Stop Paddling Upstream and Start Allowing

Knowing:

To those of you who spent your formative years trapped in the Sickness, you already know the bone-deep exhaustion of running for your survival. But when we finally cross over into the Normal World, society hands us a new, shiny kind of exhaustion: they tell us to “chase our dreams.” We are sold the illusion that if we just hustle a little harder, buy the right formula, or catch the next glittering opportunity, we will finally fill the gaping void left by our trauma. If you find yourself overwhelmed today, wanting nothing more than to pack a knapsack and walk away from the pressure of “making it,” please know that you are not failing. You are just waking up to the truth. You do not need to chase what is already yours. The ultimate rebellion against a past of lack is to plant your feet, take a breath, and simply allow.

This morning, a stranger found his way onto my Substack. He had carved out a niche for himself, selling the promise that he held the ultimate map for all writers. If I would just subscribe to him, he promised to tell me exactly how he had it all figured out, and how I could too.

But he lost me the moment he typed three little words: Chase your dreams.

I am so deeply tired of chasing. I am tired of doing. The entire purpose of writing this book was about getting the poison out and being done with it—not just the book itself, but the endless, frantic doing. From now on, I am shifting into a season of allowing. I am not doing, and I am certainly not chasing anything anymore. As Ram Dass so beautifully put it,”You already have it all, you just don’t know it yet. What you are desperately looking for is already yours. You just have to allow it in.”

If there is one absolute truth that writing my memoirs has taught me, it is that no one on this earth can tell you how to “make it.” Sure, there are wonderful, encouraging people and helpful pieces of information you will find along the way. Take what feels good to your spirit, and leave the rest. But do not chase anyone, and do not chase anything. The only real work you have to do is within the borders of your own heart. Find what you love, and gently fan the flame of that passion. Just remember: do not worship the fire. Worship the One who created the fire.

If I were to tell you how many times I have wanted to just give up, pack a little knapsack, and hit the open road, it wouldn’t even scratch the surface of the truth. It happens more often than I care to admit. I used to be one of those people who chased after my dreams with a frantic desperation. Because of my rocky past, I chased after anything that glittered, trying with my bare hands to forge it into gold.

I did that because I was so incredibly empty inside. I was terrified of lack. I was scared of just about everything. Growing up without enough of anything—especially self-love—and never being taught that we are, at our core, pure love energy, left a massive void. So, I was always chasing something to fill it. They call it dreams, hopes, wishes—the belief that someday I would finally arrive at a magical destination and feel the elusive sensation of “having enough.”

Well, I am here to tell you something they don’t teach you in those masterclasses: you are already enough. Today, right now, you have everything you need inside of you to create that feeling of abundance. The truth is, we will never get it all done. Each new day holds fresh challenges and newness all around, and some of it will inevitably trigger that old fear, making us feel like we don’t have enough. And if we aren’t careful, we will wake up and start the frantic chase all over again.

The people reaching out to you, trying to get you to sign up for their programs or spend more money to learn their secrets, are not the people who will truly save you. You are the only help you have ever needed. So show up for yourself today. Yes, there are many genuine helpers you will encounter on this journey, but most of them do not ask for your money. They are quiet miracle workers. If you just take a moment to listen, they will hand you a small, free nugget of hope and truth to carry in your pocket.

I am not saying you shouldn’t invest in yourself. Take the classes, learn the new things, and bravely explore your past to unearth the hidden negative beliefs that are keeping your feet glued to the floor. Just do not think for one single second that any of those “teachers” are any further along than you are. Every single one of us is still just trying to “make it.” But collectively, if we drop the pretense, we can help each other.

So, dear reader, enjoy your day. I know life gets hard, and the waters get rough, but we do not need to make it any harder by forcing our canoe upstream. Go with the flow today. God has got this, for you and for me.

Blessings, always. WJ

Knowing:

For those of you who grew up navigating the volatile geography of the Sickness, you understand that silence is rarely just an absence of noise; it is a heavy, physical weather system. When a child lives in a space where anger can erupt without warning, they learn to read the barometric pressure of a room before they even take a breath. If you spent your youth acting as the emotional shock absorber for the adults in your life—translating tectonic roars or hiding in the cold to avoid the fallout—please know that your hyper-vigilance was a brilliant, necessary armor. It is a profound and messy milestone when the quiet girl finally finds her voice to scream back, and an even greater grace when the legs that carried her in terror begin to carry her toward her own power in the Normal World.

That year, my entire world was strictly bounded by two undeniable borders: the white chalk lines of the sports field, and the woven wire fences of the farm.

On our patch of land, work was the only ideology that mattered. In the evenings, my father and I became a singular, calloused unit. He taught me the rigid language of construction and the quiet, demanding rhythm of the animals. He poured every ounce of his pride into every organized, sweat-stained inch of that farm. He had set down the bottle the exact same year we bought the land, and the man who emerged from the haze was one hundred percent German—a heritage that ran through his veins as thick and unforgiving as iron.

They called him “The German,” a title he earned through long, suffocating stretches of silence. But when he did speak, the sound was a physical force. It was a booming, tectonic roar that could be absolutely terrifying to the uninitiated. Even a rare, kind word from him carried the heavy, electrical weight of an impending thunderstorm. “The German” did not possess a gear for empathy; in his worldview, the earth only yielded two things: results or excuses.

While I dug into the dirt alongside him, Wes was drifting away into a jagged, angry version of himself. He was prone to flashes of unprovoked fury, and I eventually stopped trying to bridge the gap between us. I was simply too exhausted from spending my entire life walking on eggshells. Wes started disappearing into his own circle of friends, leaving behind a massive vacuum of work that “The German” fully expected him to fill. Inevitably, I was the one caught in the crossfire of their unspoken war.

The tension finally snapped one night over a meal that was really just a hollow snack. We were always hungry in those days, and hunger has a cruel way of sharpening a temper until it draws blood. When “The German” started roaring across the table about Wes’s absence, something deep and foundational inside of me gave way. The quiet, obedient girl vanished. I let him have it.

“Maybe if you weren’t always yelling at him!” I screamed from a safe distance across the room, my voice trembling violently with a year’s worth of held breath. “Maybe if you actually heard what he was saying, he’d want to be here! You’re both so damn mean, it’s a wonder any of us stay!”

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Knowing:

When you survive the “Sickness” and attempt to translate that survival to the “Normal World,” you quickly realize that healing does not come with a neat, orderly map. Trauma scatters our childhood memories like broken glass; when we finally find the courage to piece them back together, the edges do not always perfectly align. If you are navigating your own history and finding that your story feels disjointed, messy, or full of unexplained gaps, please know you are not alone. Survival is not a polished, linear timeline. It is chaotic, and it is deeply imperfect. We must grant ourselves the grace to let our stories be exactly what they are: beautifully, authentically fractured.

Up to this point in the story, my life as a child has been defined by absolute chaos—a heavy, suffocating blanket of abuse and neglect. And then, the tectonic shift: my father quits drinking. It was a single, monumental move that altered the trajectory of all our lives, forever.

But even as I sit here reading back through these published chapters, I see the flaws. I see the rough edges. Some parts don’t flow with the seamless grace I would like them to. There is so much more I want to explain, so many hidden layers in those drafty rooms that I want to drag out into the light, but then I have to stop and remember my true purpose here.

I am not writing this, nor am I publishing these words here on Substack, for literary perfection. I am writing simply to share my story with all of you. And my story is anything but perfect. It holds a lot of mistakes, blind spots, and a lot of lingering ghosts that, truthfully, even I still don’t completely understand.

So, if my writing has ever left you with unanswered questions, or if a piece of the puzzle doesn’t seem to smoothly fit—join the club! I still wake up some days, look around, and think, WTF is happening NOW? It seems that sometimes, the harder I try to force the narrative to make sense, the more it refuses to flow.

But then, just when the frustration peaks, there will be a sudden “Glimmer of Hope.” A quiet, undeniable whisper in the Knowing that says, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” And suddenly, everything rights itself for a little while... at least until the next blunder happens!

If you find that things here don’t always perfectly line up—if the timelines blur together, or if the emotions in one chapter seem to clash with the shadows of the last—please know this: this book is not about perfection or the ease of reading. It is about a messy, complicated, bruised life that just so happens to be turning out, so far, exactly as it is supposed to.

So be easy on yourself. We are all just a work in progress.

And remember: All growth is jagged. There are no straight lines here.

Heritage Glimmer:

Once the fog of the bottle clears, a long-buried soul can finally begin to rise like a lotus from the muck. Yet, moving from a drafty room to five acres of open sky does not automatically sweep away the shadows of the past. A child forged in hyper-vigilance still senses the storm long before the clouds roll in. But grace has a way of weaving a single gold thread through the deep gray of the Sickness—not through grand promises, but in the quiet dark of a barn, where a father’s soft apology gives a little girl something far stronger than silence to build her armor upon.

