“Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness yet become something beautiful.”

— Unknown

Latest Posts


  • The Locket, the Clipping, and Olivia

    The apartments Clara lived in weren’t anything special. Inexpensive, boxy, and scattered across town like checkers on a forgotten board. But they were home. Growing up, there were always kids running around the complex..riding bikes, chasing ice cream trucks, playing… Continue reading

  • The Trolls on Her Wall

    Clara did something magical. Not the wand-waving, spellbook kind of magic but the kind that lives in the in-between moments. The kind that only children and old women know how to hold without breaking it. Her apartment was a quiet… Continue reading

  • Where I Felt Safe

    By the time I was in second grade, I had started to sense that I didn’t quite fit. There was already a quiet understanding growing in me…something unspoken, but real. I knew I was adopted, at least in the way… Continue reading

  • Secrets in Plain Sight

    I have a vivid memory of my father’s drinking…one of those crystal-clear snapshots from early childhood that stays tucked just beneath the surface. Before the storms, before I understood what dysfunction was, I remember the beauty of my dad’s soul.… Continue reading

  • Behind the Sanctuary Doors: A Cult in Modern-Day Texas

    My adoption was finalized in 1989. I was already their child, so nothing changed, not really. I was just barely three years old when the papers arrived in the mail. The finishing touch on a deal that had already been… Continue reading

  • We All Have His Hands

    I was two years old when the judge gave him weekends and holidays. My biological father, after long court battles, was granted joint custody. The order was simple: he’d pay my adoptive parents $100 a month, and in return, he’d… Continue reading

  • The House Built on Shifting Sand

    The Woman Who Raised Me Born 1919 – Sunde, Kvinnherad, Norway The middle child of twelve. The reason I had stability. The reason I survived. I don’t remember a time before Clara. She moved into our home when I was… Continue reading

  • The Sick Live in Picket Fences Too

    You start with the phone book, if you’re lucky enough to know what you’re looking for. But I didn’t have a full name that I was sure of. I had pieces. So I went to the computer lab at the… Continue reading

  • The Search

    He reappeared in my life in my early twenties. I was young. Innocent. Curious. And after everything I’d been through growing up, the secrets, the silence, the aching gaps in the stories, I was sure of one thing: I needed… Continue reading

  • Bought and Fought Over

    1986 There’s no pretty way to say it – so I won’t try. I was born out of trauma. Conceived through brutal sexual assault. My biological mother was young, scared, and broke. My biological father was 21 and, by all… Continue reading

  • Chosen

    This blog isn’t curated or polished. It’s not for sympathy or spectacle. It’s a place to put the things I can’t always say out loud – grief, memory, guilt, love, survival. It’s a place to tell the truth, even if… Continue reading