God's Huntress

Not dead people. Living adults who had decided that their own lives mattered more.

Their pleasures. Their relationships. Their addictions. Their freedom. Their problems. Their need to be seen, understood, rescued, entertained.

The children came second.

And when you are a child, being second is not a small thing.

You have no self yet. You are still being formed.

Someone is supposed to teach you who you are. Someone is supposed to show you what courage looks like, what responsibility feels like, how to endure discomfort without running from it, how to love something enough to sacrifice for it.

Someone is supposed to look at you long enough to see the person beginning to emerge.

Instead, some of us were left to construct ourselves from whatever we could find.

So you go looking.

You find identity in whoever will have you.

You find belonging in strangers.

You find meaning in sex, drugs, rebellion, attention, achievement, destruction.

You learn to hurt yourself because pain is at least a sensation you can reach.

You learn to make yourself bleed because bleeding proves you are still there.

You become whatever the outside world reflects back at you because nobody stayed close enough to teach you who you were becoming.

And this is the part I cannot make pretty.

Some parents were brutally selfish.

They knew their children needed them.

They simply wanted other things more.

That choice leaves a particular kind of wreckage.

Because a child cannot look at an absent parent and say, You are failing me.

A child looks inward.

There must be something wrong with me.

And then he spends years trying to solve a problem that was never his.

I think about that when my children need me for the hundredth time in a day.

Another question.

Another glass of water.

Another fight.

Another story.

Another body climbing into my lap.

Another little person calling, “Mom.”

There are days I am exhausted enough to fantasize about being alone.

But I know what it means when the adults always want to be alone.

I know what children become when they are repeatedly told, explicitly or otherwise, that their existence is an intrusion into someone else’s life.

So I stay.

I teach.

I answer.

I correct.

I cook.

I listen.

I make them work.

I make them apologize.

I make them try again.

I tell them who they are before the world gets the chance to tell them.

You are loved.

You are capable.

You are responsible.

You belong here.

You have work to do.

You are not the center of the universe, but you are deeply known by the One who made you.

There is a difference between raising a child and simply keeping one alive.

Children need formation.

They need somebody willing to spend years giving them a language for themselves, a moral framework, a sense of belonging, a standard to rise toward.

They need somebody who will sacrifice enough of their own comfort to make a person.

That is the work.

And sometimes I look around my house at the noise and the mess and the children crawling over me and I think:

This is what it looks like when the ghosts lose.

Not because the past was repaired.

It wasn’t.

Not because what happened became acceptable.

It didn’t.

But because the children are here.

And I am here.

And somebody is finally staying.

B🤍