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asked Shellie.
    “Of course, honey. He’s your son.”
    Randi left.
    When she got out there, Randi found out that the father of her child and his family weren’t happy about it. To them, it seemed Randi had run off with the kid. To add to Randi’s problems, she had been in some trouble with the law for fighting. She’d had a court date she skipped out on.
    All of that worked against her.
    Randi was picked up and the child went to the father’s family. In jail, Randi couldn’t do much about it.
    According to Shellie, this was a turning point: “They took him and wouldn’t allow Randi to see her own child.”
    As Randi emerged from jail, she’d hit a dark, bottomless pit without any boundaries or safety nets. Randi hadn’t been on any type of hard drugs then. It was only after the father of the child took Randi’s firstborn away that things went south. She fell into a depression that drugs deceivingly lifted her out from under.
    “She felt like she had lost everything, ” Shellie told me.
    The drugs Randi took numbed the pain of losing her child. She could forget about life for a while.
    Shellie tried as best she could to rescue Randi, but what can a sibling do for a sister who has basically given up?
    In Shellie’s case, only pray.
    The family allowed Shellie to pick up the child. When she did, Shellie brought the child to see his mother. Randi, Shellie said, was never high when Shellie brought the boy around. Randi knew better and would never allow her problems to infiltrate the life of her son.
    “Losing that child like that, it broke her,” Shellie recalled. “To Randi, she had already lost her life.”
    Randi worked as a power washer for the big rigs, eighteen-wheelers. That’s hard work. It wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t as if Randi had fallen into a deep drug addiction and lived on the street. She was deadening the pain and escaping her problems, holding down a job as best she could.
    “You have to understand,” Shellie clarified, “as a family, we never knew that Randi was doing these drugs. She had so much respect for us that she never came over here or came to see any of us when she was on drugs. She never asked us for money.”
    They would wonder, of course, but Randi was an adult. She did what she wanted to do, suffered, and dealt with the consequences. Family would help, but Randi had to make the first move.
    With Randi hiding her drug use, it made it easy for her family not to see the full grip the drugs had on Randi until later.
    Then she had two more kids. One of the fathers, according to Shellie, liked to drink, and Randi found that alcohol served the same purpose for numbing the pain as drugs. Randi fell into drinking.
    Life with the new man took an even faster downward spiral for Randi. She knew the relationship wasn’t going to work.
    “I don’t love him,” Randi told Shellie one day. She didn’t feel anything for the man. They had drinking and arguing in common, but not much else. “I don’t want to be with him.”
    “You don’t have to stay with him, Randi,” Shellie said, comforting her.
    “I’m afraid he’ll take the children away from me.”
    There was that pain from the past coming back to hold Randi down. Randi felt trapped. If she left, she’d be in a battle for her kids.
     
    Shellie pressed Randi about what was wrong. Why was she so upset? Crying on her birthday?
    Randi relented. It was the child Shellie had taken care of since he was two years old. Randi was feeling as though she’d abandoned him and he would never know she was the birth mother.
    “Do me a favor,” Randi said through tears.
    “Sure, honey, what is it?”
    “Make sure he knows I’m his mother one day. Please do that for me?”
    Where had this come from? Why was Randi feeling as though she was not going to be around to tell him herself? Confused, Shellie asked Randi why she felt this way. They had always agreed that at the appropriate time, Randi would sit the boy down and explain it