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Welcome back to Uny Race with Trish Lacey.
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I'm the author of Erase in My Home, and this is where we tell the truth about things people don't always see.
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The pain behind family photos, fresh starts, beautiful homes, and relationships that look perfectly fine from the outside.
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Tonight's story begins in Atlanta.
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So before I take you there, I need to remind you how we got there.
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Because Atlanta was not the beginning of the fracture.
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It was what happened after I had already survived too much to call it just a rough patch, right?
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I love this man through move after move, promise after promise, and version after version of the truth.
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We had lived, we started in Virginia, moved to Chicago from Chicago to North Carolina, and every city seemed to come with a different woman.
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So in Virginia, if you read the book, you recall, there were naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend on his phone.
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In Chicago, there was Tiffany Milestane, the woman he pursued while we were still together, of course.
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And then in North Carolina, there was Natalie.
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And so every move was supposed to be a fresh start, but every city revealed another secret.
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And somehow, after the lies, after the women, after the evidence, after the conversations that never gave me the full truth, I still had hope.
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I hoped.
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Betrayal doesn't always make you leave immediately.
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Sometimes betrayal makes you hope harder.
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You think now that everything's out in the open, maybe he'll finally change.
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You think a new place might give you a clean sleep, a new home, a new job, new routines, a new version of the person you love, but a new address cannot fix a man who refuses to face himself.
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And Atlanta would teach me that in a way that I could never unlearn.
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Um, because I did not move to Atlanta with him.
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I left first.
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I took my daughter and went to Atlanta because I needed space.
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I needed quiet.
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I needed to get far enough away from the pain to hear my own thoughts again.
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And it was at that point I spent so much time trying to figure him out that I didn't recognize myself anymore.
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I was exhausted from being a detective in my own marriage, exhausted from trying to prove what I already knew, exhausted from constantly wondering whether or not I was overreacting, being too emotional, asking too many questions, or simply just saying the truth before he was ready to admit it.
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So I left.
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Not because I had every detail figured out, not because I was suddenly fearless, I needed to just breathe.
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And then he followed me to Atlanta.
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A part of me was scared because I knew this pattern.
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I knew his pattern.
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I knew what it felt like when he made major decisions without me, then expected me to live with the consequences.
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But another part of me wanted to believe that this meant something different this time.
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Like maybe he was fighting for us.
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Maybe he finally understood what he was about to lose.
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Maybe he was choosing me, choosing our daughter, choosing our family.
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And that's what makes these decisions so complicated.
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When someone's hurt you, their effort can feel like love.
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Even when it comes without accountability, even when it comes without a real plan, even when it comes without the safety you actually need, you still have hope.
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So we ended up staying with some friends as I moved out of my stepmother's house, obviously, when he decided to move to Atlanta.
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And we ended up staying with some friends while we prepared to move into a home of our own.
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And they welcomed us into their home with such kindness.
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Um, it was fun.
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There were dinners around the table, coffee in the mornings, conversations in the kitchen.
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Um, my daughter had her own room there.
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I mean, we had a safe place to land.
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And from the outside, I'm sure we looked fine, maybe even happy.
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Honestly, don't know what our friends thought.
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I can't speak for what they saw, but I do know what I lived, and I know he knew how to make things look good around other people.
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He could be extremely charming, helpful, very attentive, extremely calm.
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He could play the role of the man people expected him to be.
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And that's one of the loneliest parts of living through emotional abuse because the person hurting you can be so good to everyone else that you begin to wonder whether anyone would ever believe you.
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They see the pleasant conversations, they see the helpful husband, they see the family eating dinner together, they don't see what happens after the door closes, they don't see you trying to choose your words carefully so you don't trigger an argument.
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Um, they don't see the tension rising in your body.
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They don't see you laying in the bed at night trying to decide whether you are safe enough to trust what you think is peace in that moment.
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And maybe the truth is what is I was trying to believe that performance too, right?
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I wanted it to be real, I wanted everything to be okay.
