The Story of Savanna L. McKee

The Story of Savanna L. McKee

A Life of Losing, Searching, Breaking, and Finding My Way Back

Where do I even begin?

My name is Savanna L. McKee. I’m a mother to two little boys, my firstborn, Axel, and my youngest, Kash. I’m also 28 weeks pregnant with a little girl who is due January 2, 2027.

Three babies who will forever be a part of my story, but to understand the woman I am today, you have to understand the little girl I used to be.

Because my story didn’t begin with motherhood. It began with loss, separation, and a little girl who spent much of her life searching for somewhere she belonged.

The Little Girl Who Missed Her Mother

I was five years old when I was adopted. My little sister, Crystal, was around two, and she was adopted too. We weren’t placed in the same home, but that never changed what she meant to me.

That little girl was everything to me.

We were sisters, separated by circumstances neither of us was old enough to understand. We didn’t get to grow up side by side the way sisters should, but we were close. There was always a part of me that belonged to her, and a part of her that belonged to me.

I had two brothers, too. Somewhere along the way, we all lost a tremendous amount of contact with one another. Years passed, and it was almost as if we had never had those relatives at all. Life moved on around us, and the family we started with became a distant part of our lives.

My father didn’t put up much of a fight when Children’s Services came asking him to sign away his parental rights. Later in life, I would reunite with him for a short time, but by then, so many years had already passed.

There are questions a child carries into adulthood. Questions about why people leave, why they don’t fight harder, and why the people who are supposed to protect you sometimes can’t or won’t.

You grow up, but those questions don’t always grow up with you.

My mother, though, I remember her differently.

I have memories of us from before we were taken. I remember the fun. The lakes, the camping, the feeling of being a little girl enjoying life with her mom. I don’t remember everything being as bad as people made it out to be.

Maybe I was too young to understand everything happening around me. Maybe children remember the love in situations where adults remember the problems.

My mom tried, though. She tried to get us back.

But with meth charges and a few other things standing in the way, it became a dead end. Eventually, she moved away, and I went to live with her dad, my grandpa, and his wife, the woman I would grow up calling Mom.

Crystal went to live with our aunt, and she was spoiled rotten. And honestly, I was just glad she had everything a little girl could ever dream of.

If I couldn’t be there with her, at least I could know she was taken care of.

Even then, I think I had already learned how to put somebody else’s happiness ahead of my own.

Growing Up a McKee

My grandpa was an old drunk, well known in the community. I was a McKee, and that name carried its own reputation.

My other mom owned a rural clinic. From the outside, there were rules, expectations, and a certain way everything was supposed to look.

But behind closed doors, things were strict and complicated. There was manipulation, and there were people trying to make me see my mother through their eyes instead of my own.

My grandpa would come home late at night and wake me up just to tell me my mother didn’t love me. He’d tell me I was going to turn out just like her.

Imagine being a little girl who already doesn’t understand why she can’t live with her mother, only to have someone repeatedly tell her that the woman she misses doesn’t love her.

I’d cook my grandpa dinner. I’d sit there and listen to what he had to say. I’d take in those words, even when they hurt more than I knew how to explain.

Then I’d go back to my room, pull out a tiny photograph of my mother, and miss her.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I think that little girl was fighting to hold on to the one connection she was afraid of losing completely.

It didn’t take long for me to change.

I went from being the little angel they thought they’d received to a hellion they couldn’t seem to control.

I started sneaking out at eleven.

By twelve, I was on a Greyhound bus, headed twelve states away to find my mother.

Think about that for a minute.

Twelve years old, trying to find my way across the country because I wanted my mom.

I didn’t have a perfect plan. I didn’t understand all the risks. I was just a little girl who had decided that if nobody was going to bring her home, she was going to find home herself.

And I found her.

For a little while, I had what I’d spent years searching for.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

It was the beginning of another chapter.

The Years That Slipped Away

CPS found me that same year.

Phyllis, my other mom, had me on a flight that very same day, I think. One minute I had found the woman I’d spent years missing, and the next I was right back in a situation I hadn’t chosen.

After that, life became chaos.

Running away. Juvenile. Boys. Drugs. Situations I should have never walked into and situations I should have never walked away from. Nights that turned into weeks I couldn’t remember. First loves I swore were real, only to end in betrayal.

I was a kid trying to find something I couldn’t even put a name to.

Love, maybe. Belonging. Freedom. Maybe just somebody who wouldn’t leave.

I was looking for something outside myself, never really understanding how much I was carrying inside.

The years moved fast, and before I knew it, I was sixteen years old, sitting in county jail and facing prison time.

