I was born on a quiet morning that didn't feel quiet at all. Not to my mother, anyway. She says the hallway lights in the hospital were too bright, and the room smelled like metal and soap, but she held onto me like I was the only soft thing in the world. I didn't know it then, but that moment would become one of the few times she felt safe for a long while.
My father wasn't there.
He chose work instead.
Everyone else says that's just how life was back then—money tight, hours long, priorities warped. But for my mother, it was a sadness she whispered more than she ever spoke. A hurt she tucked away so I would never feel it. A man who wasn't there when I took my first breath.
But she wasn't alone. A few family members and friends came, faces hovering over my crib like flickers of hope. They stayed until the nurses made everyone leave
Until the visiting hours ended and it was just the two of us in a room too large for a new mother and her newborn daughter. She didn't sleep that night. She watched me, memorizing every tiny sound I made, promising silently that she'd keep me safe.
My father finally met me three days later.
I don't remember him walking in, of course. I only know the way my mother described it—how she felt a knot in her stomach, how she hoped the sight of me would make something shift inside him. But love doesn't always wake up when it should.
When we left the hospital, we didn't go home—not really. My mother didn't want to bring a newborn into the worn-down trailer she lived in with him. So instead, she and my older sister stayed with cousins for a while. It was temporary, cramped, and noisy, but warm in a way the trailer never was. She used that time to breathe, to think, to figure out how to build a life that didn't feel like it was crumbling under her feet.
But the truth is, nothing was easy.
Not then. Not for a long time.
There was more uncertainty than stability, more fear than comfort. And in those earliest days, my mother carried all of that alone—every worry, every doubt, every secret she tried to protect me from. She made choices I wouldn't understand until much later. Choices that meant sacrifice. Choices that meant leaving. Choices that would eventually shape the story of both of our lives.
But from the very beginning, before I understood words or the heaviness of the world, I knew one thing:
I was loved.
Not perfectly. Not easily.
But fiercely—by a mother who refused to give up, even when everything around her was breaking.
And that is where my story begins.