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So then the day came when we were supposed to move into our home in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
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I had taken that day off work, I had hired a moving company to help us move all of our things out of storage.
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We had like a big pod at the time.
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Boxes were everywhere, furniture was being carried in.
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It was supposed to be one of those big, beautiful days.
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Our home, our first start.
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Our proof that we made it through.
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And later that morning, he showed up at the house, the new house.
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Y'all, he told me he quit his job.
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Just like that.
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No warning beforehand, no conversation, no planning.
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I remember standing there being super confused.
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We were standing in the middle of this new home we were supposedly building together, and he was telling me he just made a decision that would affect every part of our lives.
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So he told me his manager had disrespected him.
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He said he wouldn't allow another man to speak to him that way.
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And I understand one to respect.
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But what I couldn't understand was why he didn't think that I deserved a conversation.
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Why he did not think I deserved to be included in a decision that would change our financial stability, our home, our daughter's life, like everything.
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Right?
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So we still moved in, but financially it was hard.
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And emotionally, it felt like abandonment all over again because it was never just one decision, it was the pattern.
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He made choices and I carried the impact.
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He reacted, I recalculated, he walked away from responsibility, and I tried to make the life that he left behind work anyway.
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And even on the day that I was supposed to feel safe, supported, and excited about our future, I find I found myself standing in a new house, wondering whether I was about to have to save us again.
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That is not partnership, that's survival.
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But for a while, we moved into the house, and Lanham gave us routines, a home, a sense of normalcy, uh a chance for us to pretend the worst was behind us, right?
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Um, but eventually he told me he was tired of Georgia.
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He said it was the traffic, the city.
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He wanted water, he wanted to be near the ocean, he wanted to fish.
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So he wanted to move to Florida.
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And once again, there was no deep conversation about the life we built, no real consideration of our daughter's stability, no shared plan, just another place he believed that would make him feel different.
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And but I had learned by then, right?
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Some people are always searching for a new city because they refuse to confront what they carry inside themselves.
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So at that time, I had a job.
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I traveled quite a bit.
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My parents are coming in and out of um Atlanta to help us out with our baby for a while as well.
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So as long as the city we moved to or the state had an airport, I was fine.
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And luckily, you know, the area we moved to had three airports: West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami.
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I was good.
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So we moved to Florida, and from the outside, Florida looked like paradise.
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Palm trees, the ocean, sunsets, blue skies, amazing.
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Um, I love seeing my daughter's little feet in sand.
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The kind of life people look online and think they have it all.
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But I learned something there.
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You can live near the ocean and still feel like you're drowning.
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And in Florida, I began to grow.
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I found more purpose.
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I worked hard, I earned opportunities, I was recognized, I was promoted.
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At work, I was seen.
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My voice mattered, my ideas mattered.
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I was really truly becoming the woman I had spent so many years shrinking away from.
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And instead of being proud of me, he started resenting me.
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The woman he said he once loved for being so driven, independent, strong, became the very woman he seemed to resent.
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There were comments, little digs dressed up as jokes, um, a shift in his energy whenever something good happened for me.
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A feeling like my success was somehow an insult to him.
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I remember winning an award once.
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I was so excited about, and I came home to share this exciting news.
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And he looked at me and said, What's for dinner?
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Like those are the types of things that I would encounter just based on just how great I was doing at work professionally.
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So I've started trying to make myself smaller.
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I celebrated quietly, I softened my voice, I tried not to talk too much about work.
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I tried to dim myself so he would not feel threatened by my light.
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But I was changing, I was beginning to remember myself.
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And once you start remembering who you are, it becomes harder to keep pretending that being diminished is love.
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So then there's this part of the story that really is, it still breaks my heart to talk about it.
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The part about being a stepmother.
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Because before, long before Florida, long before I had my, I gave birth to my own daughter.
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His older daughter had lived in, had lived with us in Chicago.
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Um, I met her when she was a preteen.