And I received it.

Seven years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Seven years.

My grandpa had passed away, and I had so much anger inside me that I didn’t know what to do with it. I broke in and robbed a place, taking an abundance of cash that disappeared almost as quickly as it came.

Nothing lasting came from it. Nothing I could hold on to. Just another decision that would follow me into the next chapter of my life.

I was sentenced to seven years, and I served every day of that sentence.

I changed in there, I think.

Or maybe I became a woman.

Or maybe both.

Maybe I was already so far gone that I didn’t know the difference anymore.

Seven Years Behind Those Gates

I remember going into prison with a smile on my face.

I can still picture a woman walking up to me in the prison yard when I was seventeen. She looked at me and asked, “Girl, how come you’re always smiling?”

I didn’t know what to tell her.

Maybe I was trying to convince myself I was okay. Maybe smiling was easier than explaining everything I’d already lived through. Maybe some part of me still believed things could turn out all right.

Whatever it was, it changed quickly.

Prison has a way of changing how you look at the world. Time becomes a strange thing when you can’t decide where to go, what to do, or who gets to be part of your day.

For the last three years, I spent my time in 23, though it felt more like 24 because I hardly ever stepped out.

Three years in one place.

Three years with nothing but your own thoughts and whatever conversation you were lucky enough to have through a vent.

People talk about being alone like it’s something you can get used to. Maybe you get used to the routine, the walls, and the sounds of the same doors opening and closing.

But there is a difference between enjoying your own company and having no choice but to be alone.

Eventually, the quiet gets heavy.

You start begging the world, or God, for some reassurance that everything is going to be okay. You start wondering whether anybody out there remembers you. You start counting time differently because the days are all beginning to feel like the same day.

I had moments in there when the weight of everything became more than I knew how to carry. There were times when I struggled to see a way forward, and I witnessed things happen to other women that stayed with me long after the moment had passed.

You don’t simply walk away from experiences like that and leave every part of them behind.

But somewhere in all of it, I found something unexpected.

Women.

Friendships. Connections. People who understood pieces of my life without needing every detail explained. Women who had their own stories, their own losses, and their own reasons for ending up behind those walls.

You learn something about love in a place like that.

Everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants somebody to love. And when the people you once called family have moved on with their lives, you start looking for connection wherever you can find it.

Sometimes you find it in unlikely people. Sometimes you get it wrong. Sometimes you hold on to whatever makes you feel less alone.

And sometimes you just do the best you can with what you have left.

I won’t pretend prison made me a better person overnight. It didn’t erase my past or give me all the answers. But it gave me time, more time than I ever wanted, to sit with myself and think about what kind of life I wanted when I finally got out.

When I was twenty-five, I walked out those back gates.

And standing there was my sister, Crystal.

Grown and beautiful.

My baby sister.

After everything that had happened, after all those years and all that distance, there she was.

We got on the next flight to Ohio, once again heading toward our mother.

Crystal didn’t stay long. She eventually flew back to Texas to take care of Aunt Joy. But we made memories in those days, and those memories meant something to me.

We had lost so much time already.

I was grateful for the pieces we got back, even if they didn’t last forever.

I didn’t know then just how precious those memories would become.

Shawn, Axel, and the Family I Thought I’d Have

After I came home, life started moving again.

I met a man named Shawn.

Axel’s dad.

And I swore that man was the one.

My mother tried to warn me about something called the honeymoon stage. I thought that was the silliest shit I’d ever heard. I figured when you loved somebody, you loved them. What was all this talk about stages supposed to mean?

I didn’t understand then how different the beginning of a relationship could look from the life two people eventually had to build together.

I was pregnant before I’d even been out for a year.

Shawn and I started crumbling, and it wasn’t pretty. It was dramatic, messy, and full of things neither of us seemed to know how to handle.

I loved him.

I still do, in my own way.

I can admit that I ruined a good thing with that man. I can look back and see where I could have done things differently. I can acknowledge my own part without pretending I was the only person who had things to figure out.

Love doesn’t always disappear just because a relationship falls apart.

Sometimes you can know something wasn’t working and still wish you’d done better. Sometimes you can understand why something ended and still grieve the life you thought you were going to have.

And sometimes the hardest part is accepting that loving somebody doesn’t mean you get to keep the future you imagined with them.

Before everything finally fell apart between us, I made a few trips to see Crystal over the years I’d been home.

Sometimes those trips were spontaneous. Shawn would get home from work and, unbeknownst to him, I’d already be halfway across the country on my way to see my baby sister.

I wanted that time with her.

