13 Going on 30

The Beginning That Would Shape the Next 17 Years

It was the first summer after losing Papa Don. I was 13 years old, giddy, hormonal, and just starting to understand what love might feel like. I had no idea then that the butterflies I felt for a new boy at school would shape the next 17 years of my life.

Growing Up in Love and Chaos

I grew up in a somewhat “normal” environment. Not perfect, but filled with love. My parents had an open-door home, if someone needed a place to crash for a night, a week, even months, they would never turn them away. We didn’t have much, but we had just enough.

I was never taught hate. My parents weren’t strict, but they instilled in me the love of God and the importance of loving others, regardless of their circumstances. That kind of love isn’t always easy. Our house was constantly filled with people at different stages of life, carrying different struggles. Sometimes it was frustrating, sometimes chaotic but it was also a place of safety and belonging.

But love doesn’t shield you from loss. By the time I was 16, I had already lost an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin to addiction.

And before all of that, I lost Papa Don... One month before I turned 13. He was my first heartbreak. The first time I felt ultimate betrayal, because he was supposed to be here. Cigarettes? COPD? Come on, Papa Don. You were stronger than that. I needed you, I still do. When he died, I withdrew so much emotionally. A piece of me hardened. I was so angry at Papa Don for dying.

Time never healed that, it actually gets harder as I get older. I sit daily and wonder what he would think of me right now.

Now I sit in the quiet of my own home, the only sounds coming from my keyboard and Mac Miller playing in the background. No notifications lighting up my phone. No blooming new relationship to distract me. No voices. No conversations spilling from the other room. Just me, and the silence I once prayed for.

And though I finally have peace, I find myself missing the noise, the interruptions, the chaos, even the hard conversations.

It Ain’t 2009 No More

My first love, the year was 2009. It was the first summer after losing Papa Don, my first summer as an official teenager. The beginning of my 8th grade year, there was a new kid at school. I was infatuated, giddy, raging with hormones. He was the first person who ever gave me butterflies. My first real crush in the real world... outside of the celebrity world.

Fast forward to 2016. I was 20 years old when I married him. My first and only boyfriend. The only guy I had ever experienced. I never dated. I never kissed another guy. To me, he wasn’t just love, he was the only version of love I knew.

But it wasn't 2009 no more. Those butterflies didn’t save us. Marriage didn’t heal us. And the girl I was at 20 feels like a stranger now. By 25, I had already lived enough lifetimes to know that what I thought was love… was only the beginning of my survival story.

The Beginning of a Failed System: Foster “Care” and Filing for Emancipation

By 16, I had already stepped into roles no teenager should have to play. I worked jobs to cover his phone bill, his school clothes, whatever he needed when there was no foster family left to lean on. When the system failed him, I tried to fill the gaps.

And people have said it all: “It wasn’t your responsibility.” “You made that choice.” Yes, you’re right. But if that’s the mindset everyone carries, how much worse does it get? Adults with that very mindset is how we got here in the first place. My choice to step in is the reason I’m here telling this story, the reason you’re reading these words right now.

I even took on the legalities to help emancipate him. At 16 years old, I was sitting in offices and reading through paperwork I barely understood, teaching myself a system no teenager should ever have to learn. I gathered documents, tracked down signatures, and walked into buildings where adults twice my age looked at me like I didn’t belong. And I didn’t but he needed someone who would show up.

I still remember overhearing the phone call with his caseworker, the one where he begged to be allowed to stay in school and play football. A chance to go to college and play ball had always been his dream, and it was a dream some of his foster families carried too. What family wouldn’t want to ride out the story of the football hero who beat the odds?

After that call, reality set in. They decided he was “too damaged mentally,” “too much to handle.” But really, what was he doing that other teenagers weren’t doing behind their parents’ backs? Smoking weed. Sneaking out. Going to parties. Having sex. Okay. Moving on.

Still, their solution was to push him toward emancipation and a GED. An easy out for DHR. A devastating blow for a 17-year-old young man who just wanted the chance to finish, to be normal, to run the field again.

