12/22/2025
A must read. Written by a RAD parent.
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“The Child of Two Worlds”
There once was a mother who built her life around a child who didn’t come from her body, but from her heart.
The child arrived like a storm trapped in a bottle — fragile and dangerous all at once. Her eyes held stories too old for her age, and she kept her heart locked behind iron doors. Still, the mother knelt down and offered everything: love like sunlight, compassion like rain, safety like soil. She thought, Maybe, just maybe, this time love will be enough.
She wrapped the child in tenderness, in routine, in bedtime stories, in the quiet assurance that you are safe now. But the child had been burned by too many promises before. She saw love not as comfort, but as currency. Every hug became a test. Every kindness a manipulation. The child would smile and wound in the same breath.
Over the years, the mother bled invisible wounds. She covered bruises on her soul that no one saw. Family visits became war zones. Doors were broken. Trust shattered. And yet — she stayed. Through it all, the mother whispered, You are my baby. I will not give up on you.
But the child didn’t want love. She wanted control. And the deeper the mother loved, the more the child twisted it. Until one day, the mother stood in her own home and realized: If I keep her here, she will destroy us all.
Letting go was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
It wasn’t like death. It was worse. Because the child was still out there, breathing and walking, but unreachable. She wasn’t lost to illness or accident. She was lost to something deeper — a wound so severe that love could not reach her.
The mother sat in the ruins of her hope, holding pieces of her own heart. She remembered the nights spent brushing hair, the birthdays, the times the child cried and let herself be held — those rare moments when the walls dropped. They were real. But they weren’t enough.
A hollow opened in her chest. Not because she didn’t love her anymore — but because she still did. Fiercely. Helplessly.
And yet… she knew. Taking her back would destroy the family, destroy her. Boundaries weren’t cruelty — they were survival.
So she mourned. Not just the child, but the dream of who that child could have been. She cried for the lost bond, for the laughter that never came, for the trust that never formed. She cried because she had loved harder than anyone should ever have to — and it hadn’t saved them.
But in the silence that followed, she began to whisper to herself the words she had once said to the child: You are safe now. You are loved. You are worth protecting.
She began to rebuild. Not in spite of the hole in her heart — but around it. She kept a candle lit on the windowsill, not because she expected the child to return, but because she needed to remember that she loved, and that it meant something.
Grief didn’t go away. But it softened. It took new shapes. Some days it raged. Some days it rested.
And in time, the mother learned that surviving love that doesn’t come back — surviving losing a child who still lives — is a kind of love all its own. Fierce. Brave. Holy.
From a member of Attach Families
