Grief is honest and brokenhearted.It sobs in grocery store parking lots.It wails and holds pain in both hands and cries out, Please, God, bring her back.It doesn’t care how it looks. It just aches.
Shame watches the room.
It matches the tone of the most respected voices.
It doesn’t need to be true. It just needs to sound convincing. Shame folds its arms. Leans in. And says, You did this.
The Constant
God’s presence in that time wasn’t loud.
It wasn’t always comforting.
But it was constant.
I never once felt like He left me.
Even when I had no strength to get off the floor, I knew He was there—curled around my breaking heart.
I didn’t always understand the quiet.
But I knew I wasn’t alone in it.
I was clinging to the hem of hope with blistered fingers.
I didn’t have all the answers.
I didn’t know what tomorrow held.
But I knew who held it.
As I sat there—pen in hand, heart in shreds—trying to fill out an affidavit to find my child, my attorney spoke.
“You made your bed. What did you expect?”
She looked me in the eye and blamed me for my daughter’s disappearance.
Not with fire and brimstone.
But with casual detachment.
A slow sip of coffee. A shrug.
And the part that still catches in my throat is this:
I almost believed her.
Grief had hollowed me out.
I was raw enough to mistake her condescension for clarity.
And in that fragile place—when sleep is a rumor and hope is bleeding out—
shame speaks louder than your grief and narrates every frame.
What if…
Sometimes, I wonder:
What if I had let her words have the final say?
What if I had carried that shame—coffee-sipping condemnation—out the door and called it truth?
What if I had turned my back on God that day and never looked back?
If I had let shame settle in my bones?
If I had never questioned it, never reached again, never stood up?
Picture the ripple.
Gemma is 15. Novi is 13.
But in that version of our life, they carry a weight that doesn’t belong to them.
In that version, I never healed. So they learned not to either.
What would that have done to me?
To my daughters?
They’d write Mother’s Day cards about how “strong” I was,
but they wouldn’t tell me when their hearts broke.
Because I never let them see mine bleed.
We’d sit at the same dinner table,
laugh at the same jokes,
but we’d all be alone.
We all live in the aftermath of words that were never meant to be spoken over us.
Words that said, “This is your consequence.”
Words that shamed instead of sheltered.
That mocked instead of ministered.
Words that could have rewritten our whole legacy.
Me?
I’d be drinking to numb.
Quietly.
Maybe socially at first.
But anything to drown the noise.
Following the same slow descent I watched in my own childhood.
Another daughter of addiction, now a mother repeating the cycle.
Saying “I’m fine” with a clenched jaw and a full glass.
Going through motions.
Living with rage I called exhaustion.
Disassociating through school pickup lines.
Not dead.
But not alive either.
Because in that version, the lie won.
The shame stuck.
And the God who fought for me?
I never saw Him again—because I never looked.
Gemma
A statistic.
Another teen with stomach pain no doctor can explain.
Eyes that flick to exits when rooms get loud.
Disconnected.
She doesn’t cry at funerals because grief was never modeled—only silence.
She starts to believe God is cold, or worse, conditional.
She thinks she has to earn her place in every room.
Maybe she keeps the secret.
Maybe she becomes the secret.
Novi
She carries it in her body.
Shoulders hunch before she’s even 14.
She feels everything but shares nothing.
She thinks being quiet is being strong.
Starts saying “sorry” before she even knows what for.
She’s still full of questions—but afraid of them.
Afraid asking too much will make her unlovable.
She’d grow up with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.
An expert at shrinking.
At tension.
At sensing what not to say.
She’d believe in good—but never believe she deserves it.
However…
This is the cost of surrendering your voice.
Of swallowing pain you were meant to name.
Of letting broken people speak for a holy God.
But—that’s not our story…
God wasn’t done.
Because when the levee broke and shame tried to drown us and rewrite the ending—
HE ripped the pen from their hands.
We are not the daughters of shame.
We are not the girls the enemy thought he could bury.
We are warriors in bare feet, built on grace, carried by fire.
Novi, 13
She is wild and weird and wonderful.
She dances barefoot in the yard.
She sings made-up songs to the dog.
She knows what peace feels like—because she’s lived through the absence of it.
She saw her mom refuse to become what tried to break her.
And she tucked that lesson somewhere deep.
She knows her story is holy.
She doesn’t wonder if she belongs—she walks into every room like she does.
She prays out loud, even when no one else does.
She leaves handwritten notes for strangers that say, “God loves you.”
And she means it.
She feels everything—like a sponge, like a storm—but she’s learning not to carry it all alone.
She still gets quiet when rooms get loud.
But she knows how to come back to herself.
She notices what others miss.
She comforts with presence, not noise.
She stays beside the hurting without needing to fix them.
She is soft in the exact places the world tries to harden.
And that softness is not weakness.
It’s strength rooted in truth.
She doesn’t shrink anymore.
She stretches—into joy, into questions, into every inch of the space that belongs to her.
She doesn’t just carry light.
She reflects it. She multiplies it.
Gemma, 15
She’s the kind of teen people pray for—grounded, gritty, entirely her own.
She knows what it means to be lost and found in the same lifetime.
She knows justice—because she watched her mother crawl through hell for it
and still come home to braid her hair and make pancakes.
She laughs loud.
She argues hard.
She doesn’t cover her scars—she knows they are proof she survived.
She’s deep-feeling, deep-seeing—
the girl who senses when something’s off and stays long enough to ask why.
Her circle is tight; entry is earned.
But once you’re in, you’re ride-or-die.
She doesn’t open the door for everyone, but when she does, it stays open.
She asks the hard questions, names the hard things,
stays when it matters, and speaks when it counts.
She climbs higher, rides faster, runs farther—
not to impress anyone,
but because she’s never doubted her strength.
She’s learning to raise her voice instead of her tolerance.
And more than that—
she knows exactly whose she is.
She knows the voice of God.
She trusts it.
It’s the anchor that holds even when everything else shifts.
She doesn’t just carry fire.
She became it.
And Me
I didn’t let a broken woman standing in the name of Christ steal Christ from me.
I walked out of that office shattered—
but unshaken in my belief that this wasn’t the end.
I am held. Anchored.
Pursued by a God who never let go.
Even when I screamed.
Even when I questioned.
Even when I felt like a graveyard.
I broke the chain—the one that said,
“This is all you’ll ever be.”
I don’t have all the answers.
But I have faith with teeth.
Daughters who understand the weight of rising.
And I know what it cost to still be standing here.
Resurrection
But God.
We are the family that should’ve been fractured.
The girls who should’ve lost themselves.
The woman who should’ve stayed small.
This is the house shame couldn’t build.
This is the fire the enemy couldn’t keep burning.
This is the legacy redemption wrote in our bloodline.
This is our resurrection.
Before You Go
If you’ve ever come close to believing the wrong version of your story—
I have too. And I know how loud shame can be when you’re running on empty.
But hear me—
God never handed them the pen.
You are not too far gone.
You are not what they said.
And this is not where your story ends.
If this stirred something in you, share it.
Send it to the one still holding her breath—
the one who needs to hear:
You didn’t deserve what happened. But you get to choose what happens next.
We are not stories of shame.
We are stories of survival.
Of fire. Of faith. Of what rises anyway.
Like a phoenix, baby.
Take the pen back. Head up. Shoulders back. Keep walking.
He’s not done with you yet.
The Wilds Project. 
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