I built a wall.
I did not know I was doing it. Most mammas don't. My son was eight when he was diagnosed with leukemia. Two and a half years of chemo. He rang the bell. Four months later, at eleven, he relapsed.
Somewhere between the yellow chair in the ER and the church lobby where strangers kept calling me strong, I disappeared. Brick by brick. I gave up the perfume. The walks. The thirty minutes that used to be only mine. My Bible study went too. I stopped looking in the mirror.
I thought I was being a good mamma.
I was actually being a vanishing one.
Warrior Mammas is everything I wish another mamma had handed me three years ago. The journals I have already published. The memoir I am writing. The community I am building. The blog where I write honestly about the trenches I am still in. All of it started in the dark middle, with me trying to find my way back to the woman in the kitchen who used to dance with a baby on her hip.
If you are in the fire, mamma, I am not above you. I am still in it. I am writing this with my son still in treatment, with the relapse still raw, with my faith shaking on some days and steady on others. I do not have it figured out.
But I know one thing now that I did not know before.
When a mamma heals, her family heals.
And coming back to yourself is not betraying the people you love. It is how they get you back.
So pull up a chair. You are not alone.