Beth Sanchez of Beth's Cakes - OKIE Magazine

They were brighter than she
had ever dreamed they could be
and she had dreamed about them
since she was a little girl.
Standing on that street, far
from her home in
Oklahoma, Beth
Sanchez was bathed
in the brilliance of the
of Broadway. She had
made it to New York
City, but not in the way
she had always hoped,
and many years later
than she had once
planned.
While her eyes
illuminating landmarks
of the city that never
sleeps, her mind
of her life, and the
many sleepless nights
of her own.
Born in Ada,
Oklahoma, the daughter of a
Southern Baptist preacher, who
was also a singer, songwriter
and traveling musician, Sanchez
acquired her love for music at an
early age.
“I wanted to be a rock star,” she
stated without hesitation, when
asked about her dreams as a
child. But her childhood dreams
weren’t without obstacles.
When she was two years old,
her mother was diagnosed with
a rare form of neuroblastoma
cancer. So rare, in fact, that she
was only the 13th person at that
time to have been diagnosed
with this particular type of cancer,
labeled as an orphan cancer,
because it received very little
A Life Pre-Heated By 360 Degrees
attention or funding, compared to
others.
Sanchez’s mother was, at no
fault of her own, an inactive
mother in the sense of performing
typical motherly duties and,
while aggressive treatment of
her cancer was needed, it was
soon realized that the insurance
Michael and Beth Sanchez
wouldn’t cover the costs. This
resulted in her father spending
additional time on the road to earn
the money needed to not only pay
medical costs, but to simply feed
his family.
Against all odds, her mother
became the only person ever
diagnosed with this type of cancer
to survive, and remains cancer-
But the blessing of her mother’s
survival was not without cost.
The stress of battling a terminal
burden it created, put a strain
on Sanchez’s parent’s marriage,
resulting in their separation when
by Randy Pennington
she was in the second grade.
Another devastating side
her mother’s development of an
addiction to pain medication, a
certain detrimental element to
her lack of participation in her
children’s lives. “She was just
a body,” Sanchez recalls of her
mother during those troubling
years.
Sanchez found
herself being the
primary caretaker of
her younger brother
as she grew up, even
though her parents
reconciled, her father
continued to be on
the road most of the
time and her mother
struggled with her
addiction.
Still, Sanchez
managed to work hard
on her schoolwork,
and her music, and
by the time she was
ready to graduate high
school, had earned
an invitation to the
Juilliard School in New
York City. Things were starting to
look up for Beth Sanchez.
But the excitement didn’t last
long.
On the very day she graduated
high school, her parents
announced they were divorcing.
Her father left that same day to go
back on the road, and her mother
left, as well, both of them giving
the young Sanchez power of
attorney over her younger brother.
At eighteen, Beth Sanchez
found herself living on her own,
responsible for her 15-yearold
brother, and facing the fact
that she would not be attending
Juilliard, her life-long dream.
Within a year, her brother,
Landon, being a teenager, found
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