As I sit in the quiet of the dimly lit room, the glow of the lamp casting long shadows across the cracked walls. My eyes, once filled with hope, now hold a deep sadness, a sadness that is hard to describe, even harder to share. The silence is comforting in its own way, but it always leaves me thinking. Thinking about the years I spent growing up in the chaos of a home that never knew peace.

As I look back on those days, the memories swirl in my mind like smoke from a fire—faint, hazy, and hard to hold onto. My mother’s face is etched in my mind, though I often wonder if it’s just a silhouette of who she truly was. My mother, Rhonda Baldwin a woman who was both deaf and mute, struggled in ways I could never fully comprehend. Yet I saw the way my mother would retreat into herself, trapped in her own silence, and sometimes I felt like that silence filled every corner of our small trailer we shared. 

The days felt long, like time dragged on without any promise of release. And yet, amidst it all, there was the drug. The thing that made my mother disappear into another world—a world that was both far away and painfully close. It wasn’t just the needles, the bottles, or the smoke that filled the air, it was the absence of my mother’s presence, the distance between them that grew every time she chose the drug over me. I’d see my mother high, her eyes vacant, her hands trembling as she searched for another fix. There was never enough. There was never enough to fill that emptiness inside my mother, just as there was never enough for me—enough love, enough care, enough protection.

And yet, I was there. Alone with my mother, while the others, my siblings, were nowhere to be found. They had been taken, each one pulled away by Nonnie, given a chance at a better life. They had been adopted, last name changed to Brown, they offered a reality, my mother could never have. I knew they were safer than me, I knew they were loved, and I knew they lived a life of stability. How do I stop the resentment that burns inside me every time I see them on social media, every time I thought of them? They had it all. They had the childhood I had never been given, the childhood I would never have.

Five children. I was the youngest, and yet I was the only one left behind. The only one allowed to remain with Rhonda. Why? What was it about me that made me worthy of staying in a home so broken, so consumed by darkness?

As a child, I couldn’t understand why the others were taken. Was I not good enough? Was I somehow unworthy of being adopted? The questions gnaw at me till this day, leaving scars that never fully healed. I would dig through the trash, collecting cans to recycle, praying no one from Ingram elementary would see me. The shame was overwhelming. I felt invisible to the world, and yet, in the quiet of my thoughts, I couldn’t escape the burning question: why was I the one left to live this life?

See Rhonda’s childhood was a story never told, a story swept under the rug, forgotten by everyone who could have made a difference. I often wondered if the drug addiction had always been a part of my mother’s life, or if it was something that had come with the years of pain and suffering. What had happened to my mother before? What had she endured? There was no one to ask, no one to listen. My grandmother, Nonni, had been a distant figure, a woman of faith and discipline who lived far away in the DMV area. She is a Christian, deeply devout, but I only met her six times in my life. Each visit was fleeting, and with each goodbye, I felt further removed from the woman who could have offered me a different path, a different life.

Nonni’s faith was something I could never quite grasp. How could someone believe in God who allowed her to live in a trailer so broken, so lost? How could this be? How can God allow my mother to suffer, allow her to live in silence while slowly destroying herself with drugs? I wanted to ask nonnie about it, but the words always got stuck in my throat. Instead, I-kept asking God, night after night, in the quiet of the corner of the trailer, why I had been left behind. Why was I the one stuck in this place, surrounded by darkness and loneliness, while the others had escaped?

I didn’t know if I’d ever get an answer, but still, I prayed. I-prayed for peace, for understanding. I prayed for the healing that I so desperately needed but didn’t know how to ask for. My heart had been fractured long ago, and now it was just a hollow shell, aching with the weight of everything I had lost.

But one day, as I sat by the window, watching the sun set over the horizon, I realized something. I was still here. I was still breathing. I had survived the chaos, the pain, the emptiness. And maybe, just maybe, that was enough. Maybe, just maybe, there was a reason I had been left behind.

I didn’t have the answers yet, but for the first time in my life, I-felt the tiniest spark of hope. I didn’t need to understand everything all at once. I just needed to keep moving forward, to keep asking God for the strength to heal, to let go of the resentment that held me in chains.

And so, as I begin to forgive—not my mother, not the system, but myself. I forgave myself for the anger, for the pain, for the times I had blamed myself. I wasn’t the one who had failed. It wasn’t my fault that I was born into a life of struggle. But Icould choose now, choose to fight for myself, for the life I deserved.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting a warm golden glow on everything it touched, I whispered to Allah “I don’t know why I was left here, but by your will I will find my way out. I will heal. And I will not let my past define me.”

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. And that, I knew, was enough.