When The Lights Went Out.. (the first time)

I didn’t know I was center stage until the curtain fell.
I didn’t know it was a performance until the audience vanished.

The first time I realized everything was going to change was when I stood in the wreckage of my own life, surrounded by people who loved the story but never checked on the one who lived it.

They came for the tragedy. They whispered about the weight I was carrying but never offered to lift it. They wanted me to mourn like it was a scene to be remembered. And when the services ended, they returned to their homes… while I returned to an empty one.

I was thirty years old with two young boys. One of them asking every few minutes, “Where’s my daddy?” And all I had to give him was: Daddy died.

Diapers. Grief. Silence. Sadness. That was my stage.

That’s when it shifted. When I stopped expecting the crowd to stay. When I realized most people come to see if you’ll fall apart, but not to hold you if you do.

There are years behind these words. The exhaustion of constantly being watched, while no one truly saw me. The impossible tightrope walk between modest enough, mother enough, faithful enough… and somehow always too much. Too present. Too blonde. Too quiet. Too visible. Too unhealed to be holy, but too strong to break.

I carried both pain and purpose, and I showed up anyway. I never fit their category, their definition, their box.

Because love isn’t measured in the spotlight… It’s measured in who stays when the lights go out.

AND that is something rarer than most realize.

“Rarer than holy water in a frat house”… (yes, I make things. Healing through humor..like your mom did when she made you. ) Hoodie available in the shop :)

C. Swearingen