She once thought she kept losing family; then she learned family is what says, and what keeps loving you, when life tries to make you leave. She grew up thinking her life was every day, even if it didn’t look like everyone else’s. Her dad wasn’t around, so it was just her and her mom, dance practices, soccer games, cheerleading, weekends outside, and little shopping trips that felt like adventures. As an only child, she wished for brothers and sisters, but also made the most of what she had. When she was eight, her mom sat her down and said she’d be gone for a while. It was the gentlest way a parent can tell a child about addiction. She didn’t understand why her mom couldn’t just stop. “It doesn’t work like that,” her mom said, taking another sip.
A few weeks later, the girl moved in with her aunt and uncle. She finally had “siblings,” and learned fast that sharing a home is beautiful and challenging at the same time. She started going to church with them. At first, God sounded like a fairytale, but the idea of peace felt real in the middle of her chaos. On November 4, 2010, she decided to make that faith her own.
She got to live with her mom again, but things worsened. There were parties full of adults, alcohol, and drugs, strange men coming and going, and the heavy feeling of being alone even when a house was packed. When her mom relapsed, she was moved to her grandmother’s home. Her grandmother had always been steady, loving, and dependable, and she was already half a mother in the ways that mattered. But when she was ten and heard that Grandma “should be your grandmother, not your mom,” she was filled with fear. She worried she’d be sent to live with strangers and wondered what she’d done to keep losing people she loved.
Then her grandmother showed her a magazine from Big Oak Ranch, a children’s home. The faces looked like hers, kids caught in storms who needed a safe place. She felt unexpected peace and even excitement. On November 5, 2011, she moved in. It was hard and good at the same time. She missed her grandmother’s familiar laundry scent and sometimes wanted to call home after challenging moments, but the house was full of laughter, sisters to look up to, and a sense of being wanted. She visited her mom on weekends, hair braids, simple lunches, the time that stitches memories back together, and life felt sweet for a while.
Then came a shock: her house parents were leaving. People say it feels like a death, and it did. One goodbye, then a year of silence, and suddenly a new house with new faces. She held back. Sports and friends filled her time, and her visits with her mom began to fade as her mom’s health failed. Alcohol had damaged her liver and her mind. Within a month, her mom went into the hospital and didn’t come out. Sitting by her grandmother, she heard, “The Lord has to bring something good out of such a terrible situation.” She didn’t believe pain was pointless.
She believed healing comes, maybe on earth, maybe in heaven. Her mom was healed that day, and the girl began to understand there was a purpose woven through the most complex parts of her story. Loss kept coming. Her next house parents left two months later, a third set a month later, and then she moved in with a fourth set three days later. By then, she was done letting new people in. Friends felt more like family than anyone else, and she told her new house parents they wouldn’t last six months.
Still, they kept loving her. Through the slammed doors, the quiet distance, the rolled eyes, and the shrugged shoulders, they showed up. They did not leave. Slowly, they taught her something she already believed: love holds even when you push it away. She saw God that way, too—meeting people as they are, not as they should be, taking hard hearts and softening them, taking broken stories and writing a better ending. She went from a lonely child to a young woman surrounded by people who chose her.
Joy started to stick. Her perspective widened. She wanted to share her story, not because it was tidy, but because it was true. Somewhere in there, the girl who longed for a family found pieces of one in many places: her grandmother’s steady voice, her aunt and uncle’s kindness, the houses at Big Oak Ranch, and the parents who stayed when she tried to send them away. She knows now there’s power in simultaneously telling the truth about pain and hope. Her life didn’t follow a neat plan, but it led her to a place where love grew.
