Better Place

There was a time when I believed that by now we would be living in a better place.

💗🌈🕊

Not perfect — just gentler. Kinder. More awake.

🤍✨

I grew up here, in this same small Texas town, in the long shadow of the late eighties and nineties, when we were still told that the future would be brighter, more equal, more understanding than the past. I was young enough to believe that promise. Old enough to feel its cracks.

🌤💔

I was adopted. Born already different. Mentally ill before there was language for it. Taller and heavier than most of my classmates. Queer before I knew the word. A nerd who drifted between goths, skater punks, other races, and even the popular kids — always belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

🖤🛹🌈

I didn’t have language for it then, but I know what I was now — I was a bridge kid.

A child who lived in the in-between.

A child who learned early how to translate pain, hold stories, and keep people connected across lines that were never meant to touch.

🫶🌍🩹

The lunch tables were never where I was called to sit. They were where there was room for my body to exist without complaint. I learned early that space was something you were allowed, not something you were given.

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The hallways were not gentle.

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The bullying was relentless — whispered, shouted, written, laughed at, performed. And when I defended myself, when I reacted like any hurting child would, I was labeled the problem. The troublemaker. The disruption. I learned that being wounded loudly was more punishable than wounding quietly.

🩹😔

And yet — people found me.

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The kids with broken homes. The kids who didn’t fit. The kids who were loved in public and hurting in private. Notes were slipped into my hands during class. Confessions. Secrets. Fear. Loneliness. I still have some of those notes, folded into old boxes like quiet proof that I was trusted long before I ever felt safe.

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I became a keeper of stories before I understood what that meant.

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I remember sitting on the town square with the skater punks, watching boards scrape pavement in the heat. I couldn’t skate well to save my life, but I loved the sport. Loved the culture. Loved the freedom in it. My mom even bought me a custom board — bright and hopeful — as if to say that belonging did not require perfection, only presence.

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I was learning, even then, how to hold space in a hard place.

🌿

There were women who mothered me long before I ever became a mother myself.

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One was part Japanese. One was German. They were not perfect. They were not quiet. They were not gentle in the way people imagine gentleness. But they were steady. They were present. They were the kind of women who taught me that care was something you did with your hands, your kitchen tables, your listening, your boundaries — not just your words.

🫖🪑🫶

They shaped my existence more than they will ever know.

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They taught me that love could cross bloodlines.

That belonging could be chosen.

That dignity did not need permission.

🤎🤍🤍

One of my first boyfriends was a biracial Black boy. Long before the world had a vocabulary for conversations about race, I was already learning what it meant to love across lines that made other people uncomfortable.

💞🌍

I did not grow up colorblind.

I grew up color-aware.

Aware of who was protected.

Aware of who was watched.

Aware of who was forgiven.

Aware of who was feared.

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And yet — there was still crossing.

There was still mixing.

There was still a fragile human web holding us together.

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I believed that web would grow stronger with time.

Instead, it feels thinner.

Louder in its arguments.

Quieter in its compassion.

Sharper in its suspicion.

More willing to speak.

Less willing to listen.

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It turns out this isn’t just something people feel quietly — it’s something that shows up in numbers, too.

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People say things are better now. But across this country, many Black adults — and many Asian, Native, and multiracial families — still report experiencing discrimination, fear, and bias in everyday life. National hate-crime reporting continues to show race- and ethnicity-motivated incidents as a significant portion of recorded hate crimes. Numbers can’t carry grief — but they do show patterns. And the patterns echo what so many people quietly feel.

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Hate still happens.

It just doesn’t always announce itself.

Sometimes it shows up as stories no one wants to finish telling.

Sometimes it shows up as names that fade too quickly from conversations.

Sometimes it shows up as fear that gets passed down without ceremony.

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Now I am a mother here.

🤱

Two years before my youngest was born, I lost a baby.

And then she came — my rainbow child, my miracle.

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Her father was Stanley.

🕯

He should still be here, but she is — and that means something.

Because she did get to know him.

They were close.

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He drove a light blue truck with bright rims and a white Cadillac — both of which became her first vehicles.

Even now, she still carries him forward in the most ordinary, living ways.

🚙🤍💫

His absence is not abstract in our home.

It is memory.

It is love.

It is a name that still matters.

It is a family that still grieves.

It is a presence that shaped her even though his life ended too soon.

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And after what happened, I see the world differently.

A Black man — a soldier — was found dead here not long ago. No clear answers. No clean closure. Talk around town says race and drugs may have been involved. Silence followed quickly. And I know now what silence does. I know how fear grows in the gaps where truth should live.

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My concern is not imagined.

It is earned.

🛑

I am raising two daughters here.

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One is already grown — a young woman who lives in black eyeliner and underground music — goth-leaning, observant, inward, deep.

And one who moves through the world in ponytails, knee pads, and volleyball courts — biracial, athletic, quietly brilliant, a soul who does not want to be a symbol, only a person.

🖤🎧🏐

They are different in every visible way.

But they are alike in the ways that matter most.

They are gentle.

They are thoughtful.

They are sensitive to the emotional weather of rooms.

They feel things before they say them.

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They are more like me than they realize.

They are bridge kids, too.

Children who feel rooms before they speak.

Children who carry gentleness into places that are not always gentle.

Children learning how to belong without being erased.

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Their stories are theirs to tell one day.

Mine is only to guard the ground they grow on.

🛡💗

And I find myself holding both fear and faith in the same hands.

Faith that God still walks near the brokenhearted.

Faith that gentleness is not weakness.

Faith that dignity can still be learned.

Faith that children raised in safety can become safety for others.

🙏🕊

I still believe God stays near the brokenhearted — and that nearness still changes things.

✞🫧

But also the quiet grief of realizing that the world I hoped they would inherit has not softened the way I once believed it would.

The better place is not fully here yet.

🌙

And still — something refuses to die.

It lives in small kitchens.

In folded notes.

In women who mother children who are not theirs.

In kids who cross lines even when it costs them comfort.

In daughters being raised to be human before they are asked to be anything else.

🕯🫶

I am still here because I still believe in that.

Not in perfection.

Not in slogans.

But in the slow, stubborn, relational work of becoming safer — family by family, table by table, heart by heart.

🤍

Somewhere inside me, that teenage girl on the hot pavement still believes:

We were meant for a better place.

And we are still building it —

quietly,

slowly,

and together.

🌈🕊🫶