“How are you, really?”
“What are you worried about?”
“What do you wish you could say but don’t?”
And then they need us to listen without fixing, dismissing, or minimizing.
My granddaughter’s truth didn’t just reframe her childhood. It reshaped my understanding of my own life—of the ways I learned to disappear, the ways I taught others to do the same.
In telling me her story, she gave me a gift I didn’t know I needed: the chance to grow, even now.
We can’t redo the past.
But we can choose how honestly we live with it.
And sometimes, twenty years later, the bravest thing someone can do is finally speak—and trust that love is strong enough to hear it.
