not tell her I cried the entire drive home.

The third thing took longer, and it was the one I had made myself stop hoping for.

Around week 6 she called me on a Tuesday afternoon, a Tuesday, not our usual Sunday, breathless with it.

She had read a whole chapter of her book the night before. A whole chapter. She knew what happened. She could have told me the plot right then.

The fog, she said, had lifted like a window being opened in a stuffy room.

It's like someone turned the lights back on, she said.

By month 2, she was hosting Sunday dinner again. She stood at her own stove in her own kitchen and made the roast she used to make, and she stayed on her feet the whole afternoon, and she did not fall asleep in her chair, and when it was over she stood at the door and hugged my children and she was, all the way through, herself.

My daughter, who is 9, said it in the car on the way home, with no idea at all what she was saying.

Mom, Grandma's back.

I had to pull the car over.

I want to be clear with you about what did this, because I'm writing to people I've never met.

She added one thing to her mornings, 2 milliliters under her tongue, and that is the thing that changed.

Yes, she rested more, because for the first time in 18 months someone had finally named the enemy and handed her a weapon against it, and the weapon was working. Yes, she ate the way a woman with an inflamed gut should eat, because the drops had finally let her gut hold food again. Every good thing that came after came downstream of the dropper.

That is how it always goes when a person who's been quietly drowning finally gets thrown a rope. The rope comes first, and everything else follows it up out of the water.

All I can tell you is this. She added one thing she had not been doing. She kept everything else exactly the same. And the stretch of months that followed was a different life than the 18 that came before it.

That is exactly what happened. I would not soften it for you.

She went back to a doctor around 5 months in, a new one, a younger woman who actually listened. New bloodwork. And after the whole long conversation, the doctor said, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. Your gut looks better than it has any right to at your age.

Nobody had ever told my mother she was doing something right. For 18 months they had told her she was fine while she fell apart. This was the first one to tell her the falling apart had been real, and that it was reversing.

She sat in her car in that parking lot and cried the way you cry when something you were sure had left you comes back instead.

She has been taking it every morning for almost 10 months now.

Just 2 milliliters under the tongue with her coffee. That's the entire thing. No powder to mix, no afternoon dose, no schedule taped inside a cupboard door.

She keeps 6 bottles in the cabinet. She is not a woman who runs out of the thing that gave her her life back.

I am telling you all of this because I think you might be where I was that October morning.

Watching someone you love slowly stop being the person you know. Watching her get quieter about it. Watching her buy the bigger dress and step out of the pictures. Watching a doctor smile at a normal test result while the woman attached to the result disappears in front of you.

If that is you, whether a mother, a wife, a sister, or your own self, I want to tell you exactly what to expect.

Week 2, the bloat starts letting go, and the loose dress stops being the only one that fits. By week 3, the dress she'd given up on buttons at the waist again. By week 6, the fog lifts like a window thrown open, and the lights come back on. By the second month, she is hosting Sunday dinner again, on her feet the whole afternoon, all the way herself. That is the sequence. That is what it did in my mother, and it is what it does.

But I want to say one thing plainly, to every person reading this.

You are not imagining the dimming.

You are not being dramatic, and you are not making it up, and you are not the difficult one.

You have been watching something real happen to someone real, and being told, over and over, by people with a chart in front of them, that nothing is happening at all.

Her doctor has been watching the chart. You have been watching the woman.

Trust what you have been watching. You have been right this whole time.

I got up from this table to refill my coffee before writing the next part, because the next part is the practical one.

Here is the last thing, and it's the reason I felt safe letting her try it in the first place.

Symbia comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

If it does nothing, for any reason at all, including simply changing your mind, they send the money back. Every penny. Empty bottles accepted. No questions, nothing to prove to anybody.

That is the whole policy.

And one honest word about stock, so you're not caught off guard.

This is not a shelf product you'll always find sitting there waiting. It sells out. Not because it's some small outfit that can't keep the shelves full, but because women who feel the difference come back and buy it 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, their sisters, themselves.

Right now, whatever got in through those cracks in your person's gut is multiplying. Tomorrow's bloat will be a little worse than today's. That's simply the biology of it.

So if you go, and it's in stock, that is the moment. It comes with the 30 day money back guarantee, so the only thing you can lose is the disappearing.

👉 Go see if Symbia is still in stock. https://trysymbia.com/go

That is all I have.

Thank you for reading this far.

I hope, somewhere today, your own Carol is sitting down beside you in some waiting room, about to say the sentence that gives your person back.

Rachel.

P.S. If you carry one thing out of this letter, carry the timing.

The repair has to happen during the cleanse, not after it. Every cleanse her friends had ever tried killed something and then walked away, and 2 weeks later the bloating came back through a wall that nobody had closed behind it.

Not after. During. That is the whole difference, and it is also how 6 doctors could look straight at my mother and see nothing at all.

P.P.S. The policy, in case you skimmed, because it is the reason I let her try it at all.

It runs 30 days. Any reason, including simply changing your mind. Empty bottles accepted. Every penny back. Nothing to prove to anybody, not about her bloodwork, not about how she feels.

And it does sell out, not because it's a small outfit that can't keep the shelves full, but because women who feel the difference come back for 3 bottles at a time, for their mothers, their sisters, themselves.

👉 If someone you love is quietly buying the bigger dress, go see if it is in stock before those cracks widen any further. https://trysymbia.com/go

P.P.P.S. Here is who I am actually writing to.

If you have opened a drawer and found clothes you didn't know she owned, this is for you.

If she leaves the gathering first now, always with a good reason, this is for you.

If she unbuttons her waistband in the car and thinks you didn't see, this is for you.

If she falls asleep in a chair at 2 in the afternoon after 31 years of grading papers past midnight, this is for you.

If she has stood in your kitchen with her keys in her hand and lost the sentence she walked in to say, this is for you.

If 6 doctors have told her every result is inside the normal range while you watch her go out like a lamp, this is for you.

You are allowed to be the person who finds the answer. You do not have to wait for a doctor to hand it to you. I found mine in a plastic chair, from a stranger with a paperback in her bag, on the worst morning of a very long year.

P.P.P.P.S. Last Thursday my mother came to my daughter's recital in the green dress, belted at the waist, and she got there 20 minutes early so she could have the front row.

I sat 2 rows behind her and watched the back of her head for most of it.

Afterward, in the lobby, my husband took a photo of her with both of my kids, and she is in the middle of it, laughing at something off camera, one hand on my son's shoulder.

It is the newest photo on my phone. It sits where the christening one used to sit, except now it is not the last of anything.

👉 trysymbia.com/go