That was the first time I ever saw him cry. After the call, he buried his face in the blankets and whispered, “Why me? Why did I get dealt this life—to have no parents?”

We were just kids, two born in 1995, both growing up under completely different roofs, carrying completely different battles. His came from a broken system that failed him over and over. Mine came from the choice to step in and try to hold it all together.

But stepping into adulthood early didn’t stop life from hitting harder. The years that followed shifted from court papers and foster families to wedding vows, paternity tests, and trauma bonds. What I thought would be love turned into survival... fast. 

I thought marriage would bring stability, maybe even healing, for him, for us. Instead, it became the place where new battles began. 

Betrayed by Infidelity. Widowed by Addiction. Questioning My Fertility.

Infidelity crept in before the ink on our vows had even dried. And not long after, he got pulled into the wrong crowd.

I never knew what it felt like to be truly loved in a romantic relationship. But what did I expect from a 20-year-old man who had never known love himself? I thought marriage would change things, heal things.

I was no longer just a wife, though in truth, I never really got to be one. The infidelity was there even before we were married, but I was young, naïve, and didn’t know how to leave.

At just 20 years old, I was already facing the possibility of him having a child with someone else. I stood by him in paternity court, a child myself, believing loyalty would fix everything. The child ended up not being his, but the pain of that situation never left me.

And at the same time we were standing in that courtroom waiting for his DNA results, I was recovering from a surgery of my own. A tumor had overtaken my right ovary and it had to be completely removed. While he was proving whether or not he was a father, I was sitting in a doctor’s office asking if I would ever be able to have a child myself. 

Two lives, two verdicts, both tied to questions of parenthood that cut deeper than either of us were prepared for, at an age when parenthood shouldn’t have even been a worry.

But verdicts weren’t the only thing being handed down, life was already stripping pieces of him away.

The same young man who once lit up football fields, who never missed a Sunday at the rec, slowly disappeared. The same guy my heart used to skip a beat for, the one I sat with every week for hours at Baker’s barbershop because he never went longer than that without an edge-up. I’d be the only girl in there, but I never minded. We made friends with his barber, spent nights at his house, even babysat his kids. I still remember the night he handed us season one and two of Power and said, “Y’all have to watch this new show.” It was right as season three was about to drop. We binged the first two seasons and started season three in the same week.

But eventually, he became someone who didn’t even think about the barbershop anymore. One day I ran into his barber at a gas station, and he slid into my car to ask what was going on. He was worried and so was I.

The change showed up everywhere. Sundays at the rec used to be his ritual, a non-negotiable. But then he stopped showing up there too. He’d tell me he was playing, but I knew when he was lying. I would drive to the rec myself just to see for sure.

I needed the truth. And when I finally uncovered it, it rattled me to my core. 

To this day, I can still feel the way my stomach dropped in that moment.

Whatever innocence was left in us was gone. What I found out changed everything and it was darker than I could have ever prepared myself for.

That’s when everything began to spiral, and the man I loved slowly became unrecognizable.

At 22, I found myself in the middle of a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Loving someone doesn’t vanish when you see them struggling, it changes how that love shows up. Mine became survival.

I went from being “legally married” to becoming a “legal caretaker.” Staying married had nothing to do with romance... it gave me legal rights. Rights to commit him to treatment against his will, rights to step in when he couldn’t or wouldn’t save himself. And I did. Over and over again.

Fight or Flight

The fights were brutal. Heads slammed through sheetrock. TVs smashed. Glass shattered. Cuts, bruises, screaming, scars that remain inside and out.

By this time I have faced years of endless sleepless nights, I was unraveling. I never knew what version of him would show up. Sometimes months would pass without a word, and then suddenly he’d appear out of the blue.

But who was standing in front of me? The fragile part of him still begging for help, or the drugs that had destroyed us both?

It started out slow… then overnight, it became demonic. The fights. The accusations. The hallucinations. The constant anxiety. Living in fight-or-flight, always on defense. Jails. Rehabs. Hospitals. I would show up at whatever house I thought I might find him in, and I’d get in however possible to drag him back out.

