Seventeen Years, One Testimony

My daughter was a teenager when I found myself out of work for six months. No income. Rent due, tuition due, car insurance due, and groceries still had to make it to the table, sometimes just enough for her. There was a day an eviction notice showed up on my door, and I genuinely didn't know how I was going to make it to the next step.

I kept my circumstances to myself, not out of pride, but because that weight was mine and the Lord's to carry, not hers.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

When my mother finally found out what was happening, she told me I could come home if I needed to. I told her thank you, but no, and that was the final answer. I reminded her I didn't have a single thing that came from selfish gain or ambition. I had prayed for and asked God to provide for my daughter and me throughout the years, so everything, from the roof over our heads to the job, all came from Him, and I had an expectation that He would provide. I told her I would stand in it and see the goodness of God through it, all the way to the other side.

I also reminded her that she was the one who taught me how to rely on God in the first place, by seeing her on her knees praying for my sister and me, back when she didn't even know I saw her.

What God Did

God provided everything we needed, and then some. No eviction took place. Over those six months, He opened doors my own ability never could have opened. Looking back, I still don't fully understand how. I only know who didn't do it. It wasn't me.

I never gave my daughter a blow by blow of what was happening. She was a child. I was the parent and provider. But she could see it, a mother not going to work each day, searching diligently for employment, staying before the Lord instead of falling apart in front of her.

Why I'm Telling You This

For years, my relationship with my adult daughter was turbulent. I won't pretend otherwise, that is real, and it is part of my story. But looking back over these seventeen years, I can see clearly that I did what I was called to do while raising her and beyond. I had this saying that I also modeled for her while raising her "I live my life around my daughter not her having to live it around me" so I have comfort in knowing I did my part. I trusted God while raising her. I trusted Him when the turbulence began. I trusted Him through unemployment, through an eviction notice, through every place my own strength ran out.

And I want to give God the glory for this too, what was once turbulent has over time, became strained rather than broken. It is not fully restored, and I won't act like it is, but it is no longer what it once was. That shift didn't come from anything I did. It came from staying planted, having done all that I could do, and standing.

My work with mothers often starts here, in a turbulent or strained relationship with an adult daughter, since that's the very journey that gave me a heart for them. But that's not where we stay. We move through all of it, the heart, the identity, the finances, and daily purpose, because a mother is never just one relationship. She's a whole woman, and reclaiming one part of her life doesn't happen in isolation from the rest of it.

If any part of this speaks to where you are right now, I want you to know your wholeness isn't waiting on the other side of a resolved relationship. It's available to you now, because it was never dependent on her. It's dependent on who you continue to trust while you walk through it.

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Elenor Fleming, CPCLC