Growing up, my daughter Brittany was on the honor roll and involved in sports. We were that family where all the kids came and hung out, and we just loved family time. We were very close with our kids and always thought we knew what was going on in their lives. Brittany met a boy.
He played hockey, and unbeknownst to us, he had been prescribed Vicodin due to an injury. And they started to take that casually on weekends. Unfortunately, her body loved it. Her body loved it so much that within a year, she was homeless, living in a trap house in Detroit.
It’s been a very, very long journey of about 15 years of her living in about 12 different states. She was being human trafficked, experiencing seizures, being beaten, being robbed, raped. And as a mother, you can’t even comprehend this, because this wasn’t supposed to be our story. This wasn’t supposed to be her life.
I started to write just for my own self-awareness of how to handle this as a, quote, unquote, caregiver. And so, I took a leap of faith and a really big deep breath and I threw it on Facebook one day. Said this is my life and this is what’s been going on and here’s a little excerpt.
And I don’t know how or what happened, but it just kept being shared and shared and shared. And then this website that I built, they said, “Your website is crashing because so many people are trying to read your stuff.” This is crazy. This doesn’t even make sense.
Then I realized I’m not alone. There’s hundreds of thousands of families out there who struggle, and they struggled with the same things that I did. As a community, we are amazing at coming together when someone is struggling with a crisis in their life. Instead of focusing on stigma and shame, celebrating and focusing on the positives—that’s building community, and focusing on that love.
