After that first supervised visit, something inside me split open.
There are wounds you can hide, and there are wounds that crawl into your bones and make a home there. The kind that change the rhythm of your heartbeat and the way your lungs work. The kind that make the world feel heavy even on good days.
When I walked out of that building, I felt like every step I took was dragging chains behind me.
People talked, phones rang, life kept moving—but mine had stalled somewhere between that room and the door where I watched my girls leave me all over again.
The truth is, that kind of pain doesn't make you strong right away.
It makes you desperate first.
I went home to an empty house that didn't even feel like mine anymore. Their drawings were still on the fridge. Their blankets still draped over the couch. But without their little bodies filling the space, everything looked abandoned—like a crime scene the world forgot to clean up.
And that's when the cravings hit.
Addiction is cruel like that. It doesn't wait for you to fall—it waits for you to break.
It knows the exact moment your knees weaken and your heart shatters, and that's when it whispers its poisoned promise: Let me numb it. Just for a little while.
I fought it that night.
And the next.
But grief is a storm, and storms don't always pass cleanly.
Sometimes they drown you before they teach you how to swim.
Some days I stayed sober out of sheer fear—fear that using again would cost me my girls forever.
Other days… the guilt was so loud, so suffocating, I didn't know how to carry it without slipping.
The worst part?
The system doesn't care about heartbreak.
The papers don't care about trauma.
The case plan doesn't care that you're a mother bleeding out on the inside.
They want clean tests, classes, appointments, check-ins.
And when you're drowning, even those become mountains.
I missed one meeting.
Then another.
And suddenly the whispers in my head started saying, Maybe you're not going to win this. Maybe they're better off without you.
But mothers don't give up—we collapse, and we crawl, and we drag ourselves through the mud even when the world calls us failures.
One day, after I'd been spiraling alone long enough, I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize myself.
My face was swollen from crying.
My hands trembled.
My eyes were hollow—like grief had carved out the girl I used to be.
I stared at my reflection and asked out loud:
"Is this who my girls are going to remember?"
That question shook me harder than any court date, any social worker, any judge.
Because I wanted my daughters to remember the mom who fought for them.
Not the mom who fell apart without them.
So I went to my first meeting.
I sat in the back, arms crossed, trying not to let the shame swallow me alive.
People talked about rock bottom like it was a place you could climb out of.
I wasn't sure mine had a ladder.
But I listened.
I listened because I needed something—anything—stronger than hopelessness.
And somewhere between the stories of people who lost everything and the ones who clawed their way back, I realized something I had never said out loud:
I didn't want to die.
I just wanted the pain to stop.
The next day, I woke up and did it again.
And again.
And again.
Not because it was easy.
Not because I suddenly believed in myself.
But because every time I closed my eyes, I saw my girls' faces pressed against the glass of that visitation room door.
I heard them crying for me.
I felt their tiny fingers slipping out of mine.
And that hurt worse than any withdrawal, any court hearing, any judgmental stare.
So I started climbing out—not fast, not neatly, not perfectly.
Just… upward.
Because Chapter 4 of my life wasn't about losing my girls.
It was about learning that to get them back, I had to become someone stronger than the person who lost them in the first place.