I’ve been sitting with this all day. At first, it seemed like nothing—just a passing thought—but it kept tugging at me, asking to be spoken.
I’ve often been told, “Give yourself grace.” For years, I nodded as if I understood. It sounded kind, like something I should know how to do. But only now, after years of healing, do I see how grace keeps circling back, asking me to notice the places inside where I once abandoned myself.
Fragments of memory rise to the surface, almost as if they’re trying to hand me the words I couldn’t find before. I remember sitting in church as a child, singing Love at Home. I hated that song. My five-year-old nervous system already knew truths my adult self would spend decades untangling—the ache of rejection, the sting of dismissal, the weight of invisibility. My body carried it all before I even had language for it.
That song told me every family knew love at home, and I believed it. Which meant that when my own family didn’t, it must have been my fault. That belief planted the seed of abandonment: if only I tried harder, followed the rules more perfectly, gave more of myself—maybe then love would appear.
But grace reminds me now: it was never mine to fix.
I think back to being four years old, dropped off on the church sidewalk, left to wander hallways too big for me to understand. I wasn’t allowed to sit with other families because “church was for families to sit together.” And so I sat alone, a child exiled by rules that adults upheld without a second thought. Even now, the hurt rises as I write it. But here, grace steps in.
Grace lets me take that little girl into my arms. I sit beside her in the pew and whisper, You matter. You belong. You are wanted here. Grace names the shame where it belongs—not on the child, but on the adults who failed her. Grace reminds me that the neglect was theirs to carry, not mine.
As a young mother, that song haunted me again. When my children argued, I thought it was proof of my failure. I couldn’t see that their shouts were not indictments of me, but their own desperate cries for connection. Grace slowly untangled that lie. Grace said: You were not failing. You simply didn’t yet know how to connect. And even in your trying, love was there.
Yet the feeling of failure has a way of lingering. Now, with my children grown, it sometimes returns in a quieter, more piercing form. I ask myself: Did I miss my chance? How can I be there for them today when I couldn’t give them what they needed before?
Grace whispers again. It tells me the past cannot be rewritten, but the present still holds possibility. My healing will not erase their pain—but it equips me differently now. I no longer need to scramble for perfection or answers. What I can offer is presence. A listening ear. A steady heart. Space for them to bring their wounds when they are ready.
This is new territory for me. But for the first time, I can see it: the possibility that my role now is not to fix, but to hold. To be a safe place instead of a perfect parent. And in this, I see what grace has been striving to teach me all along—that even in the cracks of what was broken, love can still grow.
Over the years, grace has become a teacher. It has helped me sort what belongs to me and what never did. It has given me the strength to release survival patterns that once kept me alive but no longer serve me. It has freed me to name my truth without drowning in shame.
This is what I know now:
Grace is not just forgiveness. Grace is the re-parenting of the abandoned parts of me. It is the steady voice that whispers, You are worthy, even here. You are loved, even now.
And slowly, with grace as my guide, I am learning to live as someone who truly believes it.