Another Birthday

Today is my daughter’s birthday.

I will miss her for the rest of my life. I hope she is having a good birthday and surrounding herself with positive, inspiring people who will help her grow, evolve, and see the world from a new perspective. I hope she feels celebrated in whatever way makes sense to her right now.

When grief stops screaming and becomes a whisper, it becomes easier to sit with. It can take a long time to get there, and some days are still louder than others. But grief, much like love, might actually need to be nourished too.

I am not as consistent on this Substack as I thought I would be, because revisiting the same story over and over feels like circling a wound that is trying to close. I do not think rumination is a healthy way to heal. Rumination is replaying the pain in your mind without finding anything new, without moving forward. It keeps your nervous system locked in the same state as the day it happened, like the wound is being ripped open again and again.

And I have lived enough of that in real time.

When you ruminate, it feels like control. Like maybe if you think about it long enough, you will finally understand why it happened or how to fix it. But all it really does is keep you in survival mode. You do not heal by gripping the pain tighter. You heal by letting it move through you. That is why I do not post unless I have something new to say, something that has actually shifted, something worth bringing up again. Maybe I will start using this Substack to outline the book about the trauma parents go through when a gender cult steals our children. Or maybe this becomes a place where I write my feelings anonymously to her, and to the people who helped facilitate all of this, just to get it out of my body. I cannot write about this on my other Substack. I do not want “allies” there, the same ones who have been watching, judging, and commenting on my pain.

I have started a new project over on Ashes and Antidotes, a place where I do not directly talk about how the cult stole my child. It is simply a place for me and my own journey, if you are interested in reading more from that angle.

My estranged child turned eighteen years old today.

People still have it mixed up that the “state,” as in CPS, stole her. That is not the case. Yes, we were investigated by CPS four separate times, but accusations were never founded. That is not a common theme, however, for many of my fellow parent friends who have ROGD kids and do not believe in affirming either.

My daughter chose to join this cult. Yes, influenced by her peers, the internet, her school, and the youth programs that surrounded her. She was bribed by state assistance she normally would not have qualified for under her parents’ income. Nonetheless, she, like many other kids, became fascinated in a dangerously obsessive way with the belief that she was born wrong and that the only way to get what she wanted was to lie and leave her family behind.

This is her third birthday I have not gotten to spend with her. It is a hard day that I have chosen to reclaim in a sense, because maybe now that she is an adult she will not feel as pressured to follow my rules, so perhaps she will reach out. She can do whatever she wants now. Not that she couldn’t before, as proven by our circumstances.

I do wonder how long these programs will “support” her. I believe they still consider her a “kicked out, homeless youth” until she is well into her twenties.

Most days, the sadness does not taunt me like it used to. In fact, the grief almost feels like an ally on my team in an unexplainable way. I feel indifferent. And maybe that sounds cold, but it is not. It is relief. It is knowing I no longer have to perform love in a house that had grown hostile. I no longer have to walk on eggshells or pretend I am okay with being erased or forgotten. In fact, maybe I would rather that than be remembered for false or fabricated stories.

I have had time to think, really think, about how bad it had gotten in the last year before she left. No one could have lived like that and come out whole.

So I did what a lot of us do when we are barely standing. I started learning. Reading. Studying. Becoming trauma informed gave language to what I had survived. Internal Family Systems helped me see the protective parts inside of me not as broken, but as trying to keep me safe. That framework gave me a new way to relate to myself, and honestly, to her as well. Somatic work helped me even more. Learning how to actually feel things in my body instead of just analyzing them in my head was a shift I did not expect. It is not just about understanding your trauma. It is about moving through it, slowly and gently, without force.

I am not as stuck in bed anymore. But grief still comes. Not like it used to. Now it moves like weather. I let it rain. I water the flowers. I move on.

Thank you for still being here, through my grief. For reading. For witnessing this with compassion and understanding. I am not sure how often I will post here. I do not want to keep writing the same stories over and over. If I write, it will be because something moved through me worth saying, not because I feel obligated to keep repeating the pain. I will write again when I mean it.