Once The German set down the bottle, his mind began to clear in a way we had never seen. He was no longer just a storm of unpredictable rages and heavy silence; he began to plan, to build, and to move us all forward. Wes, Warren, and I watched in quiet wonder as this man began constructing a sanctuary—not just for his own tortured soul, but for the family he was trying to save.

Where we had once been crammed into a twenty-foot tin can, and then tucked away in a cold, drafty Victorian house in town, we were suddenly stepping onto real land. My father had received a modest inheritance from his family’s farm, and that small sum of money seemed to shift our entire universe. But looking back, it wasn’t just the money. It was the sober life taking root.

My father worked so hard at becoming a good man, though I don’t think it was a matter of him trying to fake something new—I think he was simply allowing his true nature to finally shine through. He had always been a good person beneath the wreckage; that must have been what my mother saw in him when they were young. In those early sober months, I caught glimpses of an unfamiliar kindness. I saw him laugh at silly things. I saw a simplicity and purity in him stripped of all pretense. There was no faking this. For the first time in my eleven years, we had a real dad—a man standing tall against his own dragons, declaring, I am here, and that is enough.

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Heritage Glimmer:

Silence without healing is just a holding pattern before the next tremor. Yet, even in the coldest winters, grace finds subtle ways to slip beneath the door—sometimes through the steam of a sponsor’s coffee, and sometimes in the damp, echoey basement of a church where wounded children learn they are not alone in the dark.

The winter after the forgotten birthday, another sudden fracture catapulted our family into an entirely different life. It happened on a night when the snow lay heavy over the streets of Gettysburg. As part of his job with the city, my father was tasked with running the massive snowplow to clear the roads after a blizzard. But on that particular night, The German hadn’t just plowed the streets—he was plowed himself. He hit the ice blind, losing control of the heavy iron rig and slamming violently into someone’s parked car.

The police locked him up, and the Dragon did something unprecedented: she left him there. No bail, no pleas, no soft excuses. She let him sit in the cold steel cage until his hearing, letting the full weight of his actions crush him against the wall. When he finally walked back through the door of our trailer, the bottle was gone forever. My father never touched another drop of alcohol for the rest of his life.

That was the winter I first heard the name Rip.

Rip was the man they called my father’s sponsor, and he began appearing at our doorstep like an anchor dropped into chaotic waters. He and The German would sit at our small table for hours, dark coffee steaming between them. Through the thin walls, I listened in wonder as they shared quiet words. Sometimes my father wept—a sound that sent strange shivers through my spine—and sometimes they laughed with a booming, honest warmth. Whenever Rip left, The German seemed lighter, as if a few pounds of lead had been lifted from his chest.

Rip’s wife, Elaine, would occasionally come along to sit with my mother, but the Dragon offered her no warmth. While my father’s spirit softened in Rip’s presence, the Dragon remained guarded, her posture stiff and mistrustful, refusing to let another woman see the cracks in her fortress.

You would think that a trailer emptied of alcohol would finally become a place of peace, but instead, it absorbed a strange, unsettling new fear. The ghost of the bottle remained. Even sober, The German was prone to sudden, terrifying rages. Without the liquid to dull his edge, his anger burned hot and unpredictable. For no apparent reason, he would hurl a heavy tool or a block of wood clear across the barnyard, unleashing a string of curses so fierce they would make a sailor shiver.

And yet, in the quiet spaces between the thunder, a fragile gentleness emerged. He would sit with Wes and me, trying to speak to us in a low, awkward tongue we were still learning to trust.

Warren, however, was a ghost in his own home. At eight or nine years old, my youngest brother simply retreated from the field of fire entirely. He spoke neither to my father nor to the Dragon, existing on the periphery of our family like a shadow. He spent most of his days a few blocks away at a friend’s house, harbored by parents who seemed to understand, without ever being told, that the little boy on their couch didn’t have a safe place to lay his head.

To help us cope with the shifting tides at home, they made me go to a group for children of alcoholics on Tuesday nights, held in the damp, concrete basement of our church.

At first, I hated it. Sitting in a circle with kids I passed in the hallways of school every day felt excruciating. I was terrified that if I opened my mouth, the horrific truth of the trailer would spill out and ruin whatever thin veneer of normalcy I had left. So, I kept my jaw clamped tight. We played board games to break the ice, and I learned how to play Four Square, finding a brief, rhythmic distraction in the bouncing ball.

Our group leader was Reverend Rahn, the pastor of our church. He was a bright, lively man—a bit “too fun for a man of God,” as the Dragon would dryly observe—but to us, he was a quiet shield. He never forced us to speak, nor did he pry open our locked doors. Instead, he simply offered a presence that made us pause and feel seen.

One cold Tuesday evening, Reverend Rahn set up a projector and played a short film. It depicted a family that looked hauntingly familiar: a father who roared, a mother who retreated into stone silence, and children who shrank into the corners of their bedrooms to escape the noise. In the movie, a man like Rip and a woman like Elaine came to offer a lifeline, and the story wrapped up with a clean, hopeful ending.

When the screen went black, the heavy hum of the projector fan filled the silence. Some kids were quietly weeping; others whispered nervously in the dark. Reverend Rahn casually clicked off the machine, sat back in his chair, and let the room rest.

“Does anyone want to share anything?” he asked softly.

In the back row sat Patrick—a wild, unruly boy in my grade who was always getting into trouble at school. He kept his head pressed low against his chest, his hands balled into tight fists.

“I hate my mom,” Patrick muttered, his voice raw and shaking. “All she does is drink. We don’t have any food, and we don’t have any money.”

Without waiting for a response, Patrick stood up, pushed his chair back, and walked out the door into the dark hallway. Reverend Rahn didn’t chase after him or demand he come back. He simply waited, letting the air clear until he was sure no one else needed to speak, and then quietly slipped out to sit beside Patrick on the cold basement stairs.

Sitting in that church basement, watching the pastor walk out to sit with a broken boy, a quiet truth settled into my soul. I realized that out in the wide world, there were people who truly understood the weight we carried. They couldn’t magically stop the storm raging inside our houses, but they could offer us a sanctuary—a place where we could lay our armor down, take a clean breath, and rest from the misery, if only for an hour.

That little group remained together for the rest of my childhood years in Gettysburg. And Reverend Rahn became far more than just the pastor at the pulpit—he became our dear friend, a quiet guardian watching over us from the edge of the storm.

For families where drugs/alcohol are the true Dragon, there is hope and there is help. It is my prayer dear reader, that you realize if your life has “trauma responses” going on, like mine did and often does, it stems from deep wounds that are trying to come to the surface, may you find your own Rev. Rahn and find true compassion and help. You don’t have to suffer in silence.

To the reader:

When you grow up in a home ruled by the Sickness, your internal antenna is tuned to the highest possible frequency. You learn to read the atmosphere before you even enter a room, scanning the air for the subtle shifts in tone, step, or shadow that signal an impending storm. In the Normal World, a Saturday morning is for games and laughter; in our world, peace was only ever a temporary truce.

Yet even when the darkness threatens to consume everything, a Heritage Glimmer remains. It lives in the quiet bond between siblings who hold hands in the dark, and in the unspoken promise that even when a home breaks into shards, love will find a way to carve a path to safety.

Puppets on a String

After Wren moved out, the three of us who remained—Wes, Warren, and I—clung to each other tighter than ever.

The unpredictable highs and lows of my childhood made me feel like nothing more than a puppet on a string. The three of us had no control over when the next strike would hit. We were entirely at their mercy, constantly living on high alert because reading the room correctly dictated our next move, our next hiding spot, our very survival.

When home is a minefield, hyper-vigilance becomes a second language.

The Unfinished Game

One Saturday morning, the air in the house felt strangely calm. Wes and a buddy who had come over were sitting at the dining room table, deeply absorbed in a game of chess. I stood nearby, watching ever so intently as the pieces were moved one by one—captured, removed from the board, and set aside.

The boys laughed and shoved each other playfully each time a piece lost its right to stay on the board. I loved watching them, silently memorizing every move those heavy metal figures could make. I kept quiet, allowing myself only a tiny gasp here and there as a piece fell in battle. Wes would shoot me an evil eye if I dared to speak, so I just stood there in quiet awe of the strategy taking place.

For a few sweet moments, I was just a normal ten-year-old girl enjoying a game.

Then “The German” stepped into the room and announced it was time for Wes to get to work. He wasn’t as loud as he usually was—I wondered if he was holding back because Wes had a friend over. Regardless, the game was promptly packed away, the friend left, and the fleeting moment of normal boyhood vanished.

Wes pulled on his one pair ofwork jeans, I slipped into mine, and out the door we went to follow The German around the yard, gathering fallen branches. As we worked, we caught him mumbling under his breath something about needing to finish early that afternoon because he and The Dragon were going to a barn dance at Nauman’s.

I instantly shot a glance at Wes. He looked back at me, his lips pursed, his head shaking slowly in warning. Barn dances at Nauman’s meant heavy drinking. Yet, both he and The Dragon were incredible dancers. In a different life, if The German could have stayed sober, those dances might have brought them a sliver of genuine happiness.

