She Was Still My Daughter. I Just Didn't Like Her Anymore.

I have to start here, in the most honest place I can find, because this blog post deserves nothing less.

There was a season where I did not like my daughter.

Not where I didn't love her. I never stopped loving her. But love and like are two very different things, and if you have ever been in a broken relationship with someone you would die for, you know exactly what I mean. I loved Janai with everything in me. And for a long time, I could not stand to be in the same room with her.

I need to sit in that for a minute before I move forward. Because I think a lot of mothers have felt that and never said it out loud. And the silence around it is making us sicker than the feeling itself ever could.

When I found out I was pregnant with a girl, something lit up inside of me that I cannot fully describe. I already had my son, Jamir. And now I was getting my girl. I had this whole picture in my mind, the little outfits, the hair appointments, the dance classes, the gymnastics, painting her nails, the baby dolls. All of it. Some of those things I had gotten to experience growing up. Some of them I hadn't. And in Janai, I saw my chance to give her everything. The whole girlhood experience, complete and beautiful and full.

And then she arrived. And she had other plans.

This child did not want the dolls. She wanted to draw. She wanted art supplies and a basketball and room to move. She did cheerleading for a while and genuinely loved it. She played lacrosse. She was athletic and creative and completely unbothered by everything I had imagined for her. And I say this now with a laugh because looking back I can see it so clearly, she was coming against my vision for her from basically the beginning. She showed up as herself from day one. I just didn't have the eyes to fully appreciate that yet.

For years though, in spite of all my plans not going quite like I imagined, she was still my girl and life was still sweet. We found our rhythm. We did the things that were her things, not just mine. And it was good.

And then she turned thirteen. And something, somewhere, quietly began to shift.

I cannot point to the exact moment. There was no single incident I can pull out and say that right there, that is where it started. It was more like a slow leak. Something draining out of what we had without either of us noticing until the tank was close to empty.

But I know exactly when it hit me in the face.

The summer of 2021.

That summer, my son Jamir was in a serious car accident. And I did what I thought a good mother does, I went into crisis mode. I was at the hospital. I was managing everything. I was holding it together for everyone around me. And because Janai was fourteen and couldn't go into the ICU to see her brother, I made a decision to shield her. I didn't share a lot of updates. I didn't want her to be afraid. I thought I was protecting her.

But I have to be honest about something else. Something I have had to sit with and own fully. In that season, being present for Janai would have required more of me than I had left to give. I was making major medical decisions for my son. I was managing doctors and hospitals and fear. And somewhere in the back of my mind, even if I couldn't articulate it then, explaining everything to Janai, helping her process it, being emotionally available to her, it felt like one more thing I did not have the capacity for.

So I chose not to.

I told myself it was protection. And some of it was. But some of it was also just survival. And my fourteen year old daughter paid the price for that.

Protection, without presence, can feel exactly like abandonment.

She was not left alone in the sense that family was around. But her mother wasn't there. Her father wasn't there. And fourteen years old is too young to know how to process that kind of fear and uncertainty by yourself, especially when nobody is talking to you about what is happening to your brother. She was sitting in her own terror that entire summer with no one to help her carry it. Filing it away somewhere inside herself because she had no other choice.

And I didn't see it. Because I was drowning in my own.

By the time Jamir came home and we started trying to find our new normal, something in Janai had already shifted in ways I wasn't prepared for. She was angry in a way I couldn't trace. She started pulling toward her father and away from me, and I felt it like a rejection I couldn't explain. If I said no to something she would go to him. He'd say yes. I'd push back. We'd argue. And she was right in the middle of it, and I was too overwhelmed to see what was really happening.

That summer she had her first experience with alcohol and weed.

My fourteen year old daughter was struggling, And I was so consumed by my own undiagnosed anxiety, my own unprocessed PTSD from everything that summer had thrown at us, that I could not see her clearly. What I saw was rebellion. What I felt was disrespect. What I told myself was that she knew better.

What I could not see yet was that she was a child who was drowning. And her mother was already underwater.

The first time I really saw her, not the behavior, not the rebellion, not the version of her I was so frustrated with, was in the youth crisis hospital.

She was so scared. And sitting in that room, looking at my daughter, something in me went completely still. Because she wasn't a rebellious teenager in that moment. She wasn't the girl I had been arguing with, the one I didn't recognize anymore. She was just a little girl. Scared and small and needing her mom. She had reverted right back to the child I used to paint fingernails with and take to dance class, and she was looking at me like she needed me to come get her.

And I realized I had not been coming.

What I also did not yet understand was that Janai was not just going through a hard season. She was fighting something invisible. Something I did not have language for at the time. Mental health was not something I had navigated with Jamir, and if I am honest, I did not recognize what I was seeing in Janai for what it actually was. I just knew something was wrong in a way that discipline and expectations could not fix. And learning that, really learning it, sitting with it, educating myself about it, began to change the way I saw her entirely.

I could not raise my two children the same way. They were two completely different people carrying two completely different things.

I am still learning. But I am learning.

The second moment I saw her clearly was after she told us she was pregnant.

After my husband and I got through our own feelings and came to her together and told her we were going to support her, that we had her back no matter what, she laid her head in my lap and she cried. Not a little. She cried hard. The kind of crying that has been held in for a long time waiting for a safe place to land.

And I could feel it leaving her body. The fear. The shame. The weight of not knowing whether her parents were going to turn their backs on her. I could feel her exhale in a way she had not been able to exhale in years.

She just needed to know I was still there.

She had needed that the whole time.

