I always thought losing my girls was the worst pain I'd ever feel.
I was wrong.
The worst pain wasn't the day they took them.
It was the day they took away the only time I still had with them.
It started with a message—
cold, clinical, typed by someone who's never had to hand their heart over to a system that doesn't care.
"Visits are suspended until further notice."
No explanation.
No warning.
No chance to prepare myself.
Just a sentence that felt like someone reached inside my chest and ripped me open again.
I stared at the words so long they blurred, my brain refusing to understand.
Suspended?
How do you suspend a mother's arms?
A mother's voice?
A mother's presence?
How do you suspend the only thing keeping her daughters connected to her?
I called immediately.
The worker didn't answer.
The supervisor didn't answer.
I left messages—
not desperate, not frantic, just controlled:
"This is my right.
This is my time.
You don't get to take that without explanation."
But deep down, I knew exactly what they were doing.
This was retaliation.
The investigation.
The truth coming out.
The foster home getting exposed.
Someone somewhere decided that instead of protecting my children…
they would punish me.
And the easiest way to do that?
Cut off the visits.
Cut off my daughters' comfort.
Cut off the only connection we had left.
When I finally reached the supervisor later that day, her voice was stiff.
"It's in the children's best interest to pause visits during the investigation."
I swallowed the fire rising in my chest.
"You're punishing them," I said quietly.
"Not me. Them."
"That's not accurate—"
"You're taking their mother away when they need her most," I cut in.
"You're proving exactly why they were scared to speak up."
She didn't answer.
Because she knew I was right.
My girls didn't know yet.
That was the part that shattered me the most.
Somewhere in their little hearts, they were counting down days…
maybe hours…
waiting for the next visit.
Waiting to hug me.
Waiting to tell me everything.
Waiting for me to be their safe place.
And they didn't know I wasn't coming.
Not because I didn't want to.
Not because I didn't love them.
Not because I messed up.
But because a broken system, bruised by its own exposed guilt, needed someone to blame.
And mothers are always the easiest target.
That night, my house felt colder than it ever had.
I sat on the floor in the dark, holding one of their old drawings—
a messy, colorful picture where they had written:
"Mommy is our heart."
I pressed the paper to my chest, and for the first time since finding my fire, I cried.
Not weak tears.
Not hopeless ones.
But the kind of tears that come from being wounded in the same place over and over until you can't even bandage it anymore.
This wasn't just a setback.
This was a knife.
But as the tears dried, something inside me shifted.
They thought stopping visits would break me.
They thought it would silence me.
They thought it would scare me back into the corner they built for me.
But instead?
It lit something deeper.
This wasn't just a fight for reunification anymore.
This was a fight for justice.
For accountability.
For my daughters' truth.
And if they thought taking away my visits was going to make me back down…
they didn't understand me at all.
A mother doesn't disappear just because someone closes a door.
She breaks the damn door down.
And that's exactly what I intended to do next.