For all of you kindly folk who have been supportive. I posted Rememberance of My Birth as my way of acknowledging the day but also to remember that Andrea would likely not exist at all but for the love of my sister and how I believe God used the devotion of a little boy to protect his best friend. We survived brutality and pain, and grew up, maybe marred and damaged, but never alone and never without love. That continues today as I face the implications and aftermath of that pain, but not without hope and certainly not without friends like yourself.

Addenda - Please forgive me for failing to include this; I was crying, as we often do, while I was writing it. My mother was abused as a child, and spent much of her life an angry, almost bitter woman. Her own father walked up to her and two of her four siblings when she was about eleven or twelve and said to them, "You are not my children." She married my dad after a period of rebellion, I suppose.