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Um, but then when she was a teenager, she moved in with us in Chicago and she was still growing, still figuring out who she was, still needing stability, still needing someone to see her.
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And I loved her as if she were mine.
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That's what you're supposed to do.
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I had great examples of stepparents in my life.
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Like my stepfather, my mom's an excellent stepmother.
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I have an excellent stepmother as well, um, the wife that my father married.
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So I had nothing but great examples, and that's all I wanted to be.
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So I didn't just tolerate her presence in our home.
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I literally poured into her.
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Um, at that time, I worked at a university.
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I brought her with me.
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I walked her through the halls, introduced her to professors, I showed her what was possible.
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I sat with her through the college application and interview process, line by line until the day she got accepted.
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And when she did, I was proud, so proud.
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Because I wanted her to know that her future could be bigger than whatever pain she had already lived through.
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At home, we built little routines, grocery runs.
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We had late car rides, inside jokes.
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Um, I bought what she needed, made sure she had what she needed.
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I wanted her to feel like she belonged, like she mattered, like she had a home.
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And I'm not gonna sit here and say everything was perfect because it wasn't, but I absolutely tried to make sure she felt like she was at home.
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But even then, there were wounds I couldn't fix.
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Her relationship with her father was difficult.
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Um, there were arguments, shouting matches, even, pain that existed long before I entered the picture.
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And I often found myself standing in the middle, trying to hold two people to together who did not know how to even love each other without hurting each other.
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And eventually she left.
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The conflict with her father became too much, and she went back to where she lived, and she did not make it even a year with us, and life moved forward.
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She grew up, she became a mother, I became a mother, our lives drifted apart until many, many, many years later, she found her way back into our lives.
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So when she reached out again, I saw it as a second chance for her, for her father, and at the time she had, well, she still does, for her little boy, for my daughter as well, for all of us.
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Her father wasn't particularly interested in rebuilding that relationship in the in the beginning.
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He remembered the conflicts, he remembered the fights, the hurt, and he had already decided that that was enough.
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But I really thought it thought about that differently.
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I believe in second chances, and I truly believe in family.
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Anyone who knows me knows that that's the most important thing to me is family.
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I believe that love could heal what pain had broken.
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I believe that my daughter deserves to know her sister.
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I believe that she deserved to grow up close to her nephew.
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I believe that her son deserves stability.
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I believed, maybe foolishly, that this would help repair the relationship that was fractured between her and her father.
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So I opened the door, I extended the invitation, and I made that happen.
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I enrolled her son in school alongside with my daughter.
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So they went to the same school.
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I dropped them off together.
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So they were like probably two years apart in age.
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Picked them up together, managed lunches, homework, schedules, routines, all of it.
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Dinner time.
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I try to create the kind of family I always wanted us to be.
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And in the beginning, it felt hopeful.
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My daughter, in the beginning, really adored her nephew.
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There were shared meals, there were visits, phone calls, there was lots of laughter in our house.
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Um the little boy, he was very bright, very curious, um, just you know, just rambunctious.
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He had the energy that fills a room when he entered it, right?
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And I opened my heart to both of them fully and completely, as did my family.
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I would say that speaking for my mom and my my dad and my sister, who all lived in Florida at the time as well.
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Um, we all opened our hearts to them fully.
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But what started as light slowly began to cast shadows.
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And because while my husband poured his attention into his grandson, my daughter received absence.
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Silence, excuses, a father-size-shaped emptiness, like is what she experiences.
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He gave his grandson tenderness, like pride, like patience.
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He laughed with him, played with him, celebrated him, praised him.
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And my daughter watched him show up for that little boy in ways that she spent her whole life wishing he would show up for her.
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And one night she asked me, Why is he not like that with me?
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He's daddy's favorite.
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Like, there are just some questions a child should never have to ask, in my opinion.
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And there are some questions the mother can't answer without her own heartbreaking, right?
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So, how do you explain to your daughter that someone else is receiving love does not mean she's unworthy of it?