But The German was extremely antsy that day. Before the afternoon even ended, he abruptly announced he had to run to town for parts. Wes and I both knew what that meant.

Petticoat Junction and the Storm

The afternoon bled into night, the silence in that old house was deafening.

Wes and I kept our distance from The Dragon as best we could. We took little Warren outside and stayed in the yard, sitting in the cooling air, watching and waiting down the dark road for the rumble of the old pickup truck. It never came.

By 9:00 PM, we were sitting in the living room trying to distract ourselves with an old favorite, Petticoat Junction. Suddenly, the familiar rumble of the truck echoed down the driveway. A knot of pure nausea twisted in my stomach so hard I thought I would throw up.

Wes and Warren stayed frozen on the couch, but I quietly snuck into the kitchen and wedged myself into my familiar hiding spot—the tight space between the door frame and the old hot water heater furnace.

That night is burned into my memory like a hot brand on a calf.

Our mother was standing at the kitchen sink with her back to me, her hands gripping the edge of the porcelain counter so tightly her knuckles were white, trying not to fall over from crying so hard. Her shoulders, frail and shaking, rose and fell as she sobbed quietly, as if trying to drain every tear before the confrontation began.

The kitchen door squeaked open. He just stood there on the threshold, hat in his hands, swaying on his feet. He tried to pull out a chair to sit, but his balance failed, and he crashed heavily to the linoleum floor.

Immediately, the tirade began. He started slurring and yelling—first blaming the “damn slippery floor,” then demanding to know where his supper was.

Our mother never turned around. She just kept staring down into the sink, hanging on for dear life.

Then his eyes locked onto her, and the fight was on. He scrambled up and lunged toward her back as if he was going to beat the hell out of her. With his fist raised high, he began screaming at her in German. Still, she didn’t turn. He kept his fist raised, spewing rage, while she sobbed harder and harder.

What made her suddenly turn around and look into the dark corner where I was hiding, I will never know. But in a flash, she flew across the room, grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of my hiding spot, and shook me violently.

“Don’t you ever come in here again!” she screamed in my face.

It wasn’t the same mother who had beaten me in cold blood all those years ago. In that terrifying, chaotic instant, I felt something different: she was trying to protect me by pushing me away.

Run into the Woods

I stumbled back to the living room and collapsed onto the couch, staring blankly at the TV screen as the cheerful theme song of Petticoat Junction blared out into the room. To this day, if I ever hear that song, a sick knot tightens in my stomach and the nausea returns instantly.

In the kitchen, the shattering sound of dishes crashing against the walls and floors erupted. The Gray-out threatened to swallow my consciousness whole, but I fought it off. Wes was already pulling Warren off the couch. He grabbed both of our hands, and we tiptoed out the back door into the cool night air.

“Run,” Wes whispered.

We hit the soft grass and fled into the dark woods, running toward Clayton and Isabella’s house. It was a different path for a ways, since we had only moved a short distance from where the “old tin can” used to be, we had quickly found a new path from the Victorian house to the edge of the woods. We had carved that path into our very souls—a sanctuary map etched deep for whenever our world turned to shards.

The Day the Birthday Died

The most searing memory of that old Victorian house belongs to Wes. It happened on his fourteenth birthday.

For a rare, unbelievable moment, The Dragon and The German seemed to have laid down their arms. She was in the kitchen frying chicken and baking a cake. Warren and I were practically vibrating with excitement. When The German came straight home right after work, I breathed a massive sigh of relief—at least one box was checked for a normal, peaceful night.

I had carefully wrapped a small wooden horse I’d found abandoned at the playground to give to Wes as a gift. I was giddy with happiness at the thought of celebrating him, and even happier that he was actually going to get a hot, special meal on his day.

But as the sun went down, Wes was nowhere to be found.

He finally walked through the door at 9:30 PM, baseball mitt and bat in hand, having spent the entire day lost in a game at the park.

The Dragon didn’t scream. She simply pointed to his plate sitting cold on the table and walked upstairs to bed.

I followed Wes into the dark kitchen. “Where were you, Wes? We waited for you all day.”

He looked at me, genuinely bewildered. “Just playing baseball. Why?”

I slowly pulled out the cake, set it on the table, and looked at the fourteen unlit candles. “Happy Birthday,” I whispered.

I will never forget the way his face fractured in that moment. The realization hit him like a physical blow. He pushed the plate away, buried his face in his arms on the table, and broke down, sobbing with a sound so deep and guttural it felt like it was tearing the house apart.

“Oh God,” he gasped through his tears. “I forgot it was my birthday.”

The Keeper of Special Days

The next day, I called Wren and told her about Wes’s forgotten birthday. Even through the staticky telephone line miles away, I could feel the deep, heavy wave of sadness wash over her.

From that day on, Wren became the undisputed keeper of special days. No matter how far away she was, she always sent the most wonderful gifts for our birthdays and holidays. They were never late. They arrived wrapped so exquisitely, with such tender care, accompanied by cards filled with lovely messages of hope and deeply thought-out sayings.

It was her—always Wren—that I turned to whenever I needed guidance or a soft place to land. It was a tragic irony that our biological mother lived under the exact same roof, yet I felt no sense of belonging to her at all; while Wren, living miles and miles away, was the one soul I was truly connected to. She was the gentle breeze that would follow me all the days of my life…

Knowing

To the reader:

Survival teaches you to stay vigilant, but it also bestows a rare and holy gift: an endless capacity for unfiltered, belly-aching joy when the absurdity of the “Normal World” finally breaks through the gloom.

In the wake of trauma, chaos isn’t always something to dread. Sometimes, a sudden burst of pure, unscripted madness is the exact medicine we need—a bright, defiant reminder that we are still here, still standing, and still allowed to laugh until we weep.

The Creep and the Dragon

Wren had met a man—an older man, ancient in my ten-year-old eyes—who gave me the chills from the second his shadow crossed our threshold. Even at my age, I was tempered by the fires of our home, far tougher than anyone assumed. To me, the whole setup felt fundamentally wrong; it was absolute bizarre that Wren, at only sixteen, could even be considering marriage. The concept of it made no sense until one frantic, explosive night of fighting with the Dragon. She burst through our bedroom door, yelling with a wild, terrifying fury I had never heard from her. "I’m getting the hell out of this fucking place!" she screamed. Wren had never used that kind of language, not once, but the filth of the words made perfect, terrible sense. Getting married wasn’t about love, or adulthood; it was simply the only available weapon she had to buy her freedom. We never talked about it, but I knew.

I couldn’t stand the guy but it didn’t stop him from trying to get a rise out of me, When he reached down, ruffled my hair, and casually dismissed me as a “little brat,” I didn’t flinch, and I certainly didn’t cry. Instead, I planted my foot and launched a kick so hard into his shin that his knees nearly buckled beneath him. He learned real fast: I was quicker than the creeps, and I was faster than the Dragon.

When you’ve spent your whole childhood learning how to dodge fire, you don’t bow to small men with big egos.

The Fairytale Takes Over

By April, the entire house was vibrating with the frantic, high-strung frequency of wedding preparations. Wren had asked Grandpa to walk her down the aisle, a choice that didn’t even cause a blip on “The German’s” radar. He couldn’t have cared less; public fanfare wasn’t his style, and besides, he loathed the groom and made absolute no bones about it.

Yet despite the heavy undercurrents waiting in the wings, the wedding day arrived. For a few sweet, suspended hours, the dark receded, and the Fairytale stepped in to take over the stage.

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The Knowing

To the reader who has ever tasted the sweet, brief air of the Normal World, only to have the cell door slam shut once again: this chapter is for you. There is a specific, jagged cruelty in being shown a sanctuary—in learning what it feels like to breathe without a knot in your stomach—only to be dragged back into the jaws of the Sickness. The Normal World is a place where children are allowed to be wild and messy, where love isn’t a weapon of control, and where the sky doesn’t constantly threaten to collapse. The Sickness, however, thrives on the illusion of recovery. It wears the mask of legality and the approval of social workers, while trading in silence, neglect, and the slow, agonizing starvation of a child’s spirit. As you read these pages, remember that the defiance you are about to witness isn’t bad behavior. It is the holy, protective fire of a survivor refusing to let the light go completely out.

The Betrayal

For a few weeks, perhaps a golden month after that breathtaking morning with the mourning doves, I truly believed life had finally decided to be my friend. Each morning dawned easy and fun. I loved the simple routine of going to school, the laughter of playing with my cousins, and the sight of my three siblings finally beginning to untangle their shoulders and relax. I was beginning to realize that this beautiful, quiet safety was what “normal” felt like.

The Normal World had always seemed to elude us back in Gettysburg. The Dragon used to sneer at us, dictating the gospel truth of our childhood: the only reason we weren’t like other kids was because we came from the “wrong side of the tracks.” To a very young person, a sentence like that doesn’t just register as words—it lands like a physical blow, leaving the pit of your stomach aching with a heavy, unearned shame.