And yet, one thing I always respected was that he never tried to introduce drugs to me. He was so ashamed that he would cry and beg me to “stay good,” to “always remember who I am.” He held me on a pedestal, which only deepened my own silent struggle to be the perfect woman he imagined.

Those stories... you’ll hear one day.

Missed Calls

His first time going to jail, I had left for a trip with my mom and aunt. I remember sitting on a plane in Baltimore when my phone rang. It was him, his voice frantic: he needed me now. For the first time in my life, I responded with, “I’m gone.”

When I told him I was on a plane, he started to panic but then the call dropped as my phone shut off for the flight. For me, it was a strange mix: the first small moment of relief I had ever felt, but still tangled with sorrow. By the time the trip was over, I was told he had gone to jail. Something minor. But it was only the beginning... the first of many.

Over the years came countless jail calls, but one specific conversation never left me. His voice was low and broken, but beneath it, I heard that spark of who he used to be. He said, “I just lay here all day, close my eyes, and imagine being back on the football field, running as fast as possible over that line for a touchdown.”

That was him, the young man I fell in love with. The one with dreams, with light, with a future. By then, he was surviving only through memories, clinging to echoes of the boy he once was. And I was left holding both truths: the man in front of me and the boy he still wished he could be.

I knew he was broken. But by then, my own cup was empty, cracking under the weight of it all.

Oregon: A Glimpse of Peace

Years had already come and gone, and my one dream of traveling, of finally getting out of Alabama, was at my fingertips. My world had been a constant loop of insanity, and now the world outside mirrored it—the COVID pandemic was upon us. I worked in the medical field and saw an opportunity: a way out.

I took a position in Portland, Oregon, at Kaiser Permanente Sunnyside Medical Center. I was finally leaving Alabama.

Still legally married, he had been in jail for a while by then. When he was released, clean and sober, he wanted to come with me. Not to save our marriage, but to expand his chances and hold onto the hope of a clean life. And if I had the opportunity to offer someone a better shot at life, I could never turn them away.

For a while, he took that chance. He stayed clean. Oregon gave me a glimpse of what I had prayed for: no fights, no eggshells. Just peace. I was almost in shock at how it felt to finally breathe again.

When my assignment ended, the goodbye was harder than I expected. Leaving Alabama had already torn me in two, I still remember stopping in St. Louis on the drive out west, lying in bed at my cousin’s house, crying and crying over leaving Kenadee behind.

And now, time had flown, and I was facing another goodbye. This time to the family I had built in Oregon. Coworkers and strangers from every walk of life had become like home to me, nearly 3,000 miles away from where I started. Saying goodbye to them felt just as heavy. I cried and cried, not wanting to let go of the first place that had given me peace in years. They even offered me a permanent position, but I wasn’t ready to commit. New York called, and I answered.

So I said my goodbyes, spent a few days in California, and then returned to Alabama for a week before heading east.

The Relapse Before New York

The unraveling began almost instantly. The fights started in LA, like the closer we got to home, the more his old life called him back. By the time we pulled into Alabama, the peace I had seen in Oregon was gone. He relapsed. And by the time we were packing for New York, I was already broken.

The relapse brought me face-to-face again with the person I had grown to hate. It all came full circle one night when pain hit me hard, kidney stones. I asked him to take me to the ER, and his response was: “Ask your sister.”

In that instant, I realized just how alone I really was.

While I was at the ER, he took his chance. The addiction was calling, and he was gone... Again back out getting high, in my car, as always.

That’s when the panic set in. It was Saturday night, and I had to be in New York by Monday morning, fourteen hours away, and I couldn’t get there without my car. On top of it, I was on narcotics for the pain, but my body had built such an immunity that all they did was dull the edge. I was awake, aware, and spiraling.

I didn’t even want to go to New York anymore. I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I was back in my nightmare. 

Before I knew it, I was back asking myself the question that had always been lingering: How do I get out? Because I had learned that addiction isn’t just to substances, it can be to chaos, to pain, to a person. His drug came from the streets.

Mine was him.