Things did not become perfect after that. Healing is never that clean. But something cracked open between us that day that allowed us to slowly, carefully, start finding our way back to each other.

She went to therapy. I went to therapy. I started medication for my anxiety, and I say that plainly because there is still too much shame around that in our communities and I refuse to contribute to it. Getting help was not weakness. It was the thing that made me available to my daughter in a way I could not be before.

I had to stop pointing at her rebellion and start asking what my absence had planted in her. I had to grieve the seasons I missed while I was present in body but completely gone in every way that mattered.

And she had to do her own work too. Her own healing. Her own forgiving.

We did not do any of that perfectly. But we are good. We are really, genuinely good. And I do not take a single day of that for granted.

Now that I am on the other side of it, I can see Janai more clearly than I ever have. And what I see takes my breath away a little.

She has my heart. Big, wide open, built for people. She is more protective of hers than I have always been of mine, and I respect that about her deeply. She has the gift of discernment, something she is still growing into, and something I am genuinely excited to walk her through because I know that gift from the inside. I have carried it my whole life.

If I am Sana, she is Sana 2.0. Completely.

The girl I was fighting with, the girl I didn't recognize, the girl who felt like a stranger to me, she was me. She has always been me. And I think part of what made those years so hard is that we were too much alike to see each other clearly. Two strong-willed, big-hearted, discerning women in the same house, both hurting, both defending, neither one of us knowing how to stand down.

I can laugh about it now. But I also hold it carefully because I know what it cost us both.

Last month Janai and I got on a plane together and flew to Houston for a girls trip. And something happened on that trip that I need to tell you about.

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We talked. Like really talked. Not mother and daughter navigating conflict. Two women. Sitting across from each other. Honest. Open. Safe. She told me what she needed from me during the years I didn't fully show up. I told her what I was carrying during that time that I never let her see. And there were moments where she would say things like, "Mom, I'm really proud of how you handled that." And I would just sit there and receive it, because I did not take for granted what it meant to hear those words come out of her mouth.

And then a few days after we got home, I was sitting in my office and she walked in. She didn't say anything big. She just walked over, kissed me on my forehead, and hugged me.

I cannot tell you what that did to me. But I can tell you that there was a version of me, not too many years ago, who did not believe we would ever get there. Who had quietly started to grieve the relationship I thought we had lost forever.

That forehead kiss was God answering every single one of those prayers.

Now at night, before she goes to bed, she comes and finds me and we talk. About her day. About whatever is on her mind. And almost every single morning I wake up to a text from her. Good morning Mom. With a heart.

That is not small to me. That is everything.

And I want to speak directly to my friends who sat with me in those hard years, who listened to me cry and didn't know what to say. Some of you are now walking that same road with your own daughters. And because I walked it first, I can sit with you now and offer something more than sympathy. I can tell you what I wish someone had told me. I can show you where I went left when I should have gone right.

There is a blessing in surviving something hard enough to become a guide for someone else walking the same road.

I do not regret a single hard day if it means I can help another mother find her way back to her daughter a little faster than I found mine.

And now I want to talk to Janai directly. Because she deserves to hear this in my words, not just feel it in my actions.

Janai.

I am so grateful that God chose me to be your mother. Not because I deserved it. Not because I always got it right. The truth is I got it wrong more than I got it right on many days. But watching you evolve into the woman you are becoming has been one of the greatest joys of my entire life. You are strong in ways I am still learning to fully see. You are resilient in ways that humble me. And you carry gifts, that big heart, that discernment, that fire ,?that this world is going to need from you.

I am sorry for the summer I chose to protect you by disappearing from you. I am sorry for every moment I saw your pain and called it rebellion because it was easier than sitting down inside it with you. I am sorry that you had to carry fear that was too heavy for a fourteen year old, in a house that should have been your safe place, largely alone.

You deserved better from me. And I am spending every day that I have left making sure you know that I know that.

I pray that every part of your life becomes better than my own. I pray that the things I taught you, the things I showed you, the things you lived through alongside me, that all of it, the good and the painful, becomes wisdom you can hand to your own children and grandchildren one day. I pray that long after I am gone, some part of how I loved you, imperfectly and fiercely and without giving up, stays with you.

I love you with every breath in my body.

And I am so proud of you.

So here is what I want to leave with every mother and every daughter reading this.

If you are in a season where the distance feels permanent, hear me when I say it is not. But it will require more than love alone. It will require honesty. Accountability. The willingness to look at yourself and ask what you contributed to the space between you.

When does grace become self-abandonment? When does keeping the peace start costing you your peace?

Ask yourself this: is there something in you, unhealed and unexamined, that is making it impossible to really see her? Because sometimes the wall between a mother and daughter isn't built by one of them. Sometimes you both brought bricks.

And ask yourself this, when did you stop being present? Not physically. Really present. Because our children feel the difference. They always feel the difference. And sometimes what looks like rebellion is really just a child screaming in the only language they have left:

I need you to come back to me.

I almost missed my daughter. I almost let the distance become permanent because I was too hurt, too overwhelmed, and too proud to be the first one to lay something down.

I am so glad I didn't.

She is eighteen now. She is a mother. She is healing. She is becoming. She is Sana 2.0 in every single best way. And she is still my girl.

And every morning when that text comes through, good morning Mom, with a little heart, I say thank you. To her. And to God. Because I never stopped praying for this. And He never stopped working on it.

Even when I don't see it, You're working. Even when I don't feel it, You're working. You never stop, You never stop working. - Waymaker, Sinach

Be Loved & Free,

Sana Latrease