But life, it turned out, was no friend at all. It had merely been dangling a carrot, enticing us to hope just a little bit longer, before pulling that hope away for good.

The very day school let out, we drove home with Grandpa, our hearts light with the promise of summer, only to find the Dragon and the German’s car waiting for us in the driveway.

Wren was the first to spot it. She grabbed Grandpa’s arm, shouting like she had been shot out of a cannon, “No! Oh God, no please, Grandpa!” She disintegrated into heavy, breathless sobs. Beside her, Wes quickly reached out and grabbed me close to him. In that instant, the familiar, metallic terror of the old tin can hit my chest like a flying brick.

Grandpa pulled Wren close with one large, steady arm. “There, there, child,” he said, his voice trying to anchor us. “Let’s just see what’s going on first, shall we? It will be okay.” But I could hear the hollow tremor in his tone. He didn’t believe it himself.

We parked out on the street so as not to block them into the driveway, a quiet, desperate prayer that they might just turn around and leave.

Wren refused to get out of the car, paralyzed by the sight of our past. But Wes and I, fueled perhaps by a little more childhood hope and a desperate bit of bravery, scooted out of the backseat and stayed glued behind Grandpa. I saw Wes slide his small hand into Grandpa’s calloused palm, so I immediately did the same on the other side. Grandpa squeezed our hands tight, bracing his posture, and began to hum a low, quiet melody under his breath. It sounded less like a song and more like a desperate prayer to the floorboards.

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To a child forged in the Sickness, the “Normal World” does not arrive with a grand fanfare. It arrives in the quiet, unhurried scaffolding of everyday life—where basic human needs stop being used as weapons and finally become a foundation.

By the time January set in, the “Sickness” of the trailer felt like a ghost story from another life. I remember sitting on the floor with my farm set, carefully placing my toy horses in their stalls, and letting my mind wander back to the volatile year before.

The difference in our new life wasn’t just in the blessed absence of the Dragon or the terrifying presence of “The German.” It was stitched directly into the physical foundation of the farmhouse itself.

I realized that the peace settling into my soul was built on something simple and profound: Our basic needs were finally being met. When you no longer have to hyper-vigilantly scan the room to see if you are allowed to exist, your nervous system finally learns how to expand.

The Four Pillars of the Farmhouse

• FOOD

  • The Old Way (The Abyss): Scavenged, scarce, and routinely used as a weapon of control.

  • The New Way (The Normal World): Regular, warm meals and the staggering freedom of “snacks.”

• SAFETY

  • The Old Way (The Abyss): Constant, breathless panic; loud voices and sudden, unpredictable blows.

  • The New Way (The Normal World): Quiet, steady movements; a home completely devoid of raised voices.

• CLOTHING

  • The Old Way (The Abyss): Threadbare, visibly dirty, or awkwardly borrowed.

  • The New Way (The Normal World): New, warm, and carefully, lovingly folded by Grandma.

• LOVE

  • The Old Way (The Abyss): Volatile, shifting, and deeply conditional.

  • The New Way (The Normal World): Quietly shown through steady action, quick winks, and “Honey-Do” lists.

Grandma and Grandpa didn’t move in a panic. They didn’t rush through their days bracing for a crisis. They moved through the house with an organic ease that made us kids feel like we weren’t constantly “in the way.”

For a child of trauma, realizing you are not a burden is the first real breath of fresh air you ever take. Seeing Grandma and Grandpa laugh together, or catch a quick, unprompted cuddle in the kitchen, taught me more about the true nature of love than any storybook ever could.

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Heritage Glimmers

To the Reader: When you have survived the Sickness, the most ordinary moments of the Normal World carry the heaviest grace. For a child who has known only thin walls and freezing structural neglect, a proper winter coat is not just clothing—it is a suit of armor that declares you are finally protected. The true miracle of healing doesn’t always arrive with a trumpet blast; sometimes, it unfolds quietly in a red-and-white one-room schoolhouse, or in the sacred moment a parentified child finally drops her guard, falls back into the white powder, and remembers how to just be a child, maybe for the first time..

The Barn School and the Snow Angels

Monday morning arrived with a hum of nervous energy. For the first time in a long time, Warren started to cry—the sudden change of routine shaking his little heart. But Grandpa didn’t bark at him to be quiet. He scooped him up into his big, safe arms.

“You and me, little man, are going to the cafe to have coffee with the guys. How does that sound?”

Warren sniffled, his face scrunched up. “I don’t like coffee!”

“How about I have the coffee, and you have some chocolate milk and a donut?”

Just like that, the tears vanished. Warren whined a cutesy little, “Can I?” and the world was right again. We kissed Grandma goodbye—she promised to pray us through the day—and loaded into the car.

Grandpa’s Golden Rule

As we drove the ten minutes to the country school, Grandpa turned around with a look of serious intent. “Now, remember, most of these kids are your cousins. Be kind, but don’t take any shit off of them either.”

Our eyes went wide. We had never heard Grandpa use “fun language” before. Wes, whooping with delight, shouted, “Ya! I ain’t takin’ no shit off these country bumpkins!” Wren just rolled her eyes, the Manager already focused on the clock.

The Barn of Books

The school was a beautiful red and white building that looked exactly like a barn from my farm set. Inside, it was a dream:

• Wooden Walls: Shiny, clean, and smelling of floor wax.

• Cheery Posters: Pictures of kids being kind and math problems that didn’t look scary.

• One-Room Magic: Only 14 kids, grades K-8. We weren’t separated; we were a tribe.

Charlotte grabbed my arm the second I walked in. Wes found David, and Wren began meticulously organizing her desk along side Sharon’s, the two of them chatting away. As I watched Grandpa tip his cap to the teacher and walk out, I wasn’t scared.

For the first time in my life, the crushing weight of hyper-vigilance began to lift. Standing in that sunlit room, looking at the polished wood and the smiling faces, the terrifying expanse of the unknown shrank into something manageable. I wasn’t an outsider hiding from the storm anymore. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Wings in the Snow

Recess was the true test of our new life. In the trailer, the cold was an enemy that seeped through the thin walls. Here, we were armored against it. We had thick coats, mittens, and real snow boots. Even though Wren still had to wear a dress, she was bundled in snow pants.

“I’ve never been this warm before!” she laughed.

We built a snowman, rolling three massive balls and using rocks for eyes.

I watched my sister—the girl who had been “Mom” for so long, the one who carried the blueprints for our survival tucked tightly under her ribs—actually play. Her small shoulders, usually braced for impact, dropped. She wasn’t scanning the perimeter for danger. She wasn’t listening for the heavy footsteps of the Sickness. She was just a little girl, laughing in the sunshine, rolling snow.

Making Angels

Charlotte and Sharon showed us how to make snow angels. We fell back into the deep, white powder and swept our arms and legs. When I stood up—carefully, so I wouldn’t ruin the shape—I saw it. A perfect, winged figure left in the snow.

Wren lay there for a long time, her eyes closed and a contented smile on her face. When I helped her up, the 4 of us stood there looking at our work.

The contrast was breathtaking. In the Sickness, we were invisible, frozen in place by fear. But here, printed clearly into the pristine North Dakota drift, was the undeniable proof of our existence. We left an impression on the world. It felt like there were three extra beings standing there with us, guarding the fragile peace we had just discovered.

“Isn’t it just magical?” Charlotte asked.

The handbell rang, and we walked back into our “Barn School,” hand-in-hand.

The Heritage Glimmer

For a child surviving the Sickness, hands are primarily understood as things that strike, grab, or defend. But when the environment shifts toward the Normal World, those same hands are allowed to learn a completely new language. The ultimate victory of a survivor’s journey is watching a protector lay down his shield and pick up a tool—transforming from a boy who had to hide into a soul who creates beauty.

When the weather turned too cold for the sale barns, the basement became a sanctuary. Grandpa’s woodworking shop was a world away from the “Abyss.” Down there, among the curls of wood shavings and the scent of pine, Wes was finding a new version of himself. He wasn’t just the Knight who guarded the door anymore; he was becoming a Builder.

One afternoon, a few days into the new year, I heard a heavy rolling sound. Wes and Grandpa wheeled a massive, gleaming piece of furniture into the kitchen. Grandma stepped out of her sewing room, and the look on her face was pure “Gold Thread”—beaming, proud, and completely surprised.

Wes stood there, a leather tool belt cinched around his waist, his chest puffed out just a fraction more than usual. “I made this for you, Grandma,” he whispered.

It was a Hope Chest. It was made of multicolored wood that shone under the kitchen lights, with a beautiful wooden wolf cut out and set into the front. When Grandpa opened the lid, a scent exploded into the room—rich, spicy, and clean.

“It’s called cedar,” Wes explained. “It keeps the moths from eating your clothes.”

I didn’t know what a moth was, but if it was a pest that tried to destroy things, I wanted nothing to do with it.

I backed away, making a face, but my heart was soaring for my brother. I forgot, for a split second, about the “Snap” and the broken ribs. I lunged in for a bear hug, but Wes’s eyes went wide.

