When I Was Her Daughter

Book excerpt: The award-winning memoir, When I Was Her Daughter is a raw, honest account of one girl’s journey through madness, loss, and a broken child welfare system, where only the most resilient survive. Seven-year-old Leslie has a serious problem. Someone is trying to kill her. Leslie’s mother suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. She writes rambling manifestos and forces her children to live on the run to evade capture by the Russian spies she believes are after them. Her mother’s ultimate goal is to protect her children from capture, but who will step in when she is convinced that killing them herself will save them from a worse fate? Each time the authorities repeatedly intervene, the children are again and again returned to their mother’s custody before becoming wards of the state. Once separated from her family and thrust into foster care for the foreseeable future, Leslie learns to navigate a new kind of fear and loneliness. Her ultimate goal is to be loved, but how can her mother ever love her now that she is so far away? Will she ever see her again? Will she ever find a safe place to land? In this unbelievable story of grit and grief, of hope and heart, Leslie must discover her own strength to ask for what she needs. Since it seems nobody will talk about her mother’s mental illness and nothing will bring the family peace, Leslie pretends she is—and always has been—her teacher’s daughter. This true story about the redemptive power of patience and courage reminds us that unconditional love is possible, even for a lost and angry child struggling to understand where she belongs.