This isn’t a redemption arc.
There is no soft light, no golden-filtered transformation.
This is a woman, standing barefoot in a kitchen of ghosts,
carrying a child’s rage in one hand
and her own buried grief in the other.
Motherhood is hard.
But motherhood when you’re battling your own history—
when you’re crawling through a house filled with years of yourself left behind—
it’s brutal.
Tilly screamed at me today.
Told me I don’t listen.
Told me I ruin everything.
And somewhere beneath the sharpness of her words,
was the quiet cry of a child who needed safety,
and a mother already hanging by a thread.
She was hurting.
And I was the only one here.
Her dad?
Off on a spa weekend with his girlfriend.
Breathing, unwinding, resting.
And I don’t begrudge him that.
He’s allowed joy.
Allowed to step away.
But I don’t get that luxury.
I get the house.
The storm.
The aftermath.
The kitchen table buried in laundry and resentment.
The six baskets of clean clothes waiting for a version of me that has the time to fold them.
This isn’t about blame.
Joel was at work.
He offered to help, to ease, to hold space for me.
But this wasn’t his to fix.
This is my mess.
My history.
My years of choosing survival over self.
My decades of letting the clutter build while I broke in silence.
So today, I faced it.
I cleared one table.
Then one drawer.
Then another.
I threw away the litter tray I didn’t need.
Sorted through the half-used candles, the broken storage boxes,
the clothes that no longer fit this body—this life.
I got angry.
I got tired.
I got real.
And then, when the silence came back,
I made something small.
A jam jar.
Some salt.
White sage.
I stabbed the incense in like a flag.
Lit it like a warning.
Let the smoke drift into the air like a scream I couldn’t voice.
I called it the Sanctum Jar.
Not because it made me feel peaceful.
But because I needed something—anything—to say:
“This space is mine now.”
“This is where the spiral stops.”
“This is where I claw my way back.”
This wasn’t just housework.
It was grief work.
It was survival.
And I didn’t break.
Even though I had every reason to.
Even though no one would have blamed me if I had.
I’m still here.
And that has to count.
You don’t see this part.
The rage.
The shaking.
The silence.
But I do.
And I’m still standing.