This book wrote me.
I thought I was telling my story. I was not. It was the women who spoke through me who could not speak for themselves - Mary my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, my cousin, and the grandmothers further back whose names I will never know. They had been waiting for a daughter who would finally pick up the pen.
But this book is not only mine.
It belongs to every woman who has ever carried a story she did not know how to tell, a mother's story, a grandmother's story, her own. Every woman who has felt the weight of what was never said and wondered if she might be the one to say it.
You are. We are. The women are speaking now.
And the first thing they want you to know is this: you were never the only one carrying it.