Seasons of Change, Part II: Another Blow
When History Repeats Itself (2022)
By 2022, I thought I had already lived through the unthinkable and carried the weight of what healing required. But life doesn’t always give you just one breaking point.
Early that year, one of my other daughters was sexually abused over a period of time at a playground just outside our home on a military installation by another military child. The incident was devastating on its own, but it happened during a season when my then-spouse and I were working with a military counselor to help us heal as parents and partners. That counselor had advised us to stop being “such hover parents” and to let the kids play outside without our supervision.
To face that kind of devastation once was unbearable. To face it again with another child felt almost impossible, like living inside a nightmare on repeat.
The Second Report
This time, I called my other daughter’s therapist first to figure out how to approach things differently, to see if maybe I wasn’t living this nightmare all over again. Maybe this time, justice and healing wouldn’t feel like a distant fantasy.
After that conversation, I took my daughter to the Law Enforcement Desk to file a report. From there, she and I were sent to OSI, and then I sat in a conference room with 18 military representatives, all working to devise a safety plan. Eventually, we made our way to the forensic interview, and then the investigation went underway.
It was a similar process as before, but this time with a child who could verbalize her trauma.
And this time, I made a conscious choice: to believe her fully.
To not analyze, minimize, or second-guess what she said or what pain it caused her.
To trust her experience and stand beside her, even when the truth was unbearable.
The grief hit differently. It wasn’t just heartbreak for my daughter; it was the crushing weight of déjà vu, the rage of history repeating itself, and the ache of wondering how much more our family could endure within the active-duty military community.
This was supposed to be a season of healing, not a repeat.
I questioned everything: my strength as a woman, as a mother, the systems that were supposed to protect my children, and whether healing was even possible in the environment we were in.
Personal Reckoning
While navigating that crisis, other parts of my life were unraveling. The ground beneath me felt unstable all over again. It was as if every layer of my world was being stripped back at once, forcing me to decide what I was going to stand on.
That experience stirred up my own trauma as a survivor of childhood sexual assault. It pushed me into trauma therapy for myself, a topic I had avoided in the first round of trauma therapy after nearly dying in 2015.
In therapy, I learned how to hold both of my daughters’ experiences and my own. This wasn’t a fight I could wage externally; it was internal work. The same work I was asking my daughters to do - accepting, processing, and building a new foundation from their pain I finally allowed myself to do too.
Defining Resilience
Here’s what I learned in that season:
Resilience doesn’t mean bouncing back quickly or neatly.
Resilience means standing in the middle of the mess, with all the cracks showing, and saying,
“This will not break me. I will rise again.”
2022 became the year I stopped waiting for life to get easier and started deciding that no matter how hard it got, I would not back down.
Not for my children.
Not for myself.
Not for the truth.
A Life-Altering Decision
Later that year, after countless conversations with my therapist and honest talks with a chaplain, I made a life-altering decision: to end my 17½-year marriage to the person I had spent 98% of my adulthood with.
The divorce was civil, mutually agreed upon, and finalized in just 63 business days. Not once did I ever imagine that I’d drive to the courthouse with my then-spouse, file divorce paperwork, and then go get breakfast together afterward as if it were just another day.
I chose to walk away with minimal possessions, limited financial resources, and only the rights that mattered most - the ones that would allow me to protect my daughters if they were ever to experience something like that again within the military community. That was by choice. Because I wasn’t choosing to fight over what was broken, I was choosing to build something new.
That season was disorienting and painful, like being shoved into a new life before I could catch my breath.
But here’s the truth: when you have no choice but to keep going, you discover that surviving isn’t weakness.
It’s courage in motion.
Next in the series: Seasons of Change, Part III: 2023 — Choosing to Rebuild
