Surviving Sarah
Every choice has brought her to where she is today — and she refuses to regret a thing
As Sarah Gretzinger flips through her date book, certain words keep popping up. ‘New York.’ ‘Nashville.’ Most importantly, ‘Kids.’ They all have to be carefully planned for.
Gretzinger, owner of Niagara marketing agency Market Savvy & Co., can’t stop smiling as she nurses a tea. The book is for 2019 and it’s already full. Six months from now, she knows exactly where she’ll be. What she’ll be doing. She looks and acts the part of a CEO — constantly buzzing, networking. Her current passion is getting a new awards show for Niagara musicians ready for next September. She will spend the next year earning their trust, answering their questions.
And if needed, telling her story. Again. “I have done some terrible things,” she says with a sigh.
She has shared these things on podcasts. At speaking engagements. In her own book, “The Glass Ceiling.” Every time she relives them, she sees the same thing: Stunned looks, mouths agape. “How are you even still here?” they often ask.
Gretzinger, 32, can only shake her head. She doesn’t know either. She knows she should have died three or four times. She certainly wanted to die once. There are a hundred different reasons she shouldn’t be sitting in this Tim Hortons right now, but she refuses to regret anything.
All of it — every sordid thing — brought her exactly where she needed to be. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” she says. “I would do it again.”
Like her grandmother used to tell her, ‘normal’ is just a setting on the dryer.
AT THREE YEARS OLD, the turmoil was already there. Her parents divorced, leaving her mother to raise four kids in Niagara-on-the-Lake alone. Her dad, battling drug addiction, moved to Winnipeg.
“Every memory I have of him growing up, and even into most of my adult life, was not great,” she says.
Her mother, working long hours at a bed &and breakfast, tried shielding her kids from his problems, but Gretzinger was like any other little girl — she wanted to see her dad. When he moved back to the Niagara area, she would spend one day a month at his apartment. One day, she watched in horror as his prostitute girlfriend stuck a needle in her arm.
She didn’t go back for five years.
Back home, she tried helping her mother as much as possible, taking on the ‘mom role’ when she wasn’t around. Which was often. All the while, she dreamed of being a doctor: “I thought that when I was 45 I would move to Africa and save babies. “I went in a very different direction.” An unplanned pregnancy at 18 forced her to quit high school. She completed her courses at home while taking online classes to be a personal support worker (PSW). She landed a job three months before her son was born. More than anything, she craved stability.
“I grew up in a life of hell and I was determined I was not going to give that to my son.”
She tried doing everything right, moving in with her son’s father, renting a house in Niagara-on-the-Lake. She was home, she was happy, she was soon engaged.
But six weeks before the wedding she “panicked” and called it off.
“We separated, and then the world went upside down.”
It started with her brother, battling drug addictions. Knowing her mother was “burnt out,” Gretzinger offered for him to stay with her. She could handle this, she thought. She could fix things.
Instead, stuff in the house went missing. Cheques she didn’t sign were cashed. One night, her car was stolen. But she wouldn’t give up on him, taking time off work for four months taking him to detox and treatment clinics.
All the while, she was slowly losing it. Working with a client one night, listening to her problems, she looked at her and said, “I can’t do this.” Then walked out. Then got fired.
She met another guy, leading to another pregnancy. She knew she couldn’t support another baby so had an abortion. She figured it was just a rough patch, but inside could feel herself “cracking.”
When she got pregnant again, from another man, she refused to go through another abortion. She was determined to make this work.
Suffering “horrific” verbal abuse from her new boyfriend (and daughter’s father), she moved to Welland and tried re-starting her PSW career. One night, his hands ended up around her throat. Desperate for
help, she called her aunt and uncle for help. They came in the middle of the night and took her away.
It was only a temporary reprieve. She went back to her abusive boyfriend twice, then suffered post-partum depression when her daughter was born. Feeling completely lost, she phoned Family and Children’s Services (FACS) seeking help. Hearing them even suggest giving up her daughter sent a chill down her back. She would sooner go back to her abusive boyfriend. So she did.
“Bad choice, after bad choice, after bad choice.”
Depressed and in a fog because of pills, she asked to live with a friend. But she couldn’t take her daughter with her. The baby had to stay behind with her dad. “I remember taking her tiny little body and handing her to him and saying ‘I’m done.’”
Six days later, she wrote goodbye letters to her kids, wrapped a scarf around her neck and tried to hang herself. It didn’t work. Neither did the pills she swallowed. She then snapped a CD in half and started cutting herself before passing out.
“She was pretty off the rails,” recalls childhood friend Meghan Moore, who heard about it a week later. “She was in the dark about it so she really didn’t let me know there was a problem.”
Gretzinger thought she had hit rock bottom, but there was still digging to do. AS SHE RECOVERED from the suicide attempt, FACS only allowed supervised visits with her daughter. To her, it was worse than dying. So she hired lawyers and went after FACS and the fathers of her children. The legal bills were soon thousands of dollars. She could only see one way to pay them. While staying in Safe Beds, a crisis facility offered by the Canadian Mental Health Association of Niagara, she met a woman working as an escort. She was in rough shape, with “track marks” on her arms, but still working steady.
“I thought, if someone like that can make money doing this … I’m not saying it’s a walk in the park, but how bad could it be?”
She started exercising and eating better. Even got a day job. But at night, she was someone else. She recalls her first client as “totally nice,” and even questioned why she was doing it.
