A Tallahassee mom and state public health worker is featured among eight women who suffered crushing life blows yet struggled back to gratitude and resilience.
In her essay, “Growing Up Without Joy,” Michelle Joy Smith (her adopted and pen name), tells a harrowing story of being loathed as the product of rape and likely incest. She was biracial, adopted by a related biracial family and raised in a toxic stew of verbal, emotional and physical abuse. Her Caucasian mom told her repeatedly, “Your mom didn’t want you neither do I.”
It is difficult to comprehend how any of these eight women find stability, balance and joy after suffering such trauma as child abuse, incest, rape, illness, disability, financial ruin, loss and shame. Yet along the way, they find help and hope to cling to.
For Smith that comes in the person of her older brother, Isaac, her advocate from birth. Yet she opens the story on losing Isaac recently to chronic health issues when they are both adults. Going home to her father and older sister opens the lens further on the decades of mistreatment she has suffered in her own family.