New York State of Mind

“I never took a straight path nowhere. Life’s full of twists and turns, bumps and bruises, I live, I learn. I’m from that city full of yellow cabs and skyscrapers.” — 50 Cent

That lyric from Power used to be something we rapped along to, something that felt like entertainment, a tie back to life before addiction. In New York, it became my reality.

The place I had dreamed of my whole life would soon become the scene of my breaking point.

I didn’t arrive as a wide-eyed girl chasing a dream. I arrived exhausted, unraveling, already carrying the weight of relapse, broken promises, and nights that blurred together in panic.

The 15-hour drive there was its own kind of torment. He had insisted on driving, despite being high from his rendezvous the night before. I sat in the passenger seat, trying to hide my tears, my fears, my frustration. He was a man drowning in addiction, and I was his lifeline.

After a few weeks in New York, with no access to drugs, his mind seemed to shift. “I need to find a job. I’m going to save up, get my own place, and get my life together…” WHEW. Even after years on this rollercoaster, hearing those words always gave me hope.

Weeks flew by. We worked all week, spent weekends in the city, and for a short while, it felt like maybe things could be different. But with that new job came his introduction to the neighborhood and with it, the hookup to the very thing that had already stolen his life away.

It felt like we were right back at the beginning. By then, even the smallest conversation could ignite into chaos. Driving to pick him up from work one afternoon, I saw missed calls from my mom, but I let them ring. I was too close to his job, and I couldn’t risk an innocent conversation being twisted into a plot against him. At that point, I didn’t even want Mom to know he was back using. I didn’t want her to carry that worry.

What started as a simple conversation about a trip to the beach with friends and family twisted into a fight about priorities. He felt mine no longer aligned with staying in New York, with staying married and he was right. But I couldn’t admit that. Not then.

The argument shifted, like so many did, to God. He said, “With God all things are possible.” And my response remains the same to this day: Yes, but the Bible also says faith without works is dead.

We had both been believers once. But the drugs made him feel like he was God, while I was left questioning if God even existed in my world anymore, like He had forgotten me altogether. 

I remember thinking: If God knows my heart, if He knows my mind, if He truly knows who I am, then why would He allow me to be in this position?

That ride proved those questions weren’t going away. Gospel music suddenly filled the car. What should have been a normal drive turned into a moment that could have ended more than just our lives. Heat rushed through my body, nerves spiking, as his frustration grew. I could tell he was under the influence.

Then he went further, declaring he was God, mocking me, accusing me of not believing. I had a mouth on me, and I wasn’t one to stay quiet. Out of pure frustration, the words flew out:

“You’re not very Christ-like yourself.”

The car went silent.

My hands gripped the wheel, my body trembling. Suddenly, a water bottle struck me in the face. Before I could react, his hand ripped the wheel from mine.

The car spun out across the interstate. From lane to lane, for what felt like both a lifetime and the end of our lives. Relief or fear—I couldn’t tell. My soul left my body. Instinct took over. I lifted my foot off the gas and turned into the spin until I had control again. The only cars around had fallen back, watching everything unfold.

What had started as a rescue mission for him had turned into a rescue mission for us both. But it was only him and I. So who was going to be the hero now?

The only hero left was the one I had lost sight of long ago...

GOD.

I wasn’t a professional driver. But I had been raised by my dad, who drove like he was training me for NASCAR, maybe those lessons saved me. But more than anything, I finally felt the presence of God.

That was my breaking point. The moment I said: I will walk away, dead or alive. I can no longer live the life of drug addiction when I wasn’t even doing drugs.

When my feet finally touched the ground, my legs were shaking, tears streaming down my face. But I didn’t let him see me cry.

I walked inside with my head down and called my mom. I spared her the details but told her: “If I make it back to Alabama alive, I will never go back. If I make it home and I am not in a body bag, I will divorce him.”

SWEET Home Alabama

I had made myself a promise in New York: “If I make it back to Alabama alive, I will never go back. If I make it home and I am not in a body bag, I will divorce him.”

