Sunflowers

When sunflowers are young they grow in the night, and as they mature they follow the sun naturally. One could say their most important stage of growth happens in the darkness of the night.

They have not always been my favorite flower. I actually think they are kind of ugly, but that is the kind of character I look for in things I admire. It was not a thought in my mind until I started to notice that I loved many songs that talked about sunflowers. It became a common theme in my Spotify playlist. So, this led me to do so Googling about what makes these flowers so talked about.

That’s when it hit me: My life mirrors a sunflower’s.

I was in the dark for a long time in my youth. At the age of 13, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. This was the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain as well as unresolved trauma and stress happening at that point in my life. It seemed as though I was the only person seeing a therapist monthly.

I had a dark cloud surrounding my adolescence. From my dad being diagnosed with Leukemia when I was 9, seeing my mom being taken away in an ambulance at 13 and seeing my older brother handcuffed to a hospital bed at 15, there were times I did not think I would ever see the sun again. I could not see that just to the east a bright light was on its way.

The light, finally, came into my life. I did not fully recognize it at first. It confused me. I did not know what it was doing here. I tried to avoid it at first. I was scared. But, there was nowhere to hide from it.

The sun that came into my life as my nieces. Kyla and Kora. K and K. Kyky and Koko. My best friends. The literal lights of my life. I met Kyla when she was 2-weeks-old in 2015 as my brother is not her biological father. Kora came a mere two years later.

At 18 my brother got into a drunken fight at a graduation party. This led to the cops being called and charges being served to my brother. During the time between the trials, he met his ex-wife. She had just had a baby girl two weeks prior to their meeting, her name was Kyla.

It took about a year and a half for the trial to finally come around and by this time my brother had married Kyla’s now pregnant mom. The verdict resulted in the judge sentencing my brother to two years in prison.

At this point, we had almost doubled our family size within two years. As much as I loved them all, I resented them. I hated change and this was the biggest change I have had in my life, and I had no say in any of it happening.

It was not until my brother was released that answers started to fall like light raindrops while the sun is shining. While my brother was away, we cared for the girls. I drove to high school with car seats in my backseat in case I had to go pick them up somewhere or take then with me someplace after school.

As time passed, I fell in love with these two baby girls. As cliche as it sounds, I never knew I could love something so much until they came into my life. They showed me this new light that I had not seen in years.

This all hit me last year. My brother had just been released and there were issues between my brother and his wife at the time. This led to her keeping the girls away from us as punishment. We did not see them for six months. This was spring semester of my sophomore year of college. It was the first time in three years that I found myself once again stuck in the darkness. I did not realize it then, but my light was gone. My sun had been taken away from me and there was not anything I could do to get it back.

Once in that six month period, we got to see Kora. I grabbed her and just held her and cried. She took her little hands and put them in my face, wiped my tears and said, “Jessie, don’t cry, I’m right here.” This two-year-old had no idea what she had just done to me, but I sobbed. It all made sense in that moment. When their mother finally came around six months later, that baby and her older sister brought me out of the dark.

They brought us all out of the dark. Without them, I do not know if my brother would be with us today. They made us a family again after years of being surrounded by the black like being in the woods at the dead of night not knowing which way the danger might come from.

So, this is for you, Kyla and Kora. Thank you for being my lights.