For weeks, my 15-year-old daughter Kayla suffered from constant nausea and stomach pain, hiding inside her oversized hoodie and flinching at every touch. I knew something was horribly wrong, but the doctors kept brushing it off as teenage stress. Then, while washing her laundry, I found a hidden pocket inside her jacket , my blood boiling, and that night, I walked into the faculty dinner holding a baseball bat…
a heavy, suffocating exhaustion that drained the vibrant color from her cheeks. She was slipping away, morphing into a phantom of the girl I had raised.
Kayla had always been a hurricane of light. She was loud, fiercely curious, and possessed a restless, beautiful energy that commanded whatever space she occupied. Her cleats would track mud across my continue reading …