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How do you explain that her father's inability to love evenly has absolutely nothing to do with her?
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How do you protect your child from the wound created by the very person who's supposed to help her feel safe?
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Like I had no answer that could make it make sense.
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None, I mean, nothing that could undo what she felt, right?
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Nothing that could erase the way she started to see herself invisible.
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And that's when something inside of me shifted because I had spent years trying to survive what was happening to me.
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Now I could see it was reaching my daughter.
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She was carrying the tension, she was noticing the silence, she was watching love become conditional in her own home.
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And I couldn't I couldn't keep telling her that staying was protecting her, right?
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Not when she was learning what it looked like from a for a woman to disappear in front of everyone else that she loved.
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Florida was supposed to be a dream.
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Instead, it started being like a nightmare.
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Um, the ocean was endless, the sky was super blue and beautiful.
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The house really did look like a fresh start.
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But inside, love had become so brittle, conditional, fractured, and I began to understand something I didn't want to admit.
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Paradise is not a place.
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Paradise is peace.
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And no matter how close I lived to the ocean, I didn't have it.
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Not yet.
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I did not know then exactly how this story was gonna end.
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I didn't know how much more I would have to lose before I would finally have to choose myself.
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But I knew the warning was no longer whispering, it was echoing.
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Every secret, every move, every woman, every time I was expected to carry the weight of his choices, every time my daughter was made to feel unseen, it was all leading to one truth.
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I could not save a home by sacrificing myself inside of it.
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So there's more to this story.
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But I will leave you with this step-parenting is not for the weak.
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It's not.
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But I commend all step parents so much love and adoration there, and stay strong.
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Next episode, I'm taking you into the moment, the illusion finally shattered.
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The disrespect, the confrontations, the choice he demanded, and the night I realized I could not return to a home where I was expected to become invisible until then.
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Keep healing, keep becoming, and remember you were never erased.
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See you next week.
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Yeah, I came back.
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Welcome back to Uny Race with Trish Lacey.
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I'm the author of Erase in My Home, and this is where we tell the truth about things people don't always see.
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The pain behind family photos, fresh starts, beautiful homes, and relationships that look perfectly fine from the outside.
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Tonight's story begins in Atlanta.
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So before I take you there, I need to remind you how we got there.
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Because Atlanta was not the beginning of the fracture.
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It was what happened after I had already survived too much to call it just a rough patch, right?
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I love this man through move after move, promise after promise, and version after version of the truth.
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We had lived, we started in Virginia, moved to Chicago from Chicago to North Carolina, and every city seemed to come with a different woman.
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So in Virginia, if you read the book, you recall, there were naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend on his phone.
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In Chicago, there was Tiffany Milestane, the woman he pursued while we were still together, of course.
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And then in North Carolina, there was Natalie.
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And so every move was supposed to be a fresh start, but every city revealed another secret.
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And somehow, after the lies, after the women, after the evidence, after the conversations that never gave me the full truth, I still had hope.
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I hoped.
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Betrayal doesn't always make you leave immediately.
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Sometimes betrayal makes you hope harder.
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You think now that everything's out in the open, maybe he'll finally change.
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You think a new place might give you a clean sleep, a new home, a new job, new routines, a new version of the person you love, but a new address cannot fix a man who refuses to face himself.
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And Atlanta would teach me that in a way that I could never unlearn.
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Um, because I did not move to Atlanta with him.
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I left first.
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I took my daughter and went to Atlanta because I needed space.
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I needed quiet.
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I needed to get far enough away from the pain to hear my own thoughts again.
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And it was at that point I spent so much time trying to figure him out that I didn't recognize myself anymore.
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I was exhausted from being a detective in my own marriage, exhausted from trying to prove what I already knew, exhausted from constantly wondering whether or not I was overreacting, being too emotional, asking too many questions, or simply just saying the truth before he was ready to admit it.
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So I left.
