Anchored in Grace

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Prologue

 

I didn’t know it at the time, but life had already started changing before I found out I was pregnant in 2022.

 

A few years earlier, in 2020, I had moved from New York to New Jersey to be closer to Muffin. He had been incarcerated for years by then, and the drive to where he was being held was shorter from New Jersey than it had been from New York City. At the time, he and I had agreed that we were going to work on preserving our relationship, and moving closer felt like one way I could show that I was serious about trying.

 

I spent nearly everything I had getting into my apartment.

 

It was a two-bedroom even though I lived alone. I wanted my brother to have somewhere stable to stay if he ever needed it, and I wanted the same option available for my sister. I didn’t have much left after moving in, but I had decent credit, a credit card, and the confidence that came from knowing I had always managed to find another job when I needed one.

 

That confidence eventually became carelessness.

 

I was constantly quitting jobs because I didn’t like them. I lived paycheck to paycheck and spent extra money irresponsibly because, in my mind, more money was always going to come. For a while, that way of thinking appeared to work. I had my own apartment. I had a car. I was working in mental health and human services. I enrolled in graduate school. I decorated my home and made it comfortable. From the outside, I probably looked independent.

 

And I was.

 

But independence and stability are not always the same thing.

 

I didn’t understand that yet.

 

I worked different jobs during those years. At one point, I was a Case Manager. By 2021, I was working as a Clinical Addiction Counselor while pursuing my master’s degree for the first time. School was virtual and self-paced, and academically, I was doing fine.

 

Personally, I was not.

 

Muffin and I were in one of the worst places our relationship had ever been. We argued constantly. I could be disrespectful to him, and instead of taking accountability for my behavior, I justified it by reminding myself that I still answered his phone calls and went to visit him whenever my car was working.

 

My excuse was that showing up excused how I showed up and made up for the kind of support I was actually giving him.

 

He needed somebody, and I made myself available. At the time, I thought that counted for more than my attitude, the ways I had begun disrespecting him, and the things I wasn’t telling him. Looking back, availability and investment weren’t the same thing.

 

We had been together for years by then. Long enough that reaching another anniversary should have meant something, let alone our 10th anniversary. But there wasn’t much to celebrate. We were tolerating each other more than we were investing in each other.

 

Inside and outside of that relationship, I was lonely.

 

I traveled back to New York City almost every weekend for a while because I didn’t want to sit at home by myself. My family was there, but I didn’t have many friends waiting for me when I arrived. A lot of those weekends still involved me spending hours alone, just in a different place: my car. But eventually, that stopped.

 

My car officially broke down, and there wasn’t much public transportation where I lived. I didn’t want to rely on the little transportation that was available anyway, so I started taking Ubers everywhere until I couldn’t afford them anymore.

 

And suddenly, I wasn’t choosing to stay home.

 

I was stuck there.

 

Nobody was watching me unravel because most of it happened inside my apartment. Even the drinking was private. I wasn’t outside giving people something to gossip about, but I was oversharing things I was doing at home on my social media because I needed attention. I was home drinking excessively, feeling lonely, frustrated, and tired of thinking about the same problems.

 

I was desperate, but I was still praying every morning and every night. I was doing daily devotionals, reading Scripture, and writing in my Bible journal. I was talking to my biological dad more often, building our relationship around conversations about the Bible. I even posted biblical content on Facebook.

 

If somebody had looked at that part of my life alone, they might have thought my relationship with God was in a great place.

 

Admittedly, I thought it was too.

 

Then I had a dream.

 

I don’t remember every detail perfectly today, but I wrote it down in my Bible journal at the time. Before reading that entry again to write this memoir, I still remembered how I felt when I woke up. Not only had I never been that afraid in my life, but that dream became the catalyst for what eventually led to me becoming a mom.

 

In the dream, I was in a hotel with a girl I didn’t recognize. I went from holding the girl in my arms, to running down the stairs to save her, to realizing I was her.

 

I woke up alone in my apartment and suddenly felt scared. I didn’t want to go back to sleep because I didn’t feel safe. I was intentional about strengthening my faith back then, so I immediately settled into the thought that God was trying to warn me about something.

