“Your greatest contribution to the world may not be something you do,
but someone you raise.”
That line caught me off guard when I first heard it.
It gave words to what I’ve been living quietly for the last two and a half years.
My daughter was born in the aftermath of the worst kind of loss.
I was five months along when sorrow became my shadow,
and survival became my rhythm.
There were days when the only reason I ate or moved was because of her.
Even before she took her first breath,
she became the reason I kept breathing.
When she was born, the grief deepened,
not because she wasn’t enough,
but because she was everything.
And that made the absence louder.
Watching her grow, I started to see how instinctively she reached for men,
how naturally she looked for the presence of a father.
Every time she did, it broke something in me.
Because I couldn’t give her that.
And I couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter.
So I had to choose wholeness.
Not just for me, but for her.
She didn’t ask to come into a broken world.
She didn’t ask for a mother rebuilding from rubble.
She came into the storm,
but she didn’t deserve the fragments.
She became my reason to heal,
my motivation to fight for joy again.
Not performative healing,
the kind that looks polished but is crumbling underneath,
but real healing.
The kind that confronts the wounds,
sits with the sorrow,
and still chooses to get up anyway.
Breaking Patterns
Being a New Zealand-born Samoan often meant living between worlds,
too much for one, not enough for the other.
Love wasn’t always safe.
Survival often looked like silence.
Shame was used to teach us,
and perfection was praised more than presence.
I didn’t always have words for it,
just the feeling that something wasn’t right.
Therapy helped me name it.
Faith helped me break it.
And motherhood gave me a reason to rebuild it differently.
There have been many nights where I’ve laid awake,
whispering prayers over her.
Asking God to fill the void I never could.
That He would become the Father she reaches for.
That His presence would meet her
in the places where mine runs out.
That as she grows older
and begins to ask questions,
she’ll somehow know,
not just through my words,
but through her own encounters,
that her story is still held by love.
I watch her sometimes and quietly mourn
the fact that her dad will never get to know her.
She’s effortlessly funny,
a little chaotic, dramatic, boisterous,
but impossible not to laugh at.
Like the time she tried to give Elmo a bath,
and I walked in to find her dunking him in the toilet.
Or when we lost the TV remote,
and she wandered around calling out,
“Remote?! Remote?!”
as if it had legs and a GPS tracker.
Moments like that make me laugh until I cry.
And sometimes I do,
because I wish he could see it too.
I see him in her,
not just in her face,
but in her energy.
Becoming a parent helped me see God the Father more clearly…
Not as a distant figure,
but as a Father who delights in His children
simply because they are His.
It changed how I saw love.
It made grace real.
It made me want to parent Eden with that same tenderness,
to reflect, even in glimpses,
the Father who never leaves.
And in that process, I’ve begun to understand my own parents too.
They loved me in the best way they knew how.
Even the most devoted parents love through human lenses.
But God’s love, it’s different.
Perfect.
Unconditional.
Not based on behaviour, but belonging.
The story of Abraham hits differently now.
The ache of offering your child,
it’s no longer just a story.
It’s a weight I can imagine.
And it reminds me,
God didn’t just ask for a child.
He gave His own.
The more I grasp that,
the more I understand the kind of love I’ve been held in all along.
There are moments I feel unequipped, unqualified, undone.
Yet even then, grace finds us.
God is in the gaps.
In the whispered “help me” at midnight.
In the hallway tears.
In the softness that returns after I’ve been too hard.
In the laughter that breaks the tension.
One surrendered day at a time,
He’s healing generations.
I can’t promise I’ll never fall short.
But I can promise that I will keep showing up.
I will keep healing.
I will keep choosing love over fear,
wholeness over hiding.
Because she deserves a mum who is present, not perfect.
A mum who doesn’t just survive for her,
but lives fully with her.
If my greatest contribution to the world
is not a book I write,
a career I build,
or a stage I stand on,
but the way I raised her,
with tenderness, truth,
and with the God who held us both,
then that will be more than enough.
And maybe,
she’ll grow up not only knowing who her father was,
but who her Father is.
Eden & Ashes 