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Not because I had every detail figured out, not because I was suddenly fearless, I needed to just breathe.
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And then he followed me to Atlanta.
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A part of me was scared because I knew this pattern.
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I knew his pattern.
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I knew what it felt like when he made major decisions without me, then expected me to live with the consequences.
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But another part of me wanted to believe that this meant something different this time.
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Like maybe he was fighting for us.
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Maybe he finally understood what he was about to lose.
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Maybe he was choosing me, choosing our daughter, choosing our family.
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And that's what makes these decisions so complicated.
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When someone's hurt you, their effort can feel like love.
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Even when it comes without accountability, even when it comes without a real plan, even when it comes without the safety you actually need, you still have hope.
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So we ended up staying with some friends as I moved out of my stepmother's house, obviously, when he decided to move to Atlanta.
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And we ended up staying with some friends while we prepared to move into a home of our own.
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And they welcomed us into their home with such kindness.
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Um, it was fun.
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There were dinners around the table, coffee in the mornings, conversations in the kitchen.
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Um, my daughter had her own room there.
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I mean, we had a safe place to land.
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And from the outside, I'm sure we looked fine, maybe even happy.
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Honestly, don't know what our friends thought.
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I can't speak for what they saw, but I do know what I lived, and I know he knew how to make things look good around other people.
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He could be extremely charming, helpful, very attentive, extremely calm.
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He could play the role of the man people expected him to be.
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And that's one of the loneliest parts of living through emotional abuse because the person hurting you can be so good to everyone else that you begin to wonder whether anyone would ever believe you.
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They see the pleasant conversations, they see the helpful husband, they see the family eating dinner together, they don't see what happens after the door closes, they don't see you trying to choose your words carefully so you don't trigger an argument.
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Um, they don't see the tension rising in your body.
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They don't see you laying in the bed at night trying to decide whether you are safe enough to trust what you think is peace in that moment.
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And maybe the truth is what is I was trying to believe that performance too, right?
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I wanted it to be real, I wanted everything to be okay.
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So then the day came when we were supposed to move into our home in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
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I had taken that day off work, I had hired a moving company to help us move all of our things out of storage.
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We had like a big pod at the time.
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Boxes were everywhere, furniture was being carried in.
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It was supposed to be one of those big, beautiful days.
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Our home, our first start.
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Our proof that we made it through.
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And later that morning, he showed up at the house, the new house.
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Y'all, he told me he quit his job.
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Just like that.
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No warning beforehand, no conversation, no planning.
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I remember standing there being super confused.
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We were standing in the middle of this new home we were supposedly building together, and he was telling me he just made a decision that would affect every part of our lives.
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So he told me his manager had disrespected him.
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He said he wouldn't allow another man to speak to him that way.
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And I understand one to respect.
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But what I couldn't understand was why he didn't think that I deserved a conversation.
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Why he did not think I deserved to be included in a decision that would change our financial stability, our home, our daughter's life, like everything.
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Right?
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So we still moved in, but financially it was hard.
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And emotionally, it felt like abandonment all over again because it was never just one decision, it was the pattern.
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He made choices and I carried the impact.
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He reacted, I recalculated, he walked away from responsibility, and I tried to make the life that he left behind work anyway.
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And even on the day that I was supposed to feel safe, supported, and excited about our future, I find I found myself standing in a new house, wondering whether I was about to have to save us again.
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That is not partnership, that's survival.
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But for a while, we moved into the house, and Lanham gave us routines, a home, a sense of normalcy, uh a chance for us to pretend the worst was behind us, right?
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Um, but eventually he told me he was tired of Georgia.
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He said it was the traffic, the city.
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He wanted water, he wanted to be near the ocean, he wanted to fish.
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So he wanted to move to Florida.
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And once again, there was no deep conversation about the life we built, no real consideration of our daughter's stability, no shared plan, just another place he believed that would make him feel different.
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And but I had learned by then, right?
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Some people are always searching for a new city because they refuse to confront what they carry inside themselves.