 

So after I journaled, I did what I had been doing for the past few weeks. I prayed.

 

I don’t remember now, nor did I write in my journal then, where I found the exact words. But I prayed a desperate prayer that I thought I meant.

 

What happened afterward made me turn my back on God.

 

At some point, I told my biological dad about the prayer, and his response was simple: It was a powerful prayer, and God takes prayer seriously.

 

I eventually stopped talking to my biological dad, stopped reading my Bible, and stopped doing daily devotionals and journaling. Then God stopped communicating with me through my dreams, or at least that’s how I felt at the time.

 

With the wall I had built up against God and the anger I felt toward Him, I started manifesting and asking the universe to do what I believed God didn’t.

 

That isn’t something I practice now, nor is it something I practiced for long then. But at the time, I was desperate and tired of being lonely. I manifested getting engaged and being in what I considered a “real” relationship. I wanted companionship that didn’t have walls, schedules, and distance attached to it.

 

I wanted my life to be different.

 

Muffin and I eventually fell apart after “celebrating” our 10th anniversary. A month later, I met Jason. A month and a half after that, I was pregnant.

 

Finding out I was pregnant disappointed me because it was confirmation of how much I’d lost my way.

 

At the time, the positive pregnancy test felt like confirmation that Muffin and I would never get back together, which scared me more than Jason finding out that I didn’t want to be a family with him.

 

More importantly, I believed that test confirmed God was punishing me. I was thinking about everything I believed I had lost and how much harder rebuilding could become with a baby.

 

I was thinking about the decisions I had made that brought me there and what I could’ve done differently to change the outcome.

 

My pregnancy didn’t immediately make me stronger.

 

It made the consequences of my actions harder to ignore.

 

Before Wisdom, I had been willing to gamble with my own finances, my own time, and sometimes my own comfort just to have someone around because I believed God would “fix” it.

 

But with God punishing me—or at least what I believed was God punishing me—Muffin upset with me, and Jason backing out, I had no choice but to step up.

 

There would be someone else living inside whatever life I built. Someone who didn’t create my problems. Someone who shouldn’t have to spend his childhood paying for decisions that were made before he ever took his first breath.

 

Although I was upset with God, I couldn’t shake the thought that my child could inherit a spiritual debt he didn’t owe. If consequences were waiting for me because of choices I had made, I would deal with them myself.

 

To do that, I had to accept that the relationship that brought me to pregnancy was not going to become the family I wanted with Muffin. It took me two years to work through my feelings of guilt and shame about that, all while exhausting myself trying to be present for my son.

 

Later, trying to move forward peacefully would surprisingly lead me into a year-and-a-half-long custody battle and criminal court, fighting what sometimes felt like a losing battle over my own child.

 

But that part comes later.

 

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about court orders, custody, protection, entrepreneurship, becoming a therapist, rebuilding a relationship with Muffin, or eventually writing any of this down.

 

I was pregnant, angry with God, embarrassed by my choices, scared about money, and trying to figure out how to become somebody’s mom.

 

The true turn of events is that years later, I would say that removal prayer again during my custody battle. Part of me believed that if God wanted to strip things away and I didn’t complain this time, maybe He would let me keep my son.

 

Looking back, I can admit I was trying to manipulate God.

 

I was bargaining with Him for my son and justified doing so because I was terrified of losing the child I had worked so hard to love and protect.

 

But the second prayer didn’t end the way the first one had. I had previously measured God’s response by what He took away, but this time I measured it by what He allowed me to keep, including my relationship with Him.

 

That realization didn’t erase my anger or suddenly make every loss feel beautiful.

 

Even now, my faith isn’t perfectly disciplined. I have seasons when I pray faithfully and seasons when I avoid God because I’m embarrassed, angry, or distracted by everything He allows me to have.

 

At 31 years old, I can reflect and see things that the woman in that New Jersey apartment couldn’t.

 

She wanted external miracles; I want peace of mind.

 

The cliché thing to say is that I’m still a work in progress. But the truth is, I’m still trying to be the kind of woman, mom, and Bible-believing Christian that my son will be proud of. I haven’t arrived there yet, but the way he interacts with me shows me that I’m making progress.

 

This book is about my journey toward becoming a “good” mom.