“NO!” he yelled.

I froze, my hand mid-air.

The “Knowing” reminded me—his sides were still healing.

I quickly shifted gears, grabbing his hand and shaking it like a serious businessman. “Well done, young man!” I said in my best deep voice. He ruffled my hair and told me to get out of there, but for the first time, his smile stayed on his face even after I left the room.

Chapter 34: The Council at the Breakfast Table

The Heritage Glimmer

To a child born into the Sickness, entering the public spaces of the Normal World feels like stepping onto a battlefield without armor. We look for cloaks, shields, or any disguise to hide the hyper-vigilance or the phantom weight of our history. New clothes are never just fashion to an escaped child; they are a camouflage skin woven to face a world that asks far too many questions.

The kitchen smelled of bacon grease and woodsmoke—the scents of the Kingdom. But when Grandma spoke the word “school,” the air turned cold. To a child who has lived under the shadow of the Dragon, “school” usually meant a place where people asked too many questions about why you walked with a limp or why your sweater was buttoned to the chin in ninety-degree heat.

Wren was the dreamer, looking for a story to get lost in.

Wes was the sentry, silent and still, hoping that if he didn’t move, the world would forget to hurt him.

I was the skeptic, already weighing the odds of survival.

But the “Little Country School” sounded like a sanctuary. It wasn’t the looming, brick fortress in town where we would be strangers. It was a place where our cousins—our blood allies—would be waiting. It felt like the King was building a moat around us, trying to keep the reality of the world at bay for just a little longer.

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More Than Enough

The shift from the toxic Sickness of the travel trailer to the vast, unconditional abundance of the farmhouse was never more visible than it was that Christmas afternoon. For the entirety of my conscious memory, my existence had been defined by the iron rule of not enough. Not enough food on the plate, not enough space to breathe without triggering an explosion, and certainly not enough safety to let your eyes close completely.

But as the heavy, rich scent of roasting turkey and yeasted rolls expanded into every single corner of the house, the old math broke down. I realized that in the Normal World, resources didn’t run out. There was more than enough to go around.

Seeking a moment to digest the sheer scale of the day, I retreated to a quiet, sunlit corner of our shared bedroom down the hall. I carefully laid out the pieces of my new farm set on the floor, finding a secluded spot where no adult boots would accidentally crush the perimeter. It was a tiny sanctuary of plastic stallions, white fences, and red barn walls.

As I moved the horses through the imaginary grass, I felt an unfamiliar, weightless sensation. I felt like I was floating. For my entire childhood, play had been a survival tactic—a way to become invisible, to hide in the woods or behind a chair so the monsters wouldn’t notice me. But this afternoon, I wasn’t playing to hide. I was playing because I was genuinely, unreservedly happy.

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Good Morning, Friends.

VITAL INTERMISSION: Turning the Story into a Sanctuary

Tomorrow morning, I am doing something I haven’t done in a very long time. I am climbing into my truck and driving 7.5 hours back to my childhood stomping grounds: Gettysburg, South Dakota. I am going back to the exact coordinates where the Sickness lived, back to the shadow of the tin can, to represent my brother Wes at his 50th high school class reunion. Wes is very sick now and cannot travel, so I am going as his voice, his sister, and a witness to how he protected me in the dark.

I am looking forward to the quiet miles of that long highway. But before I turn the ignition and look backward, I need to look directly at the Sanctuary we are building together right here in the present.

For months, you have walked with me through the raw prose of Song of the Mourning Dove. You’ve sat with me in the cold travel trailer, and you’ve felt the radical, unforced grace of the farmhouse warmth. But this book was never meant to just be an exercise in excavating the past.

It was designed to be the cornerstone of a living, breathing sanctuary.

The Pivot: Words into Sanctuary

I want to be entirely clear about where your money is going: 100% of every single dollar raised through these paid subscriptions is going directly to fund our Veteran Sanctuary work at 307 Draft Horse Rescue.

We are building a “noise-canceling” environment where veterans and their families can escape the fight-or-flight cycle of trauma, find their footing along our riverfront trails, and experience unforced healing alongside our twelve Shire giants.

But the deepest “why” behind our mission—the reason this sanctuary is now dedicated so fiercely to our military heroes—rests in the names of Ty and Jamie. Their lives, their service, and the heavy, invisible rucksacks they carried home made it undeniably clear to us that our country’s veterans are fighting brutal battles long after the uniform comes off. The Sickness doesn’t just exist in childhood trailers; it follows our heroes home from distant battlefields, trapping them in a relentless, exhausting cycle of hyper-vigilance.

Ty and Jamie are the heartbeat of this pivot. When we lost Ty, a piece of our family’s sky fell with him. The devastating truth of military service is that the combat doesn’t end when the deployment does, and the casualty count doesn’t stop when a soldier comes home. Along with us, their parents, Ty and Jamie still have sisters, nieces nephews and friends, and we are all still dealing with the shrapnel of that grief. We carry our own quiet battles, our own inner war cries, everyday navigating the long, exhausting toll that both he and Jamie’s military scars left on everyone who loved them. The trauma of war ripples out, tearing at the fabric of the entire lineage.

It is in their sacred honor, and for every veteran and family member who has ever felt entirely swallowed by the dark, that we have built this perimeter. We originally rescued the Shires to heal the horses, but Ty and Jamie showed us that these gentle giants were meant to heal humans as much as we were trying to help them, our protectors—and the families who carry the weight of their wars.

The work isn’t theoretical; it is happening hour by hour. Just a few days ago, we pulled a 4.5-year-old Great Pyrenees named Jack out of a situation of terrible neglect. He was starved, dehydrated, covered in filth, and deeply matted. Today, he is clean, safe, and currently sleeping right at my feet as I type this. He hasn’t taken his eyes off us.

Why Your Voice Matters (The 33% Rule)

Here is the beautiful, gritty reality of running a professional non-profit organization. We are currently navigating conversations with major institutional foundations to secure large grants for our heavy infrastructure, leases, and operations.

But a true public charity cannot stand on the back of just one giant foundation check.

Under the law, the IRS looks closely at public charities to ensure they pass what is called a Public Support Test. They want to see that at least 33% of our financial bedrock is built by everyday, ordinary citizens—the general public. The government heavily weights the number of real people standing behind a mission.

When you choose to become a paid subscriber to this Substack, you aren’t just paying for extra content. You are legally registering as part of that crucial 33% grassroots baseline. You are becoming the independent shield that protects our 501(c)(3) status and proves to giant foundations that the public believes in this sanctuary.

📢 A Heartfelt Note to My Founding Paid Subscribers:

To those of you who are already monthly or yearly paid subscribers—you are the bedrock of this dream. You didn’t wait for a fancy tier or a specific perk; you gave simply because you believed in the truth of this story. Thank you.

• Where you stand now: If you are currently subscribing at our standard base rate, you are automatically grandfathered into our “Mourning Dove” Tier. You don’t have to change a single thing to stay right there.

• If you want to step up your guard: If you feel compelled to transition your current subscription of free to a paid subscriptions this goes to directly to underwrite our veterans’ retreats, Substack makes it incredibly easy to change your level. Simply click “My Account” in the top right menu of this page (or go to your Substack account settings), a level you would like to contribute next to your subscription type to choose your new tier. Substack will automatically adjust the math for you.

Whether you stay exactly where you are or choose to climb to a new tier with us today, please know that you are officially a part of the perimeter holding the line for our heroes.

If you prefer to make a one-time donation instead of a monthly subscription, we have also integrated the zero-fee Zeffy platform directly onto our website, which flows instantly into our rescue account. www.307drafthorserescue.org

Captaining the Ship

When I left Gettysburg decades ago, I was a runner taking the back alleys to escape the vultures. Tomorrow, I am driving back into those streets as the Captain of my own ship.

Thank you for giving me the wind to sail, for honoring the legacy of Ty and Jamie, and for standing guard with us through our family’s ongoing war cries. Upgrading your subscription today doesn’t just fund a horse rescue or a veteran retreat; it helps us build a permanent perimeter of safety where the morning never has to begin with a scream.

See you on the other side of the state line.

With deep love and appreciation,

Wanda Johnston

Executive Director, 307 Draft Horse Rescue

North Dakota: December 1969

The Scent of the Timber

That afternoon, the real work of Christmas began. My brother Wes and Grandpa put on their heavy winter coats and walked out into the dense quiet of the timber, their boots crunching against the deep North Dakota snow. When they returned, they dragged a massive, real evergreen through the back door.

Almost instantly, the sharp, clean scent of fresh pine began to fill the farmhouse. For me, it was a sensory shock wave. The crisp aroma did something miraculous—it began to mask the phantom smells that lived permanently in the back of my throat: the stale cigarette smoke, the cheap whiskey, and the suffocating, recycled air of our travel trailer memories.