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So at that time, I had a job.
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I traveled quite a bit.
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My parents are coming in and out of um Atlanta to help us out with our baby for a while as well.
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So as long as the city we moved to or the state had an airport, I was fine.
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And luckily, you know, the area we moved to had three airports: West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami.
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I was good.
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So we moved to Florida, and from the outside, Florida looked like paradise.
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Palm trees, the ocean, sunsets, blue skies, amazing.
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Um, I love seeing my daughter's little feet in sand.
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The kind of life people look online and think they have it all.
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But I learned something there.
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You can live near the ocean and still feel like you're drowning.
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And in Florida, I began to grow.
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I found more purpose.
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I worked hard, I earned opportunities, I was recognized, I was promoted.
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At work, I was seen.
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My voice mattered, my ideas mattered.
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I was really truly becoming the woman I had spent so many years shrinking away from.
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And instead of being proud of me, he started resenting me.
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The woman he said he once loved for being so driven, independent, strong, became the very woman he seemed to resent.
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There were comments, little digs dressed up as jokes, um, a shift in his energy whenever something good happened for me.
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A feeling like my success was somehow an insult to him.
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I remember winning an award once.
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I was so excited about, and I came home to share this exciting news.
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And he looked at me and said, What's for dinner?
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Like those are the types of things that I would encounter just based on just how great I was doing at work professionally.
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So I've started trying to make myself smaller.
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I celebrated quietly, I softened my voice, I tried not to talk too much about work.
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I tried to dim myself so he would not feel threatened by my light.
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But I was changing, I was beginning to remember myself.
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And once you start remembering who you are, it becomes harder to keep pretending that being diminished is love.
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So then there's this part of the story that really is, it still breaks my heart to talk about it.
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The part about being a stepmother.
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Because before, long before Florida, long before I had my, I gave birth to my own daughter.
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His older daughter had lived in, had lived with us in Chicago.
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Um, I met her when she was a preteen.
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Um, but then when she was a teenager, she moved in with us in Chicago and she was still growing, still figuring out who she was, still needing stability, still needing someone to see her.
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And I loved her as if she were mine.
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That's what you're supposed to do.
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I had great examples of stepparents in my life.
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Like my stepfather, my mom's an excellent stepmother.
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I have an excellent stepmother as well, um, the wife that my father married.
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So I had nothing but great examples, and that's all I wanted to be.
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So I didn't just tolerate her presence in our home.
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I literally poured into her.
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Um, at that time, I worked at a university.
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I brought her with me.
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I walked her through the halls, introduced her to professors, I showed her what was possible.
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I sat with her through the college application and interview process, line by line until the day she got accepted.
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And when she did, I was proud, so proud.
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Because I wanted her to know that her future could be bigger than whatever pain she had already lived through.
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At home, we built little routines, grocery runs.
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We had late car rides, inside jokes.
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Um, I bought what she needed, made sure she had what she needed.
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I wanted her to feel like she belonged, like she mattered, like she had a home.
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And I'm not gonna sit here and say everything was perfect because it wasn't, but I absolutely tried to make sure she felt like she was at home.
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But even then, there were wounds I couldn't fix.
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Her relationship with her father was difficult.
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Um, there were arguments, shouting matches, even, pain that existed long before I entered the picture.
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And I often found myself standing in the middle, trying to hold two people to together who did not know how to even love each other without hurting each other.
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And eventually she left.
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The conflict with her father became too much, and she went back to where she lived, and she did not make it even a year with us, and life moved forward.
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She grew up, she became a mother, I became a mother, our lives drifted apart until many, many, many years later, she found her way back into our lives.
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So when she reached out again, I saw it as a second chance for her, for her father, and at the time she had, well, she still does, for her little boy, for my daughter as well, for all of us.
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Her father wasn't particularly interested in rebuilding that relationship in the in the beginning.
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He remembered the conflicts, he remembered the fights, the hurt, and he had already decided that that was enough.