Three weeks later, we returned to Alabama. I don’t even remember those three weeks. What I do remember is applying for an apartment back home. The day I went to my best friend’s house so she could ride with me to pick up my keys, I unlocked the door to an empty apartment—just me, a bag of clothes, and an air mattress. My first place alone.

I was leaving him behind at my parents’ house. He looked at my mom the same way he looked at me—with sorrow, longing, confusion, and anger. She was the only other person who truly saw him the way I did. To her, he was like a son. And when he realized I wasn’t coming back, the rage of abandonment—the one wound he never thought I would inflict—took over. He slung a gallon of milk off the counter, shattering it across the floor.

My mom, one of the kindest souls you could ever meet, often called “too soft-hearted”, was the only person besides me who knew how to handle him in moments like that. In my eyes, her softness was her strength. I was on the other end of the phone as she calmly told him to get it together. Then she said: “He’s taking your clothes outside…”

And just like that, he grabbed my suitcases full of clothes and threw them into the river.

I remember screaming on the phone: “Not my clothes!”

And he yelled back: “You love clothes more than you love me!”

It was never about loving clothes more than him. But clothes were important to me because they were my only form of identity. They were the one piece of me I could control when everything else in my life was spiraling.

Within the next week, he stayed at my parents’ house, drifting between there and the neighbor’s, the man next door who was living the same lifestyle he was.

I never returned.

The hardest decision I ever made was ignoring his calls, letting the voicemails pile up. Him crying. Begging for food and water. Calling my name over and over: “Please, Kensley. Where did you go? Please, Kensley…”

Then one day, my mom called. The police had shown up next door. He had been arrested.

That was the moment I kept the vow I made in New York. I went and filed for divorce. He was served in jail. And then he called me to tell me he was signing the papers—that he understood.

In that moment, I felt the very thing I had tried to prevent for so long. The disappointment. The abandonment. The wound I had done to him. The wound I had spent my life trying to protect him from.

And now, as an adult, I carry the same abandonment issues myself.

After the Papers

This part of the story comes a year after my divorce. By then, I had already started a whole new life, but even that new life came with its own havoc. And still, somehow, he found his way back into it.

I got wind that he needed help. Someone had tried to cut him with a glass bottle, and the wound wasn’t being taken care of. So I went to the places I knew he might be, and that’s when I saw him for the first time in years. It was shocking, a skeleton of someone who once held so much potential.

When I found him, he wasn’t alone. A group of men, high out of their minds, turned on him. They tried to beat him, and without hesitation, I stepped in, my own body becoming the shield between him and their fists. I had done this before, and I would do it again. Because even after everything, the instinct to protect him was stronger than fear. The adrenaline that floods your body when someone you love is being threatened makes you feel untouchable, immortal.

After pulling him out of that chaos, I took him straight to the hospital. He was prescribed antibiotics to prevent sepsis. Then I set him up in a safe place where I could administer the antibiotics, clean the wound and doctor it up as much as possible, and make sure he had food.

He agreed to try rehab again, so I showed up every day, praying he would still be there when I walked through the door. In the meantime, I gathered every document, filled out every form, and turned in everything the rehab needed until he was finally accepted. Those next few days felt like forever, a countdown where all I could do was hope he wouldn’t vanish before help came.

One night as I was leaving, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Can you please stay?” My heart, always so soft, shattered all over again.

I told him I couldn’t. And in that moment, I surprised myself, the man I had begged for so many years not to leave was now asking me the same thing, and I said no.

He pleaded again: “At least stay until I fall asleep?”

So I sat in the chair, fighting back tears so he wouldn’t see. I had to stay strong for him.

I watched him drift into a deep sleep. When his breathing slowed, I tucked him in quietly and walked out as softly as possible. It felt like a mother sneaking out of her child’s room. My heart hurt, but for the first time, I felt proud. I had grown stronger, than I ever imagined I could.

What we once called love as young adults was no longer romantic, it had shifted into a platonic bond, forged by years of survival. Just like marriage had once turned into caretaking, this too had become less about being together and more about keeping each other alive in the ways we could. The love had transformed from wanting to be someone’s wife to loving someone the way a mother loves her own child.