“The thing that gets me now, even still, is that in one hour you are someone — you’re you — and then someone walks in that door and you become someone else. You become who that person wants you to be. Then an hour later someone else walks in the door and you become someone else.
“At the end of the day I’d go home, shower and go to my real job. Leave that, get changed, visit my kids. Then get changed and go to therapy. I had no clue who I was.”
Seven years ago she took an esthetics course and opened a spa in Niagara Falls, while still working as an escort at night. The two businesses were totally separate, she stresses.
“I would leave the spa and say, ‘Oh, I’m going for a lunch meeting.’ I’m changing in my car, changing my makeup and becoming someone else. Go do this, showering and then going back and pretending that life was great, except I was screaming inside all over again.”
Before long, Gretzinger’s spa was doing so well she could have quit escorting. But she was so lost, she craved the “attention” it brought her. And as it went on, the risks went up. Soon enough, she was coming home with bruises.
Through all this misery, Gretzinger’s grandmother was her sole voice of support and understanding. She didn’t judge. Having pushed her own mother away, her grandmother filled the void. They ended up living together.
And she died in her arms. “I don’t even know how to put words to it, still to this day. I didn’t cry. I don’t know that I felt anything towards it. I remember doing CPR, I remember her eyes rolling to the back of her head, I remember my son was there and all I was thinking was, my son can’t see this.
“I’m just thinking … I need to save her. All the pressure was on me to save this person’s life because God knows I couldn’t do anything else wrong in my life.
I’d already blown up the sun, the moon and the stars around me countless times. She died, and I just went numb.”
For weeks afterwards she went through the motions, smiling and getting things done. But something was missing. Gretzinger had no idea who she was anymore. At one point she got rebaptized, and no one in her family came. “I remember that day thinking I’m completely alone in this universe.”
There was more cutting. More drinking. She was servicing seven to 10 men a night. She was doing the “bare minimum” to survive. The bad relationships continued — at one point she got engaged to one of her clients. He ended up cheating on her … with another escort.
Finally, though, she met someone who had no idea about her life. At least the bad parts. They moved in together and Gretzinger, for once, tasted a normal life. No more escorting, no more drama.
Believing she had turned a corner, she went out one night with a friend to the casino. She can’t explain how she ended up in someone’s hotel room. What she was thinking. And as two men sexually assaulted her, all she
could think was she couldn’t tell anyone.
She had to, of course. She was covered in bruises. Even at the hospital she struggled to say the word ‘rape,’ fearing it would jeopardize her status with FACS. Her kids were all that mattered. But this crossroads felt different. She knew she was teetering.
As another relationship ended (“he put my head through a window”), she came to a realization: Walk away. From everything. Men, alcohol, every toxic relationship. Everything except her kids. Her bad decisions were replaced by something else: A drive to promote. To build something.
SOMEWHERE BURIED in all her trauma was an entrepreneur trying to come out. Instead of spending $15,000 on a marketing course, which would require her to escort again, she resisted and taught herself.
“I very quickly realized I had a talent for thinking outside the box,” she says.
Her social media efforts promoting the spa started getting attention. Other businesses contacted her seeking tips. She was burned out, but things finally felt right. She sold the spa, taught herself web development, nearly lost everything, but somehow formed her own company — Market Savvy & Co.
As Gretzinger discovered, “everything you do you learn from.” Including being an escort.
“I was dealing with different people on an hourly basis. I had to change and adjust. My job in those rooms was to make people believe in what was happening, to believe in themselves.”
“Now that I see everything she’s doing, I think she can do anything,” says Moore. “Anything she puts her mind to, she seems to accomplish.”
Along the way, Gretzinger saw the Niagara music scene as untapped potential. Mainly because of geography. Working with clients and venues in major U.S. markets, she had a vision of getting them international exposure, not just local.
“I look at the artist in Niagara who goes from bar to bar to bar, to old age home, to coffee shop, back to bar. They play, they don’t perform. There’s a difference in the two. In order to be noticed, you need to do both.”
This led her to the Niagara Music Awards, where Gretzinger joined organizer Todd Brown on stage at September’s show to announce a partnership to link the event with similar awards shows in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles.
The partnership didn’t last — Gretzinger says she and Brown had approaches that couldn’t work together. But she wasn’t willing to walk away. Instead, she’ll debut a whole new show, tentatively titled Reviving The Awards, to debut Sept. 29 at Scotiabank Convention Centre.
There will be full accountability, she says. Artists will know who is judging them and what criteria they’re using. And yes, it will be competing with the Niagara Music Awards.
(For his part, Brown feels Gretzinger “misrepresented” herself, and the Niagara Music Awards will be “proceeding as always.”)
Welland band Otherwives is among the first Gretzinger will bring to Nashville for a showcase. Drummer Matteo Ramundo calls her a “one of a kind go-getter.”
For years, Gretzinger wasn’t sure how. The weight of her decisions led to crushing guilt. Are you surprised you’re even alive, she’s asked? “For a very long time … I didn’t believe I deserved to be. You can survive anything in life, but that’s so oversaid … you can stay stuck in one thing, or you can make a choice to get out of it. I got out. It’s too short of a life.”
My job in those rooms was to make people believe in what was happening, to believe in themselves.” SARAH GRETZINGER Market Savvy & Co.