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But I really thought it thought about that differently.
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I believe in second chances, and I truly believe in family.
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Anyone who knows me knows that that's the most important thing to me is family.
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I believe that love could heal what pain had broken.
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I believe that my daughter deserves to know her sister.
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I believe that she deserved to grow up close to her nephew.
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I believe that her son deserves stability.
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I believed, maybe foolishly, that this would help repair the relationship that was fractured between her and her father.
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So I opened the door, I extended the invitation, and I made that happen.
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I enrolled her son in school alongside with my daughter.
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So they went to the same school.
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I dropped them off together.
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So they were like probably two years apart in age.
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Picked them up together, managed lunches, homework, schedules, routines, all of it.
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Dinner time.
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I try to create the kind of family I always wanted us to be.
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And in the beginning, it felt hopeful.
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My daughter, in the beginning, really adored her nephew.
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There were shared meals, there were visits, phone calls, there was lots of laughter in our house.
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Um the little boy, he was very bright, very curious, um, just you know, just rambunctious.
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He had the energy that fills a room when he entered it, right?
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And I opened my heart to both of them fully and completely, as did my family.
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I would say that speaking for my mom and my my dad and my sister, who all lived in Florida at the time as well.
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Um, we all opened our hearts to them fully.
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But what started as light slowly began to cast shadows.
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And because while my husband poured his attention into his grandson, my daughter received absence.
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Silence, excuses, a father-size-shaped emptiness, like is what she experiences.
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He gave his grandson tenderness, like pride, like patience.
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He laughed with him, played with him, celebrated him, praised him.
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And my daughter watched him show up for that little boy in ways that she spent her whole life wishing he would show up for her.
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And one night she asked me, Why is he not like that with me?
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He's daddy's favorite.
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Like, there are just some questions a child should never have to ask, in my opinion.
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And there are some questions the mother can't answer without her own heartbreaking, right?
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So, how do you explain to your daughter that someone else is receiving love does not mean she's unworthy of it?
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How do you explain that her father's inability to love evenly has absolutely nothing to do with her?
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How do you protect your child from the wound created by the very person who's supposed to help her feel safe?
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Like I had no answer that could make it make sense.
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None, I mean, nothing that could undo what she felt, right?
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Nothing that could erase the way she started to see herself invisible.
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And that's when something inside of me shifted because I had spent years trying to survive what was happening to me.
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Now I could see it was reaching my daughter.
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She was carrying the tension, she was noticing the silence, she was watching love become conditional in her own home.
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And I couldn't I couldn't keep telling her that staying was protecting her, right?
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Not when she was learning what it looked like from a for a woman to disappear in front of everyone else that she loved.
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Florida was supposed to be a dream.
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Instead, it started being like a nightmare.
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Um, the ocean was endless, the sky was super blue and beautiful.
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The house really did look like a fresh start.
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But inside, love had become so brittle, conditional, fractured, and I began to understand something I didn't want to admit.
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Paradise is not a place.
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Paradise is peace.
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And no matter how close I lived to the ocean, I didn't have it.
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Not yet.
00:18:56.480 --> 00:19:02.319
I did not know then exactly how this story was gonna end.
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I didn't know how much more I would have to lose before I would finally have to choose myself.
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But I knew the warning was no longer whispering, it was echoing.
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Every secret, every move, every woman, every time I was expected to carry the weight of his choices, every time my daughter was made to feel unseen, it was all leading to one truth.
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I could not save a home by sacrificing myself inside of it.
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So there's more to this story.
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But I will leave you with this step-parenting is not for the weak.
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It's not.
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But I commend all step parents so much love and adoration there, and stay strong.
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Next episode, I'm taking you into the moment, the illusion finally shattered.
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The disrespect, the confrontations, the choice he demanded, and the night I realized I could not return to a home where I was expected to become invisible until then.
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Keep healing, keep becoming, and remember you were never erased.
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See you next week.
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Yeah, I came back.
