My mother carried a darkness that started long before I ever took my first breath. She was a little girl when the abuse began — a child trying to grow in a house where safety did not exist. Her own father stole pieces of her childhood, over and over, until she was around fifteen. She ran more times than anyone ever should. And in the wildest, saddest twist of fate, she was even trafficked for a time… dragged all the way up north, far from everything familiar.

And when she finally found the courage to speak — when she looked at her family and told them the truth — they called her a liar. Her own mother. Her brothers. The very people who should’ve wrapped her up and protected her. So she learned to swallow her pain, bury her truth, pretend it never happened. She closed that chapter, at least on the outside, and tried to move forward, drowning the pain in alcohol and drugs.

When she had me at twenty-eight, she tried to build a better life. She went to college. She worked. And while she was trying to rise, she left me and my brother at her parents’ house — the same house where she had been broken.

We stayed there so often it might as well have been our home. Some nights I even slept in his bed, wearing just an oversized t-shirt and panties, curled up next to the same man who had hurt her. And from what I can remember… he never touched me. Thank God for that mercy. But the thought eats at me: What if he had? Or what if he had and I don’t remember? He abused my cousins — so why wouldn’t he have hurt me too? He had every chance.

But then I came to her at nine years old, trembling with my own truth — the abuse I was endured from somebody completely different. And suddenly the wound she’d spent so long trying to seal, split open again, and that was when she told me what her father did to her, and since then, I’ve been kind of angry.

And so here I am now, grown, carrying a storm of anger that sits heavy in my chest. I’m furious. I’m confused. I’m heartbroken that my mother — who knew what he was capable of — still placed her children right back into the lion’s mouth. Gave that man open access to destroy us the way he destroyed her.

But she’s gone now. Twenty years gone. And all my questions, all my “why didn’t you protect me?” … they echo into a heaven that feels too quiet on this topic. I want answers I can’t have.

So I’m choosing something else: healing.

I’ve made a plan for myself, below this post ⏬️⏬️⏬️ I started daily reflections. A plan to sort through this pain, to release what isn’t mine, to learn how to breathe inside my own body again. I can love my mother and still be honest. I can honor her heart and still acknowledge where she failed me.

She loved me — I believe that with every fiber of who I am.

But she did not protect me.

And now, the healing is mine to do.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower