Part 4 – Storms and Strongest Threads

This post is part of From Unravelling to Weaving: My Journey to Recollections Within, a foundational five-part series following my personal path to this work. Each chapter reflects on the losses, changes, and realizations that shaped the archive and the vision behind it.

⚠️ Content Note: This post contains references to sexual assault, depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts. Please read with care and step away if needed.

The Calm Before

After leaving the cage of a life that no longer fit, I stepped into a new beginning. In the summer of 2019, I moved from the only home I had ever known in Canada to the United States. That August, I married my beautiful, sweet husband, and we began building a life filled with love and intention. For the first time in decades, I felt grounded in myself and in the life we were creating together.

But storms have a way of arriving just when life feels most secure.

The Storm

COVID arrived in early 2020, and like everyone else, our lives were shaken.

That summer, my daughter went to visit her father in Canada. What was meant to be a summer trip turned into a painful custody battle. In November 2020, the Supreme Court of my home province finally ordered her home. Those months felt endless. The terror of being unable to protect your child, of watching forces outside your control pull at her life, is something I will carry forever.

When she was home again, we began trying to settle into the rhythms of daily life. In March 2021, we bought our home. She adapted to school, made friends, and had support around her. On the surface, things looked steadier. But in 2023, shadows resurfaced. She began to spiral into depression. She withdrew, grew increasingly hopeless, and started self-harming. The light in her seemed to be dimming.

In January 2024, I rushed her to the hospital after she disclosed suicidal thoughts. That day still rings in my memory like a bell I cannot unhear. While I knew the steps to take, nothing brings you to your knees quite like that moment. All we could do was love her, support her, and try to keep her safe.

Just a few months later, in May, buried memories surfaced. One devastating night, she remembered something unthinkable. My daughter had been sexually assaulted when she was nine years old while staying in her father’s household, after the point when she should have been returned home to me.

The truth explained so much of her pain. It also tore me open as a mother. I was consumed by grief, fury, and helplessness. Nothing prepares you for learning that your child was harmed so profoundly, or for living with the knowledge of how differently things might have been if events had unfolded as they should have.

Her healing has not been simple or linear. What happened to her has had ongoing consequences, including lasting effects on both her mental and physical health. That truth remains part of our lives.

Surrounded by Women

Amidst this devastation, a different kind of moment unfolded. In June 2024, my sister and my adult daughter came to visit. They crossed the continent to be with her as soon as it could be arranged. Together, the three of us encircled my daughter as women have done for generations.

We gathered in the water at the river.

There, my sister led us through a Pagan ritual of release, cleansing, and renewal. She called to the four directions and sang a song of healing. My daughter was surrounded by her women, her mother, her sister, and her aunt. She was held in fierce love and witness while the river carried away what no one should ever have had to hold.

That day was not a cure. It did not erase what had happened. But it was a turning point. She knew she was deeply loved, and that her women would cross any distance to bring her strength, love, and presence.

Something shifted. With stronger support around her, including a therapist better equipped to help carry the weight of her trauma, she began, slowly, to reclaim parts of herself. By the time she entered high school in August 2025, her spirit felt lighter. She was laughing again. She was beginning to step into a life that belonged to her.

This young woman is my hero.

And not only her women. Beside her, every single day, is the man who chose her as his own. My husband stepped into the role of father with a steadiness and love that could never be demanded, only freely given. His love is not tied to blood, but to presence, consistency, and care. In him, she has seen that fatherhood is not about biology, but about the daily act of showing up. He has been the protector, listener, and safe place she has so deeply needed. There are good, pure-hearted men in this world, and we are fortunate to have found him.

Resilience & Vision

Walking with her through the fire and witnessing the strength it took for her to keep going changed me. It reminded me that healing is not linear. It is uneven, exhausting, and often far less visible than people imagine. It asks for endurance, witness, and the courage to keep living inside what has happened.

Those months carved something deep into me. They taught me that resilience is not about never breaking, because my God, we break. It is about what helps us endure the breaking. It is about love, witness, and the strength that helps us gather ourselves again, even when the pieces do not return in the same shape.

What Endurance Revealed

My daughter’s healing clarified something for me that now sits at the heart of Recollections Within. Women have always carried one another through what formal systems fail to hold. They have witnessed, protected, remembered, and helped make survival possible.

What I was being led toward was not simply a place to speak, but a place to preserve. A place where women’s lives, ruptures, and transformations could be held with seriousness, and where what has been lived through is not treated as too private, too messy, or too ordinary to matter.

If my daughter’s life taught me anything here, it is that what women survive, and how they carry one another through it, deserves to be remembered.

This chapter is a testament to resilience. Not only mine, and not only my daughter’s, but to the ways women continue to witness one another through rupture and help make survival legible. Life will hand us storms. What we preserve from them matters.