Preface

My Memoir When Fate takes Hold is not a confession written to entertain, but a record of memories that I kept hidden in the margins of my mind. I have learned that the most difficult stories are not the ones I have told to feel seen, but the ones I have kept concealed.

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I was two when the world around me shattered and three, when the fracture hardened into a pattern I did not know how to navigate. My mother’s disappearance, set against the ordinary scene of a purple bedspread and a beloved story, Are You My Mother? left me trying to translate her absence. I was the middle child, a position that felt like an unrelenting negotiation with the universe. 

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I could fill hundreds of notebooks describing the sights and sounds of doors that opened and closed, with murmurs of adults who were supposed to protect but failed to do so, and the constant uprooting that severed me from my siblings, my only anchors. A sexually abusive uncle, a father who was continually reinventing himself, and a revolving door of mothers left me in a state of perpetual fear and confusion.        

                                      

On my own by age 13, I wandered through Denver’s streets into places I didn’t understand. I navigated landscapes of imminent danger, where I was drawn into robberies, congames and escort services. I slept in laundry rooms, church pews and bathroom stalls and slept with men twice my age to have a roof over my head. I survived acts of violence with survival tactics I taught myself. 

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Through the treacherous landscape of my childhood and teens, I encountered a presence; startling, intimate and sacred, that proved to be a compass. I truly believed I would eventually prove worthy of someone or something.

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My personal healing began when I was nineteen during an encounter with my father in a Native American sweat lodge that did not erase the past, but helped reframe it. In that ceremony, I traded fear for a vision of how to map the arduous path of becoming someone with purpose. 

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I never set out to be a writer and yet with very few years of schooling, the current of my life carried me to this place. My memoir does not promise easy answers or neat endings. To the reader who may be seeking assurance that light can exist beyond a long, unlit corridor, I offer not an answer, but an example of how I struggled to chart a safe passage through the wake of a broken family.