Wren and Grandma hauled down heavy cardboard boxes from the attic, lifting out old ornaments wrapped in tissue paper. To my young eyes, these weren’t just decorations; they looked like tiny, fragile treasures. I stood back and watched them closely, my body locked in its usual hyper-vigilant posture.

Grandma kept talking about a concept called “Joy,” but I couldn’t find the coordinates for it inside myself. My heart felt heavy, locked in a tight, twisting knot—like a pair of hands desperately wringing out an old dish towel in a dark kitchen. I had heard adults whisper words like Santa and Jesus, but standing there in that living room, those names felt entirely foreign to my reality. They were dialects of a language I had never been taught to speak. They belonged to the Normal World, and I was still a ghost from the tin can.

The First Spark

Then, Grandpa reached down and plugged the cord into the wall.

For the very first time in my conscious life, the room shifted. As the electric current hit the wires, dozens of tiny colored bulbs began to twinkle against the deep green needles of the pine. The sudden illumination struck something deep within my frozen nervous system. I felt a tiny, electric tingle flare up in the center of my chest—a sudden warmth that caught me completely off guard.

I stood there completely mesmerized, my eyes reflecting the flickering blues, reds, and silvers. In the travel trailer, we had never possessed a tree. We had never been allowed a decoration that didn’t serve a strict, utilitarian purpose. We had never had a “Spark.”

Watching those lights dance in the quiet of the farmhouse, I found myself wondering if this was the “Magic” the outside world was always talking about. It was the first time I realized that light could exist without a fire attached to it, and that beauty could be invited inside without bringing a storm along behind it.

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The Alchemy of the Familiar

Let us step out of the current for a moment. Let us boil the water, pour a quiet cup of tea, and simply allow our lungs to expand. We have traveled through some brutal, unsparing landscapes in these pages, and the weight of the South Dakota winter demands a pause.

When you are born directly into the fallout of an ongoing explosion, your baseline for reality is completely warped. As a child, you possess no alternative blueprint, so you look at the chaos, the hunger, and the frozen silence, and you call it normal.

But the older you get, the chemistry of that word changes. Eventually, you realize it was never normal at all; it was simply familiar. You are far too young to change the script of the house you are trapped in, but the moment you recognize the difference between what is normal and what is merely familiar, a silent revolution begins on the inside.

This is precisely why I have never believed that history books hold the ultimate authority on anything. History is rarely an objective ledger; it is merely one person’s recollection, one group’s curated memory of the past. If you ask another soul who survived the exact same house, the exact same storm, their version will carry an entirely different shape. We are all navigating this physical existence through our own separate prisms. There is no absolute right or wrong, no clean good or bad—there are only the raw experiences we endure, and the secret, internal dialect we use to process them.

The Feral Sanctuary

As the timeline of our childhood marched on, I began to process the terror of our environment entirely differently than my siblings. While Wes and Wren were developing their own necessary, hyper-vigilant coping mechanisms just to keep us alive, I operated under a completely different internal code.

My sister Wren looks back at those years today and tells me I was born with a fierce, innate “fuck it” attitude. She says, “Wanda, you never let any of that absolute shit get to you the way it got to the rest of us.” But the truth is deeper than that. It wasn’t that the radiation of our parents’ rage didn’t touch my soul; it did. It was simply driven down into a much deeper, more fortified vault within my chest.

To survive the suffocating confinement of that twenty-foot travel trailer, I developed a quiet, feral autonomy. When the air inside the tin can became too toxic to breathe, I broke containment. I escaped out into the woods, seeking the maternal comfort of the earth that I could never find under our roof. Surrounded by the trees, the soil, and the animals, the frantic machinery of our family stopped. I was entirely happy there.

As our story moves forward, you will see that this exact feral defiance is the very thing that kept my heart beating. In a world defined by unpredictable violence and emotional desertion, it was not safe to walk around uncovered.

That attitude became my physical armor. It was the iron shield I raised against the terrifying whims of The Dragon, the cold control of The German, and later in life, against anyone I perceived as a threat to my sovereign perimeter. If you came at me with an intent to harm, you met the armored side of me, big time.

The Sovereign Choice

As we turn the page and prepare to move into the upcoming chapters, I must be honest with you: there are more heavy roads ahead. The timber gets thicker before it clears. But I need you to hold onto something unshakable as we walk through it together.

The hell I endured did not destroy me; it engineered me. It shaped the exact architecture of the woman I am today. I live my life by a vital, non-negotiable statement these days:

“Life happens FOR us, not TO us.”

It is an incredibly difficult truth to swallow when you are standing in the center of a catastrophic, painful wreckage. It feels impossible to believe when the blows are landing. But when the smoke finally clears, the ultimate human boundary reveals itself, and it is a choice: you can either choose to remain a permanent victim of the fire, or you can choose to rise as a sovereign survivor, gather the brutal lessons of the timber, and use them to build a fortress of your own design.

The choice belongs entirely to you. Let us take one more deep breath, set our cups down, and walk on.

The Pink Bundle of Punishment

The memory of my entry into this world was never offered to me as a soft, maternal keepsake. It was handed down reluctantly, whispered in fragments by the adults years later when I went wandering into the dark timber of our past, desperate for answers to my own fractured existence.

When Grandma walked into that sterile hospital room in 1962, the air was already thick with defeat. My mother refused to turn her head. She lay rolled over in the hospital bed, her face pressed against the wall, completely checked out from the baseline of her own reality.

“I can’t do it, Mom,” she whispered into the cold paint of the wall. “I can’t take care of those kids.”

“Jan, you have to pull yourself together,” Grandma pleaded, her own exhaustion bleeding through. “Your dad and I can’t carry it all.”

“Where is Edgar?” Grandma demanded. But the silence that followed was the only answer.

The truth was, my father was already back in South Dakota, entirely submerged in the amber depths of the bottle. The brutal northern winters were always a crucible for his addiction; when the construction grids froze and the work dried up, he had nothing to occupy his hands but the heavy pull of the glass. He had begged Grandpa John to let him come back to the family land, but Grandpa John had drawn an ironclad boundary in the dirt: Not until you quit drinking.

Trapped in that vacuum of neglect, my mother finally shattered. She wept in that hospital bed, a volatile, desperate sound, before screaming out a line that would forever define the blueprint of my childhood:

“Why is God punishing me by giving me another mouth to feed?”

When the hospital finally discharged her, she was handed what she could only view as a little pink bundle of divine punishment. Grandpa drove us back to Gettysburg, trying the entire way to help her patch the leaks in her mind, begging her to hold the vessel together. But the moment the truck stopped, she grabbed me and a single small bag, slammed the heavy metal door, and vanished into the trailer. Grandpa drove away, leaving us in the dark.

For a few months, my older siblings, Wes and Wren, remained in the safety of Grandma’s house. But when Grandma eventually traveled down from North Dakota to check on us, she walked into a silent, freezing trailer and found a horror. I was entirely alone in my crib, my tiny body burning with a volatile fever. My mother was gone, completely untethered from her post.

Grandma bundled me into the truck and rushed me to the emergency room. The diagnosis was unsparing: double pneumonia, severe dehydration, and profound malnourishment. I spent weeks in the hospital fighting for a life I hadn’t asked for, and during that entire duration, my mother never once showed her face.

When the hospital doors finally opened for my discharge, Grandma didn’t take me back to that trailer. She pulled me into her own fortress.

The Visitation Under the Willow

For the next two years, the machinery of our trauma was held at bay by a collaborative army of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We stayed mostly under Grandma and Grandpa’s roof, our weekends spent rotating through different family farms, running wild with cousins in a desperate attempt to learn the dialect of a normal world.

Then, when I was two and a half years old, the ghost returned.

Wren remembers the imagery with a chilling, photographic precision. My mother arrived at Grandma’s house looking entirely transformed—a striking portrait of artificial composure. She was wearing a soft yellow cotton dress, her jet-black hair pulled back into a tight, flawless low ponytail fastened with a ribbon. She wore bold red lipstick, a brush of rouge, and heavy mascara. Wren said she looked real pretty—a beautifully manicured mask hiding the hollow underneath.

Grandma poured two glasses of lemonade, and the two women walked out into the backyard to sit under the massive, weeping canopy of the old willow tree.

Wes and Wren, driven by the hyper-vigilant survival instincts of abandoned children, snuck around the side of the house to listen from the shadows. Wren said they spoke for what felt like a lifetime, but the atmosphere remained utterly frozen. Neither woman smiled. Neither woman laughed.

When the audience was over, my mother stood up, walked to her car, and drove away. She never once turned her head to look at the three children watching her from the brush.

Interlocking Fates and Blood Secrets

The illusion of safety shattered completely on my third birthday. I was sitting at Grandma’s kitchen table, my eyes locked onto the three small candles flickering on my cake, when a heavy, sudden knock echoed through the hallway. Grandpa answered the door, his face instantly hardening, and waved for Grandma to come over. Grandma didn’t say a word; she simply grabbed her winter coat and vanished into the freezing night.

