Chapter Seven: A Daughter at the Door

She didn’t know the exact moment her daughter stopped calling her “Mom.” There wasn’t a final word or dramatic exit. Just a slow, widening silence—measured in missed birthdays, unsent letters, and the cold weight of time.

Estrangement doesn’t scream. It just stops speaking.

Her daughter had been a college freshman the last time they spoke face to face. Old enough to know disappointment, too young to understand trauma. She had witnessed the arrests, the personality altering and swings, the shutdowns. She had watched her mother vanish into locked doors and reappear as someone more fragile, lost, and more broken than before. And when the silence started, it made a terrible kind of sense.

Because what could she say?

“I’m sorry I missed your school play, I was institutionalized.”

“I didn’t forget your birthday—I was in prison.”

“I love you, I just didn’t know how to be honest and to staying would cause more harm.”

No Hallmark card could hold that much pain. No phone call could fix it.

So instead, she held on in secret. To drawings from kindergarten. A locket with her daughter’s baby picture. Notes written in crayon, still folded neatly inside her Bible. Every item a shrine to a relationship that once existed—proof she had been loved, even if only for a while.

She replayed their last goodbye over and over, picking at it like a scab. She’d shouted. She remembers seeing her daughter crying. Then nothing. Years passed. Seasons changed. And still—nothing.

In prison, she’d tried to write. Letters full of half-truths and wishful thinking. Pages soaked with regret, with explanations that felt too late and too long. Most were boxed away and she never read them.  Others disappeared into the void. She imagined them being tossed into trash cans, or worse—read and shrugged off. She couldn’t blame her.

Shame doesn’t just haunt the person who carries it. It echoes into everyone they’ve ever touched.

And yet—every time a child entered a visiting room, her eyes darted to the door. Just in case.

Every time she left a mental health program or a prison or another stay in the hospital, she imagined her daughter on the other side, waiting. She wasn’t. But the fantasy kept her from giving up completely.

She started writing—not about her own pain, but about what she’d want her daughter to know. Who she’d become. What she’d learned. Not just to apologize, but to tell the truth, fully and without excuse. She wrote every day as if her daughter might one day read it. As if the door could still open.

Maybe it never would. Maybe the silence would remain.

But healing, she realized, couldn’t depend on forgiveness.

It had to begin with facing the wreckage and choosing to live anyway.

And in the quiet spaces where grief used to scream, a new voice whispered, “I’m still her mother. I always will be.”