I was 6 when the game of “house” stopped being pretend. My cousins—12 and 14, blood I trusted—locked the basement door, told me we were playing “mommy and daddy,” and showed me what that really meant. I didn’t know the words for what they did, only that it hurt, that my body felt wrong afterward, that I wet the bed for the first time in two years. When I told my father, the youth pastor with the gentle pulpit voice, he dragged me to the garage by my ponytail and beat me with a leather belt until the buckle split my skin. “You don’t lie on family,” he said. “And you don’t pee yourself like an animal.”

That was the first time I learned silence was safer than truth.

My name is Kayla Monroe. I’m 27 now, but the calendar never caught up with the mileage on my soul. Between ages 6 and 11, the beatings became a language my father spoke fluently:

Burnt popcorn bowl at the babysitter’s → belt across my back.
Barbie karaoke machine at show-and-tell → extension cord around my thighs.
Wetting the bed after my cousins’ “visits” → fists to my ribs until I vomited.

My three half-siblings—born to the stepmom who smiled for the church cameras—never felt the buckle. I was the only one marked with welts that had to be hidden under long sleeves in July. I was the only one who reported to DCS. Five times. Each time, the caseworker sat in our living room, sipping coffee from the “World’s Best Dad” mug, while my father quoted scripture about honoring thy parents. Each time, the file closed with the same note: No evidence of abuse. Father is a respected community leader.

At 11, I swallowed every pill in the medicine cabinet—Tylenol, Sudafed, my stepmom’s prenatal vitamins. I wanted the pain to stop, not my heart. I woke up in the psych ward with my wrists zip-tied to the bed rails. DCS placed me back home in 72 hours. “Family reunification,” they called it. I called it a death sentence with a curfew.

I ran away for good at 16. Hitchhiked to a house party in East Nashville where the bass rattled the windows and the air tasted like weed and desperation. A boy I knew from middle school—someone who once traded me Pokémon cards—poured vodka down my throat, carried me to a back bedroom, and took what my cousins had already broken. Nine months later, I gave birth to Elijah in a county hospital while a social worker hovered, clipboard in hand. They let me hold him for 11 minutes before DCS swooped in. “You’re a runaway minor with no stable housing,” they said. “We’re terminating rights for the child’s safety.”

Elijah was adopted six weeks later—by the director of the Children’s Bureau and his wife. The same agency that “lost” my five abuse reports. I signed the papers with a pen that shook so hard the ink bled.

DCS promised independent living support: GED classes, Section 8 vouchers, insurance for the beat-up Civic I’d saved to buy. Instead, they handed me a pamphlet and a deadline. “You can’t enroll in high school until you’re 18,” the worker said, as if education were a reward for surviving childhood. I was homeless at 17, couch-surfing with strippers and dealers who taught me the only currency the world accepted from girls like me: skin and secrets.

At 18, I danced under purple lights at Déjà Vu, counting singles sticky with beer and shame. I moved weight on the side—pills, weed, whatever kept the rent paid and the nightmares quiet. I had two daughters in quick succession: Ava at 20, Lily at 22. I swore I’d be the mother I never had. I read them Goodnight Moon in a studio apartment that smelled like Febreze and fried onions. I kissed their bruises before they ever had any.

Then the diagnosis came: borderline personality disorder. The psychiatrist prescribed nothing—just therapy I couldn’t afford. I self-medicated with whatever numbed the static in my brain. One night I nodded off with a lit cigarette; the complex called DCS. They took Ava and Lily the next morning. “Unstable environment,” the report read. “Mother non-compliant with treatment.”

Guess where they placed them? My father’s house. The same man who once whipped me until I passed out. The same stepmom who smiled while I bled. When I screamed at the caseworker—“He beat me! He let my cousins rape me!”—she flipped through the file and asked, “Who is he again?”

I clawed my way to supervised visits. Once a month in a beige DCS room that smelled like bleach and broken promises. Elijah—now 6—wasn’t supposed to be there; adoption is final. But his adoptive mom, the Bureau director’s wife, brought him anyway. “He asked for you,” she said, eyes soft with something that might’ve been pity or guilt.

He ran to me like I’d never left, all gap-toothed grin and sticky fingers. Wrapped his arms around my neck and whispered, “I saved my allowance.” From his pocket he pulled a necklace: a tiny silver medal of the Virgin Mary, the kind sold at Catholic gift shops for ninety-nine cents. “So you’ll always know I’m near your heart,” he said, echoing the prayer card the nuns gave him at school. “Mary had a baby without sin. You had me without a daddy who stayed. That means we’re both special.”

I sobbed so hard the caseworker threatened to end the visit. But I felt it—the first crack in the concrete around my soul. That medal wasn’t jewelry. It was absolution. A child’s theology declaring me worthy when every system had branded me trash.

I wear it every day now, under whatever T-shirt I can afford. I got clean at 25—90 days in a church basement that didn’t care about my past, just my presence. I’m studying for my GED at the library, one earbud in for flashcards, the other listening for sirens that never come for girls like me. I petitioned the court to reopen Elijah’s case—new evidence, they call it. The abuse reports that “disappeared” in 2009? Found in a mislabeled box during an audit. My cousins—now grown, one in prison for assault, the other a youth leader—finally face questions. My father’s church board put him on leave pending investigation. The stepmom’s Facebook is private now.

Ava and Lily’s case is in limbo. The judge ordered psych evals for everyone—including my father. The evaluator’s preliminary report: Children exhibit fear responses to paternal grandfather. For the first time, someone wrote it down.

People ask how I keep going. I tell them about the necklace. About the boy who sees saints where the world saw stains. About the night I danced topless for rent money but still tucked my daughters in with lullabies. About the God who let a 6-year-old smuggle grace across a conference table in a plastic bead pouch.

I survived what was meant to destroy me. I birthed life from violation—three times. I turned scars into stories, silence into subpoenas. The system discarded me, but I’m building a bridge back with every GED class, every 12-step meeting, every petition filed pro se in the county clerk’s office.

This isn’t just a story of motherhood lost and fought for. It’s proof that trauma doesn’t get the last word. That a child’s ninety-nine-cent medal can outweigh a lifetime of million-dollar lies. That the Virgin Mary—conceived without sin—smiles on mothers conceived in violence who still choose love.

I’m Kayla Monroe. I was beaten, raped, trafficked, and erased. But I’m still here. And I’m still his mother.