Just like that, the color was drained from the room. The celebration was instantly hollowed out by the re-emergence of the family emergency. Grandpa did his best to hold up the crumbling walls; he handed me a small package, and under the watchful, protective eyes of Wes and Wren, I opened my very first dolly. I hugged her real close to my chest, seeking an anchor, and went to lay on the couch in the quiet living room.

Late that night, Grandma returned, her hair wind-blown and her face carrying the immense weight of a new crisis. The next morning, we were introduced to a new reality: we had a baby brother named Warren. He had been born on the exact same day as me, a strange, interlocking twist of fate that Grandma tried to dress up as an “extra special birthday present.” But Warren’s arrival had nearly cost my mother her life.

She had suffered a catastrophic complication from an RH factor incompatibility on the delivery table. In the frantic rush to save her, the doctors ordered an immediate blood transfusion. But when the laboratory cross-matched the samples, a massive generational lie was unmasked: neither Grandma’s nor Grandpa’s blood types matched hers. In the middle of fighting for her life, my mother discovered that the only father she had ever known was not her biological sire. But that is a shadow for a later chapter.

The Twenty-Foot Crucible

With Warren’s birth, my father re-entered the grid. His own father, Grandpa John, had passed away a year prior, leaving him a modest inheritance. Armed with this new currency, he bought a small plot of farmland in South Dakota, determined to use the dirt to buy a fresh start.

Before Mom and the newborn were even discharged from the hospital, he showed up at Grandma’s house to claim his property. Wes and Wren, terrified by the volatile memories of his frame, immediately ran to hide in the back bedrooms. I stood my ground, staring at this stranger. Wren said he reached down to pick me up, and I let out a blood-curdling scream that shook the floorboards. He put me down instantly.

The baseline of our nomadic disintegration was officially set. Wren was nine, Wes was six, I was three, and Warren was a newborn.

We were loaded into the vehicle to begin our forced migration back to Gettysburg. Wren says she was absolutely terrified to leave the sanctuary of Grandma’s house, kicking and screaming against the car door as Dad forced her into the backseat. My mother sat in the passenger side, cradling Warren, her lips sealed in absolute silence.

We didn’t move onto the farm. There was no house. Instead, the six of us were compressed into another tiny, twenty-foot travel trailer parked on a dusty lot.

Dad truly tried in the beginning. When his construction season ended, he took a menial job working for the town of Gettysburg. He despised the institutional confinement of the work—his soul only ever knew the wide-open autonomy of the farm—but he put his head down and slaved. He was a hard worker, and the townspeople respected him for it. But inside the metal walls of that trailer, happiness couldn’t take root. My mother became a permanent fixture by the small window, staring out into the bleak South Dakota horizon. A cigarette was a permanent extension of her fingers, the smoke curling around her head like a self-imposed fog.

By the time I turned six, the black cloud had completely swallowed the trailer. Dad’s drinking fermented into a heavy, predictable rage, and he began vanishing for weeks at a time, leaving us marooned. Warren, who was three now, was Dad’s undeniable favorite. My father seemed the happiest when he was sitting on the trailer’s cramped couch, holding that fat little boy in his lap. The rest of us didn’t possess the bandwidth for jealousy; we just stood on the linoleum, quiet and watchful, trying to catch a stray reflection of that warmth for ourselves. Warren was a pudgy, happy little thing—Dad always joked he looked like a professional football player—and to this day, I don’t know how his frame stayed so round, because there was never enough food in our cabinets.

When Dad was gone, we were left alone with the volatile radiation of our mother’s unmitigated grief, day and night.

That was the exact moment the hierarchy flipped. At just nine years old, my sister Wren became the mother. She stepped squarely into the trenches of that twenty-foot cage, structuring our days with an fierce, protective compliance, ensuring that our mother was never, under any circumstance, left accessible to us alone. She carried a heavy pull that the normal world could never comprehend.

She held the line when the walls were falling down around us. I look at her today, through all the decades and all the scars we brought out of that timber, and I hand her the ultimate truth:

It WAS enough, sister. Look at us—we are all alive, aren’t we?

The Nomadic Disintegration

Grandma took a long, steadying breath, her eyes tracking the invisible lines of a map only she could see. The kitchen towel in her hands was now tightly coiled, a fabric tourniquet holding back the bleeding edges of our family’s history.

“Your dad took a job on a highway construction crew that summer,” Grandma continued, her voice flattening into the rhythmic cadence of a reporter detailing a long-past disaster. “You mom and you two kids went with him. They bought a small, silver travel trailer—a tiny metal box—and all summer long, you guys lived out of that tin can, moving from one dusty roadside job to the next.”

She paused, a shadow of profound regret crossing her face.

“We watched you leave, and we prayed. We truly thought your mom was finally healing out there in the sun, away from the heavy air of this house. We thought the open roads of South Dakota might wash the gray lake out of her mind. But the darkness doesn’t dissolve just because you change the scenery.”

I knew the reality of those winters long before Grandma gave them words. When the ground froze and the road construction crews laid off their men, the architecture of our lives collapsed entirely. In those brutal South Dakota winters, when my father was out of work, he didn’t just stay home—he vanished into the amber depths of the bottle. He spent whatever meager currency they had on whiskey to drown Ivan’s ghost, and God knows what other demons he was carrying, leaving my mother marooned in that metal trailer with two toddlers, no money, no heat, and absolutely no lifeline. The sorrow didn’t heal; it fermented into an unmitigated, volatile rage.

The Midnight March

“And then, the breaking point came,” Grandma whispered, her knuckles whitening against the cloth. “It had been exactly three and a half years since the day Ivan went through the ice. Three and a half years where your mother had vanished from our lives completely. She refused to call us. She refused to answer a single letter. She had locked us out of her grief, punishing us for surviving the boy she couldn’t save.”

She looked directly at Wren and Wes, her eyes pooling with ancient tears.

“Then, in the dead of night, she simply shattered. She took you two babies, walked out into the freezing dark, and flagged down a semi-truck on the highway. She hitched a ride with a stranger, a trucker who drove through the night and finally dropped her off among the shadows of the local stockyards right here in town.”

I closed my eyes, the imagery cutting into my mind like a jagged blade. I could see my mother—a woman completely untethered from reality, consumed by the toxic radiation of her own unresolved trauma—dragging two shivering toddlers through the dirt and manure of the midnight stockyards. She wasn’t walking toward a haven; she was marching a war path.

“She walked all the way from those stockyards to this very porch, dragging you two kids behind her through the blackness,” Grandma said, her voice trembling. “When she pounded on the door and Grandpa opened it, she wasn’t looking for comfort. She was filled with an ancient, howling fury. She started screaming at Grandpa right there in the hallway, venting a lifetime of bitterness. Grandpa begged her to keep her voice down—he didn’t want the neighborhood to hear the family’s shame breaking out into the street. But she wouldn’t hear it.”

Grandma’s voice dropped to a horrifying whisper.

“She didn’t want to be a mother anymore. She didn’t want the burden of the lives she had left. She stormed back out into the freezing night, leaving you two shivering babies standing on our floorboards. She vanished into the darkness alone. We kept you two with us, holding you tight, while she went off into the black. We didn’t see her face or hear a single word from her for months.”

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The Heritage Glimmer: The Architecture of a Perfect Storm

The Normal World loves to argue over timelines. It clings to exact dates, sanitized facts, and the neat, tidy histories that families rewrite just to sleep at night. But the survivor knows a deeper, heavier truth: the Sickness does not care about official records. When a foundational pillar cracks—like the devastating death of an uncle—and a mother’s compounding grief collides with a father’s uneducated, alcohol-fueled chaos, the exact sequence of events matters far less than the wreckage it left behind.

For a seven-year-old child trapped in the center of it, the truth isn’t found in what the relatives choose to remember; it is found in the terror of the storm itself. This chapter is not a sterile historical document. It is the emotional map of a child’s world fracturing. Never let anyone tell you your memory is wrong just because it threatens their comfort. The way it felt is the only truth that ever truly mattered.

When the cleanup was finished, the atmosphere in the farmhouse was no longer just quiet; it was heavy, like the air before a North Dakota blizzard. Grandma asked Wes to go get my dolly and meet us in the living room. She had something to tell us. She helped me up, her hands steadying my trembling frame, and we made our way to the front of the house.

Wren was already there, sitting straight-backed on the couch—the Manager ready for a briefing she had waited her whole life to hear. She told us Grandpa had taken Warren down to his woodworking shop in the basement. Even then, the adults knew that some stories are too heavy for a four-year-old to carry.

We three sat on the couch, a line of survivors in our new flannel. Grandma pulled a big chair in front of us, facing us like a teacher about to explain a difficult lesson. Wes threw my dolly into my lap and crawled up beside me, his shoulder a familiar bracket against the world.

Wren sat perfectly still, hands in her lap, eyes intent on Grandma, like she was ready for any tidbit of information Grandma was about to deliver.

Grandma took a deep breath. She looked like she had practiced this a thousand times in the dark. “Ok,” she said softly. “Here it goes.”

