Trauma We Carry

They didn’t take my daughters all at once. They took them slowly— through court filings, false narratives, and a system too blind to see the pattern. They obstructed my motherhood, my voice, my right to be heard.

Before I was erased, I was a daughter. A sister. A girl with scraped knees and a wild imagination. I grew up in a house where faith was stitched into every meal, where grief lived quietly in the corners, and love was something you showed more than said.

My mother carried softness like a secret. She had lost her parents young, raised by her aunt and uncle, and still managed to radiate grace. She taught me how to hold pain without letting it harden me.

My father was protective, devout, and kind. He taught me gratitude in the duck blind— how to be still, how to listen, how to honor what you couldn’t control. We shared quiet laughter, reverence for nature, and the kind of bond that doesn’t need words.

A wild uncle with the thrill of life in his eyes and a heart and souls that could not be named who played guitar and lived life fast till he could live anymore.

My grandmother survived war, migration, and loss. Born in Holland, she came to America and built a life from ashes. She pastored a small church in my hometown, taught me how to create from nothing, how to smile through sorrow, and how to lead with joy even when your heart is breaking. I was raised on resilience, On blended families and unconditional love. On stories that didn’t always make sense, but always made me stronger.

My grandfather a rough and rugged hard ass but pure love and heart that greived their daughter. He taught me no to take any bullshit but I often accepted it anyway.

I was creative. Sensitive. Fierce. Drawn to music, poetry, and the ache beneath things. I didn’t know then that these gifts would become survival tools.

They didn’t take my daughters all at once. They took them slowly— through court filings, false narratives, and a system too blind to see the pattern. They obstructed my motherhood, my voice, my right to be heard.

They used the justice system like a scalpel, cutting me out of my children’s lives with precision and cruelty. They framed me as unstable, unfit, and uncooperative. Not because I was any of those things but because I dared to speak, to fight, to protect. And while I was drowning in their absence those first few months, I met a man that I thought was my twin flame with a connection so magnetic and instant, and deep. David felt like a poem. Not the kind you read once and forget, but the kind that lingers—etched into your skin, humming in your bones. He was quiet, deep, mysterious. A Pisces. He moved like water—soft, reflective, impossible to hold. He was the wolf and I was the girl silly enough to think he’d let her love him, but I learned that wolves never stay gentle—it’s just not their nature. He mirrored my pain, spoke in riddles, held me like a savior, and studied me like prey. He used my brokenness as currency, and I paid in isolation, confusion, and shame.

I didn’t use drugs to forget. I used them to function. To get out of bed. To face the unbearable weight of being erased while still expected to perform, to prove, to survive. It wasn’t about numbing. It was about movement— when my body couldn’t move, when my soul was frozen, when the grief was louder than my heartbeat. I didn’t choose addiction over my daughters. I chose survival in a world that kept stealing them from me. And when the pain became too heavy to carry alone, I reached for what gave me breath. By the time I saw it clearly, I was already erased from their lives. My daughters—my heart—estranged. My name—dragged through courtrooms and headlines. My truth—buried beneath someone else’s narrative.

But this book I have been asked to write is not a plea. It’s a reckoning. A resurrection. A refusal to be silenced by those who abused me then painted me as the villain. Its for every small town that enables abuse and spreads gossips and half truths like wild fire, every mom or dad gossiping in the drop off / pick up zone, every estranged child, every school teacher, every step parent, for every lawyer, advocate, police officer and judge to challenge your system and fight for reform to open your eyes to choose truth and justice and to stop accepting the easy lie instead of seeing complex truths, to leave the labels and assumptions and see the whole situation, because some things don’t fit neatly into affidavits and sometimes a survivor continues to endure abuse by the system created to protect them from it.

This is for those families, for those who hear my story and have lived it. This is your story too, and your story matters when you are silenced. I hope mine helps you find the courage to share yours. It’s for every parent who's been erased, for every survivor, every child, every family member who's known this pain, let this help you break through the chains they place on you. Most of all it’s for every child who has been manipulated or been kept from their loving parent and was given manipulated versions of the truth , children caught in the middle of a way they did not ask for to save another’s ego.

and for the family still healing who let me into their hearts and bled with me this is for you because you mean more to me then you could possibly know.