An Instruction Manual for Keeping Your Child Alive:

Author’s Note

This story contains references to childhood trauma and a parent’s experience supporting a child through recovery, including moments of emotional crisis. The focus is not on graphic detail, but on a family’s survival, vigilance, and the quiet, ongoing work of caregiving.

This piece is offered in honor of, and in support of, anyone who has lived—or is living—alongside their child’s trauma. You are not alone.

The Story

No one gave her a map. Survival came as a series of instructions she learned by living them. What she received instead was a body—hers—and the sudden understanding that it would no longer be allowed to sleep the way it once had. Even reaching for ordinary things, her hands shook.

Nights stretched without edges. Despite the sleepless evenings, morning arrived anyway, carrying its demands with every sunrise. Love stopped being soft. Love became vigilance. Love became listening for silence, sleeping with one ear open like an animal guarding its young. She learned to count breath the way other people counted blessings.

The day she truly understood what had happened, her knees buckled under the knowledge. Understanding was too much—soul-crushing, life-altering. She slid down the kitchen cabinet and let the floor take her weight. Collapse, she would later realize, was not failure. It was gravity doing its job. Some truths are simply too heavy to carry.

Falling was permitted. Disappearing was not. Be there.

She forced herself to focus on the words being shared by the clinical staff—the transcript of her child’s latest flashback. “This one was bad,” they said. “Are you in a safe place with support?”

In ordinary times, she and her husband would have flown west, spent a week together with their daughter by their side, and ended with a final meeting with the medical team, where they would have discussed everything as a family—together, in the same room, breathing the same air. Instead, it was 2020. They were scattered between three quarantined phones: Mother. Father. Therapist.

“Yes, we’re fine.”

“Good here, doc.”

Both were noncommittal answers, quickly regurgitated to mask the rising panic. This one was bad? How “bad” were the others, according to their experiences? They seemed bad enough already. What fresh hell was waiting now? How much worse could it get?

“Good to hear. Let’s get started then.” With those mundane words, her world tipped off its axis as the lead therapist began to share her daughter’s latest revelation.

The call ended. The team shut down their screens, just as her husband had seconds earlier. Only one face stared back at her from the darkened phone. Frozen. She had to remind herself to breathe—in through her nose and out through her mouth, an exercise she had used countless times with her own daughter when she was home, before she had to leave.

In and out.

This moment will pass.

Hang in there.

Keep breathing.

Look at me—in and out—okay, good—again—good.

Then she allowed herself one final deep breath to steady her balance. There were things to do. Her daughter needed her more now than ever—not as a fixer or a savior, but as a witness. Someone who could stay in the room when the truth arrived without sugar or apology, broken and bleeding.

***

Her daughter did not talk about dying the way people expect. Death had learned manners. It came dressed as rest. As quiet. As relief.

“I’m tired,” her daughter said.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“I just want it to stop.”

The mother wanted to argue, to build a future out of words and push her toward it. She didn’t. She listened. She sat beside her instead—on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, on the edge of a bed stripped of hope—and listened.

When her daughter stopped talking and was overtaken by sadness and tears, no longer able to speak through the hiccups forming in her chest, she finally allowed herself to speak. Only one word—said carefully, like it might shatter if handled too roughly.

Stay.

Not forever. Not for her. Just stay.

***

She became the thing her daughter pushed against. Some days that meant anger. Some days accusations—”You don’t trust me. You’re watching me too closely. Ease up.” She watched anyway. She locked doors. Hid medications. Slept on the floor outside her daughter’s room. Counted footsteps. Read faces the way sailors read weather. Learned the sound of dangerous quiet.

This wasn’t control. It was containment. She wasn’t trapping her daughter. She was holding the world back long enough for her daughter’s nervous system to remember daylight existed.

Other people grew uncomfortable. They said her daughter seemed fine. They reminded her that kids were resilient. They suggested she couldn’t hover forever. They did not hear what she heard at three in the morning—the muffled cries that faded right before dawn into a thin, terrible silence stretched too far.

She stopped explaining herself. She learned she didn’t owe anyone palatable grief. She owed survival. Her job was no longer to make rooms comfortable. Her job was to keep her child breathing—one breath, then the next. She learned to hang in there–to keep moving forward.

***

There were days she couldn’t remember who she’d been before all of this began. Her body kept the record—in her jaw, her shoulders, the way sirens made her heart misfire, the way certain words froze her in place. She wasn’t broken. She was rewired.

She was becoming someone who knew how close the edge really was, and how fiercely one human could cling to another without letting go. Hope, she learned, wasn’t optimism. It was refusal. Refusal to let trauma write the final sentence. Refusal to let the story end here.

Light did not return like a sunrise. It came sideways. A laugh that surprised them both. A full meal eaten without tears. A night slept through. A sentence spoken in future tense. She didn’t celebrate loudly. Like a tiny speck of dust, she marked it quietly, the way survivors do.

Today was better.

Soon there would be other todays. Eventually, there would be more good days than bad. The tomorrows would begin to look brighter again.

All they had to do was survive today—

One day at a time.

Keep moving forward.

Remember that today was better. That counted. The good days still mattered. And there would be more of them.

***

Some nights she held her heart in one hand and her daughter’s wrist in the other, feeling for proof of life. Bargaining with the universe. Begging. Badgering. Betting. Borrowing time where she could.

She learned to bargain with time. Ten minutes. One breath. The length of a song. The time it took to boil water. This wasn’t a weakness. It was a strategy. Survival happened in increments small enough to hold.

In the darkness, death still whispered. She whispered back—closer, softer, steadier. She didn’t promise forever. She promised this breath. Then the next.

***

It turned out that keeping a child alive wasn’t heroic. It was relentless. Ordinary. Holy. It was staying when everything begged her to step away.

And so, she stayed.

Just for this next breath.

Eventually, she would stay—for a lifetime of breaths.