“Reluctant love is the experience of loving someone with your entire soul, even when your logical mind tells you it would be much safer not to. It is a love that refuses to die, lingering deep in the fibers of your being.” It's the tugging on the spiritual umbilical cord that connects a mother and her baby forever, while the flesh still pushes away. Two souls trapped behind the walls of human caution. Shame initiates the push, grief maximizes the pull. It's reluctant love. Th

How I Unknowingly Followed A Mother's Scent For 30 Years It started when I was a very young girl. I couldn't tell you what it was back then, but there was a pull that went beyond the mother I knew. I would feel this pull beyond my bedroom, past the bathroom; it wasn't pulling me to the living room, where my entire family was, nor was it leading me to the bedroom of the mother I knew. I would get to the front door and stare. The pull I have felt for as long as I could r

She took a step back, looked me up and down, and with a curled, aggressive sneer said, “You ain’t even my child!”

A truth, a voice for anyone who’s ever felt like the sheet, tucked into someone else’s version of love, but never quite covered.

(A short story of a mother’s heart and a sister’s bond)