The next morning, I drove him to a new rehab. I had gone to the store beforehand and filled a bag like it was the first day of school, blankets, pillows, toiletries, snacks, everything he might need. A backpack full of essentials, like I was sending him off to start fresh.

I sat in the lobby with, tears pouring uncontrollably. I handed his medication bottle to the director and said, “He needs these, please make sure he finishes these antibiotics so the cut doesn’t get infected.”

I’ve never been a mother, but in that moment, it was the closest I had ever felt.

As they are giving us a tour of the center. He glanced back at me as my tears fell, and he said, “Kensley, don’t cry. I’m going to be okay.”

Out back, there was a basketball goal. We both noticed it, and without saying a word, we looked at each other like we were reading each other’s minds. For a second, it felt like hope, like maybe he was being given the chance to play again, to dream again, even if just in the parking lot of a rehab.

All the years I had searched for affordable rehab options, his one question was always the same: “Do they have a basketball gym?” The answer was always no. None of them did, especially not the ones we could afford. But this one had a basketball goal in the parking lot, and in that moment, that was enough. It was the sliver of hope that calmed my nerves, even as I walked away.

It didn’t last long. He left soon after. And that was the last time I ever saw him.

Sometimes, when I think back on that day, I don’t remember the drive home or the tears that blurred my vision. I just remember that hoop, the way the net swayed in the wind, the ball he never picked up, and the echo of a game that never got played. That’s where our story faded out.

A Look Into the Next Five Years

Divorce didn’t end the chaos, it just gave it a new face.

What came after was its own storm. Between 25 and 30, my life became a cycle of healing, heartbreak, and hard lessons. It was my real first introduction to alcohol, the club scene, men, and new friends. A whole new world that looked different from the chaos I had known before, but underneath, it carried the same shadows.

Damage has a way of following you until you face it head-on. Abandonment became the shadow trailing me everywhere. I searched for love in people who were just as emotionally unstable, no drugs this time, no violence, but also no commitment. No emotional availability. Just enough chaos to feel familiar. I buried myself in distractions that numbed instead of healed. I stayed too long in places that hurt, tried to rewrite my story through other people’s eyes, and in the process, lost sight of who I was or maybe realized I had never truly known.

There were new beginnings, jobs that pushed me back out of Alabama, opportunities that stretched me, the first time I ever saw a positive pregnancy test, and dreams that cracked wide open.

But with them came new losses, new betrayals, new versions of the same fight: to be seen, to be loved, to be enough.

Still, those years weren’t wasted. They taught me survival wasn’t enough, I had to choose life. They showed me that love built on brokenness will always shatter again. They stripped me down to the core until all that was left standing was me.

Now, 17 years after my first heartbreak, standing on the edge of 30, I was done running from my past.

I am not the victim.
I am not abandoned.
I am not the caretaker.

The truth?
I abandoned myself.
Tried to fill the void by saving everyone else.
But that weight was never mine to hold.

Now...I am the vessel.

Vessel

From the time I was a child, I always knew I wanted to be someone who made an impact. I dreamed of having a platform, even when I didn’t know what that meant or where it would come from.

As a little girl, I begged my parents to take me to auditions, to agencies, to anything that might give me a chance to act. I wanted to be an actress, to stand on a stage, to have people listen. I used to say, “I just want people to have a voice. I want to help others.”

What I didn’t realize then was that I didn’t even have a voice of my own yet. I didn’t have a story.

But those dreams never faded. What my parents thought was a phase was really the first glimpse of who I was meant to be.

Now, after everything, I have a voice. I have a story. And I finally understand what that little girl was wishing for.

Because today, I don’t just want to be seen... I want to be a vessel.

I won’t let this story be wasted. I won’t let his life become just another statistic.

My mission is clear: to be a bridge. A bridge of hope. A bridge of resilience. A bridge of forgiveness. A bridge of survival.

Because what you’ve read here is just a glimpse of 17 years.

And the rest?

The rest of the story, I’ll tell you in my own voice

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