For a long time my name was Bitch. I will only write it once, hereafter I will use a placeholder, but it is important for me to acknowledge it just once.

My adopted daughter called me this regularly for years. Never without venom. It hurt to be called beach because of the venom. It hurt because she was saying I was not human, without value.

I suspected that my new nickname, like much of her other abusive behavior, was a reflection of her own struggles with identity. She said I was the beach, but struggled with who she was and how valuable she was.

She was valuable to me. I had sacrificed a great deal to be her beach, um… mom.

She is still valuable to me. I know she can be a pain in the grass, but she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

When someone treats her badly or dehumanizes her or devalues her. And let us be clear, those words themselves are placeholders for very bad things. People who should help her have done very bad things instead. Well, I may be a beach, but I want to stomp and yell and kick’em in the shins.

I want to say stop!! She is worth more than this!! She is my daughter.

I want to have a healing, undoing, potion for the harm done to her.

I do. It is a single name–Jesus. He became the beach for her, for me, for all of us to undo the undoable, to restore our lost and stolen value.

When she tells me what has happened to her I grieve and wish she would stop running from the one Man who raises the value of an ordinary beach like me.

He buys the field/finds the treasure/sets the captive free.

And instead of the rude name we have become accustomed to, He cups our faces in His hands and calls us by our eternal name–
Dear
Very Dear…