I feel her. The skinny backbones of the silent, downtrodden kid. It’s not my daughter’s young frame who I have my arms around, when I look at her face, it is mine, darker, rounder, and with a halo of curls surrounding it. The darkness in her gaze tells me everything, she knows a bleakness that my daughter thankfully does not. 

I feel her sadness, her helplessness. In mine. The child who nobody wanted, she had so much life to give. I feel her go down to my root and she is my lifeforce, Eve, buried deep down. I named my daughter after her as A Way Back — a Protection for her young life, and a commitment from mine. Eve is the state of the lifeforce of all women, forced into servitude, our true power and magnitude hidden and quashed beneath the surface. The world doesn’t even know us, we don’t even know us. Not in our True Form. Yet.

The girl who embodied my lifeforce was crushed. The things we allow parents to do are egregious. Hit their child and leave them to cry. It would end any other relationship. The two of you would never speak again. It is criminal but not prosecuted at this level. 

And I have known since I was four years old that I would need to leave. After I had already split myself in two and put my entire emotional self underneath the surface – the expression of everything I felt and that mattered and that I am. After I locked myself in that cage, it kept happening, the abuse, I knew there was no stopping it and I would have to leave.

And that is the first time I tried. I packed a tiny duffel. I put clothes and things in, trying to think of all I would need. I found that the trees were not enough to protect me, I would not survive, I was too young. And I put the idea of leaving away realizing as the world spun out from under me, there was no way out.

My experience by four years old was that of wave after wave crashing down on me that would never stop. It crushed me. Crushed my Spirit, crushed my lifeforce. Until one day I got out.

My entire childhood I lived with the awareness under the surface that this thing between my family and I was wrong, was affecting me gravely, and was coloring the way I saw the world as I grew and learned about it. It morphed and followed me as I got older, changing, intensifying, solidifying but never so solid as the break in my heart. I survived by burying myself down deep inside so it appeared that no one was home. I did what I was told.

Until I was knocked out, broken apart by a force so great it was impossible to deny what had been happening. This force digging down deeper than any human could realistically go brought me to the surface to be reborn. That force was Death. In the form of a car accident. Persephone, Goddess of Death took my hand and brought me down to her underworld. Where I discovered all the unfound parts of me, all the truths and strings of my lineage woven through out, where parts of me that were never allowed to develop and were necessary for my survival were given the room to grow in Her Spring. I went to Persephone’s Home for 8 long years and then I started to come out. 

Lilith, Eve’s predecessor, now has my hand and has been guiding me ever since. She did not need to be kidnapped, she walked out of The Garden with her head held high. I knew this when I was 4, I knew this when I was 35, and in between I never forgot what was wrong. 18 years ago I got into a car accident that changed my life. Today I walk out of The Garden Free.