“Wren, you were three and a half. Wes, you were only a year and a half when this started,” Grandma began.

Her voice was steady, anchored by the weight of a history she had spent a decade trying to survive, but her eyes were looking at a horizon ten years away. In her weathered hands was a simple cotton kitchen towel. As she spoke, she began wringing it with the rhythmic, hypnotic precision of a rocking chair—twisting the fabric over and over, as if she could somehow squeeze the memory out of the cloth.

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The Heritage Glimmer

For the children of the Tin Can, “Christmas” wasn’t a season of light; it was a sharpened edge of rage. This is the story of the day the body spoke the truth the voice couldn’t, and the first time a mess was met with a mop and a hug instead of a strike.

Chapter 17: The Ghost of Christmas Past

The Normal World of the farmhouse had felt like a fortress—a place where the walls were thick enough to keep the Sickness at bay. But on the morning of December 24, 1969, a ghost from the past found a way through the cracks.

We were sitting at breakfast, the kitchen warm and fragrant with the smell of Grandma’s cooking, when the atmosphere shifted. It was like a cold front moving in without warning. Grandma looked at Grandpa with an expression I had never seen before—hollow, haunted, and ancient. Grandpa saw it too. He put his paper down, and the sharp, sudden snap of the newsprint sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room.

“Well kids,” Grandpa said, forcing a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes, “do you know what today is?”

Wes was ready with the only logic that made sense in this new, better life. “It’s Wednesday, Grandpa! That means the sale barn in Bismarck!”

Grandpa’s smile faltered, crumbling at the edges. “Not today, little buddy. Today is Christmas Eve.”

The table went dead. It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room. Warren, only four and still shielded by his age, just kept digging into his cereal, focused on the milk and the sugar. But for us three—the ones who had survived the “tin can”, the ones who had memorized the Dragon’s moods like a survival manual—the word “Christmas” was a curse.

We looked down into our empty bowls, the silence heavy and suffocating. In the trailer, December didn’t bring carols; it brought a sharpened edge to the rage.

Wren, the Manager, finally spoke the truth of our life. Her voice was flat, a shield of its own. “We don’t do Christmas, Grandma. Mom hates this time of year.”

Grandma’s lips pursed, her eyes swimming with a sudden, fierce grief that she tried to blink away. “Well,” she whispered, fighting through her own tears, “starting this year, we are going to find a way to love it again.”

The Body Remembers

The moment the words left her mouth, the Knowing in my gut turned into a physical assault. It wasn’t a memory; it was an animal. My stomach cramped so hard I thought I’d been kicked by a horse. The trauma was a tide, and it was rising fast. Wren flew from her chair straight to Warren and scooped him up, Warren, seemed to know, he stayed quiet and steady.

Wes, ever the shield, saw it instantly. He was already half-out of his chair, running to protect me, his eyes scanning for the threat. But I was already running.

I didn’t make it.

I threw up right in front of the bathroom door, a hot, sour mess hitting the floorboards. Wes was there in a heartbeat. He didn’t flinch. He grabbed a handful of my hair to keep it out of the wreckage, his hands steady and practiced, his face a mask of pale determination. This was a drill he knew by heart. In the tin can, being sick was a liability, and Wes and Wren were the only ones who ever helped us navigate the “mess.”

The Intervention of Grace

But then, the Normal World intervened.

Grandma moved in, her touch firm but infinitely gentle. She placed a hand on Wes’s shoulder—a soft release from his post. “I’ll help her, honey,” she said. “Go back and talk to Grandpa.”

Wes didn’t move. He sat just outside the door, pretending he hadn’t heard her, refusing to believe the Knight could ever truly be off-duty. He stayed close, his eyes never leaving the room, guarding the perimeter of my pain.

Grandma didn’t force him away. She simply left the door wide open so he could see that I was safe, that the world wasn’t ending. As she mopped up the mess from her beautiful rugs—rugs that deserved better than my fear—I kept whispering, “I’m so sorry, Grandma. I’m sorry for the mess.”

“It’s all right, child,” she hushed me, her voice a warm, heavy blanket that muffled the echoes of the trailer. “Everyone gets sick sometimes.”

She didn’t yell. She didn’t call me a “pittance.” She just cleaned the floor and kept her hand on my back, while across the threshold, Wes watched and waited for the ghost to leave.

Author’s Vital Intermission: The Architecture of the Shards

Before I tell you what came next, I need to break the theater of this book and speak to you directly from my desk.

As you read the horrific details of the chapters to follow, you must understand that my grandmother did not—and could not—pour out this entire, devastating ledger onto three young children in a single afternoon. We were far too young, the truths were far too jagged, and the secrets within our ranks were far too heavily guarded.

Grandma spoke only to what her grief-stricken heart could handle that day. The rest of this history was gathered over decades. It was stitched together from years of me asking pointed questions, overhearing whispered conversations through floor vents, and collecting the stray, bitter confessions dropped by relatives when the going got tough. Even with all the verbal information I have received over my lifetime, another vital informational pathway came about several years ago through dreams. I would awake and begin to journal all that I had dreamed, many of those dreams are woven into my story.

I am not entirely sure of the exact dates or which specific relative handed me each piece of the puzzle. But as the Noticer of this family, my mind has spent a lifetime organizing these fragments. I have woven them together here in chronological order, because it is the only way to make the chaos make sense. Hold on, Stay close, because this is the threshold where the terrain changes forever, and we finally learn the raw truth of why the foundation of our world was so violently and permanently shattered

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The Heritage Glimmer

While some find peace in the quiet rows of a crochet hook, others carry the wind in their marrow. This is the story of the day a Hellion learned that being “clumsy” with a needle is just the side effect of being meant for the wild, and the “Whoosh” of a spirit finally given permission to run.

While the farmhouse hummed with the steady, predictable rhythm of the North Dakota winter, I found myself facing a different kind of challenge.

The Manager was in her glory. Wren’s brain thrived on the orderly rows of Grandma’s knitting patterns and the quiet precision of the needles. To her, this was a puzzle she was born to solve.

But for me, the sewing room felt like a beautiful, colorful cage.

Grandma sat me down in a small wooden chair, her hands patient and steady as she tried to guide my fingers around a crochet hook. The room was a treasure trove of textures—mountains of soft wool in every color of the sunset, shimmering spools of thread, and the rhythmic thrum-thrum of the sewing machine.

To anyone else, it was a fairytale sanctuary. To me, it was a test I was failing in real-time.

My fingers, usually so capable of climbing trees and navigating the timber, felt like clumsy, oversized sticks. Every time I tried to pull the yarn through a loop, it snagged, slipped, or knotted. I could feel the heat rising in my chest—that familiar, restless vibration I called the “Whoosh.” My legs wanted to kick; my lungs wanted to pull in the cold, sharp air of the outdoors; my eyes kept darting to the big picture window where the sky stretched out, endless and inviting. I was trying so hard to be a “Good Girl,” to sit still and be small, but The Hellion inside was starting to scream for the exit.

The “Knowing” Gaze

Suddenly, Grandma stopped.

She didn’t scold me for the tangled mess of yarn in my lap. She didn’t sigh with the disappointment I had spent seven years expecting from an adult. Instead, she tilted her head to the side, a funny, knowing smile playing on her lips.

She wasn’t looking at my crooked stitches; she was looking straight into my eyes. She saw the storm brewing there—the frantic energy of a bird trapped in a barn.

“Ah,” she said softly, her voice acting as a gentle release valve. “I see it now.”

I froze, my heart thumping against my ribs like a trapped rabbit. “See what, Grandma?”

“I see the wind in you, Wanda,” she whispered.

She reached out and took the crochet hook from my hand, setting it aside as if it were a heavy weight I was no longer required to carry.

“Some folks are made to stitch things together, like your sister. They find their peace in the quiet rows. But you? You’re a girl of the timber. You’re made for the running wild and free.”

She gave me a playful wink—a secret acknowledgment of the wild spirit I had spent my life trying to hide. Then, she and Wren laughed as Grandma swung her arm high, making a wild arc in the air.

“Why don’t you go find your little brother and see how much noise you can make outside?”

The Great Escape

I didn’t need to be told twice. The relief was so sudden and so sweet it felt as if I had sprouted wings. I bolted from that chair so fast I almost tripped over a pile of floral fabric.

“Thanks, Grandma! That was really fun!” I yelled over my shoulder.

It was the biggest lie I’d ever told, but I think she knew my gratitude wasn’t for the crochet lesson—it was for the freedom.

As I raced down the hallway, my new shoes thumping a frantic, happy rhythm on the floorboards, I heard it—a real, belly-deep chuckle following me out the door.

“Yep! It sure was!” she hollered back, rolling her eyes, and smiling as she shook her head.

I burst through the door and into the biting North Dakota air, my lungs finally expanding to their full capacity. I never darkened the door of the craft room again. I left the needles and the thread to Wren, and I headed for the trees.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to pretend to be anything. I was a girl of the wind, and I was finally, truly, free.