A Life that Glimmered

 From the outside,

my life shimmered with beauty.

My husband and I had good careers,
a lovely home,
and all the pieces
that looked like happiness.

But beneath the surface,
I felt numb—
physically, emotionally,
and somewhere deep within,
spiritually.

I carried shame quietly,
along with secrets
I never imagined speaking aloud.

So I did what I knew how to do.

I disappeared into caring for others—
motherhood, marriage,
a well-kept home,
beloved pets,
and endless creative projects
that kept my hands busy
and my heart distracted.

For a while,
it almost worked.

Then came an assignment
while I was earning my associate’s degree:

to create a timeline of my life.

Until then,
I had never journaled,
never learned
how to travel inward.

But placing my life onto paper
brought me to my knees.

The story I had spent years
outrunning
was suddenly sitting before me.

It was my first true surrender
to a God I did not yet understand—
and the quiet beginning
of my recovery.

The Wounded Mother

 Motherhood brought me

a love deeper than language,
a joy I could never have imagined.

And still,
I can see now
that the mother I was then
was deeply wounded.

More than anything,
I wanted to be different
from the parents who raised me.
I wanted to give my children
the safety, tenderness,
and steadiness I had longed for myself.

But recovery was still years away.

I was winging motherhood
while carrying unhealed pain
I did not yet understand.

What began as experimentation
slowly became escape.

Drugs offered relief
from the self-hatred
and buried sorrow
I had carried since childhood.

I was, in many ways,
the perfect soil for addiction—
a frightened heart
searching for silence.

And addiction
took hold of me hard.

Those years were dark—
for my family
and for me.

The dream of becoming
the mother I never had
began to fracture beneath the weight
of my own suffering.

I did not repeat
all the same wounds
I had known growing up.

But I made wounds of my own.

That truth is painful to hold.

And it would take many years—
and much unraveling—
before I could begin
the slow and sacred work
of forgiving myself.

The Search for Safety

It would be many years
before the pieces began to gather
into something I could understand.

Back then,
I blamed myself for everything.

Self-hatred lived quietly inside me,
hidden behind a smile
I had learned to wear well.
No one saw it.
No one knew
how deeply I carried the belief
that something in me was broken.

So I did what I had always done—

I searched for safety
in someone else.

A few years later came husband number two.

He was gentle, kind,
soft in the way of wounded souls.
Almost puppy-like in his tenderness.
But responsibility slipped through his hands,
and substances often held him
more tightly than life itself.

He was not a cruel man.

Like me,
he was carrying wounds
he did not know how to heal.

And so we stayed together
in the uncertain rhythm
of leaving and returning,
two hurting people
trying to build shelter
from unfinished healing.

Then came husband number three—
the father of my children.

He was a good man.
A loving father.
Steady in ways
I had longed for.

And yet,
inside me lived a restless ache
that no marriage could quiet.

I kept searching for a man
who could finally make me feel safe,
not yet understanding
that what I was seeking
had never lived outside me.

The shelter I longed for
was waiting patiently within—
a home inside myself
I had not yet learned
how to enter.

A Marriage of Fear

I was nineteen
when I married my first husband,
still searching for safety
and mistaking familiarity for love.

I lived with him only three months,
though those months stretched long and heavy,
measured more by fear than time.

He came home drunk,
anger arriving before his footsteps.
The meals I cooked
sometimes ended scattered across the table,
care meeting cruelty.
One night,
his boot struck my chest,
and my body remembered
a language it already knew.

When my father saw the bruises,
he appeared without warning
and told me I was coming home.

So I left that house,
but not the story I carried inside me.

Home did not greet me with tenderness.
Instead, shame waited there—
the burden of having made
such a terrible mistake.

I wish I could say
I walked away completely.

But I didn’t.

For another year
I slipped quietly back toward him,
drawn by something I did not yet understand.

He told me it was my fault.
And I believed him,
because that story was not new.

I had learned it early.

Punishment was familiar.
Pain was familiar.
And somewhere inside me,
fear still confused
what was familiar
with what was love.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets

In early adulthood,

long before recovery found me,
fear still lived quietly beneath my skin.

Though my mind holds no clear memories,
something inside me remembers.

A flinch.
A tightening.
A fear without language.

I believe now
that some part of me was wounded in childhood,
even if the story itself remained hidden behind locked doors.

The body does not always remember in pictures.
Sometimes it remembers in sensations,
in silence,
in the way the nervous system learns to brace
long before the mind understands why.

I loved relationships—
or perhaps I loved the shelter they seemed to promise.

To be chosen.
To be held.
To belong to someone.

And yet, inside my own body,
I carried confusion.

Pleasure and fear lived side by side,
woven together so tightly
I could no longer tell
where longing ended
and terror began.

My body wanted closeness,
while another part of me
stayed watchful, guarded, afraid.

Even then,
before I understood any of it,
my body was speaking
the truths my mind could not yet bear to remember.

When Safety Hid Behind Control

Fear followed me into adulthood

like a shadow that knew my name.

By the time I was a teenager,
I was already searching for someone
who could make me feel safe.

What others called boy-crazy
was never really about attention.
It was the ache of a frightened heart
looking for shelter.

I confused closeness with protection,
attachment with safety.
I did not yet know
the difference between being held
and being possessed.

Control arrived dressed as comfort,
and I clung to it
like a child reaching for a railing
in the dark.

I thought safety meant
never being left,
never being abandoned,
never standing alone with my fear.

So I gave pieces of myself away
in exchange for the illusion
of protection.

The Girl Who Learned to Live in the Shadows

From the outside, my childhood home looked beautiful.

My mother kept it spotless. My father, a contractor, had built a house people admired. To neighbors, we looked fortunate—safe, settled, whole.

But inside those walls, fear lived quietly among us.

My siblings and I learned to walk carefully, listening for shifts in mood, measuring words, predicting storms before they arrived. Love felt uncertain. Punishment did not.

I became skilled at disappearing—
quiet footsteps, careful smiles, hidden feelings.
I learned early that being good was not the same as feeling safe.

The places I loved most were the ones I created alone.

Hours passed in my room with dolls and daydreams, where I built softer worlds—places where tenderness existed and no one had to earn love. Those small imagined spaces became my first refuge.

My sister and I shared a room but not a closeness. We moved through childhood like different seasons, often misunderstanding one another. Over time, I came to see the pain and jealousy she carried. Though our relationship left wounds, compassion eventually softened what resentment once held. I love her still, though now from a distance that protects my peace.

My brother belonged to adventure—frogs, BB guns, pockets full of boyhood freedom. I loved him easily and completely. Even death could not lessen that love.

One memory has stayed with me all these years.

A pack of cookies disappeared from my father’s pantry—food we were forbidden to touch. No one confessed, and all of us were punished with the belt. Years later, after my brother had passed, my sister revealed the truth: he had eaten the cookies.

My sister and I had suffered for something we did not do.

That moment became larger than the cookies themselves. It taught me how unpredictable love could be, how innocence offered no protection, and how pain could arrive even when I had done everything right.

And so I learned to live in the shadows—
reading rooms, anticipating anger, hiding tenderness beneath careful obedience.

But I also carried something else from those years:

the quiet resilience of a little girl
who escaped into imagination
and, in secret, began creating
the safety she could not find around her.