We’d already lost so much of our childhood. I wasn’t going to take the time we had as adults for granted.

I remember our last visit so vividly.

I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see her.

I didn’t know those memories would become something I’d replay in my mind, searching for pieces of a life I couldn’t get back.

Then the phone rang one night.

And my heart knew before my mind could catch up.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

It was Crystal’s best friend.

She was crying. She told me she was sorry.

And I hung up.

I was driving, and my friend, whose name was actually Crystal too, was sitting in the passenger seat.

I remember screaming.

My baby sister was dead.

A bullet to her head.

The little girl who had been everything to me. The sister I had searched for, loved, missed, and tried to make up for lost time with.

Gone.

I will never know the entire truth of that night.

I don’t know every detail of what happened, and I won’t pretend I do. But I know the pain of losing her, and I know how much that loss changed me.

Crystal was a soldier, too. She had her own battles, her own losses, and her own pain. While I was down here making a mess of my life, she was down there trying to handle hers.

We were sisters, but we weren’t always close enough to see everything the other one was carrying.

We had spent so much of our lives apart. Even after we found our way back to one another, there were still parts of our worlds we couldn’t reach.

I don’t blame her.

I don’t know what happened in those final moments, and I may never know. I’ve had to learn how to live with unanswered questions.

I only know that I miss her.

And I’m angry.

I’m angry every day in ways that don’t always make sense. Angry at the world, angry at the circumstances, angry that two little girls who were separated so young had to grow up and fight so hard just to find their way back to each other, only for me to lose her anyway.

This beautiful girl who laughed, who was the life of the party, who could bring energy into a room, had her own struggles when the world wasn’t watching.

People can look happy and still be hurting. Sometimes the people we think we know best are carrying things we never fully see.

I wish I could have taken some of that pain from her.

I wish I could ask her questions I will never get to ask.

I wish we had been given more time.

There are losses that change the way you understand life.

Crystal’s death was one of mine.

I had already spent years trying to understand why people left, why families broke apart, and why love wasn’t always enough to keep people together.

Losing my sister was different.

This wasn’t another separation. It wasn’t somebody moving away or another chapter that might someday be repaired.

This was forever.

And I fell hard.

When Grief Turned Into Chaos

Three or four years passed, and I was just fucking up.

Making mistakes I’d sworn I’d never make as a mother. Running around, breaking the law, hurting people, and losing pieces of myself all over again.

I knew what it felt like to be that little girl who needed somebody to make things okay. I knew what it felt like to wonder why the people you loved couldn’t just stay.

And somehow, I was becoming a woman creating her own kind of chaos.

Grief doesn’t always look like crying in your bedroom or sitting quietly with old photographs.

Sometimes it looks like making one bad decision after another. Sometimes it looks like pretending you don’t care. Sometimes it looks like chasing anything that will keep you from sitting still long enough to hear your own thoughts.

I wasn’t okay.

And I didn’t know how to become okay.

I was doing so many drugs. I was living in ways I had promised myself I never would. I was becoming the kind of mother I had once sworn I wouldn’t be, and somewhere inside me, I knew it.

I was losing in life, really.

I had spent so much time fighting to survive that I hadn’t figured out how to live without fighting something.

I knew I needed to change, but knowing something and actually being ready to do it are two completely different things.

Eventually, I walked away.

I remember leaving with tears in my eyes.

It wasn’t some beautiful, perfect moment where everything suddenly made sense. It hurt. I was leaving people, places, habits, and a version of myself I’d spent years getting comfortable with, even when it was destroying the life I wanted.

But I got clean.

And I stayed away.

Learning How to Live in Peace

I met new people, genuinely good people, and slowly started learning how to live differently.

I learned that silence wasn’t always something to run from.

I learned that I could sit at home without needing to fill every second with something happening. I learned that the quiet didn’t have to mean I was alone or that something was missing.

For so long, I’d confused chaos with living.

If something was happening, if there was drama, if people were coming and going, if I was constantly chasing something, then at least I didn’t have to sit still and figure out what was going on inside me.

But peace is different.

Peace doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it’s just a quiet evening. Sometimes it’s waking up and realizing you don’t have to fix yesterday’s mess. Sometimes it’s being able to look at yourself honestly without immediately needing to escape what you see.

I started looking at life with a clearer head and, in a lot of ways, a cleaner soul.

People might think pregnancy is what made me settle down, but I can’t agree with that.

I had to make that decision for myself.

I had to get tired of living the way I was living. I had to want something different badly enough to walk away from what I knew, even when I wasn’t sure what was waiting on the other side.

I had to learn how to sit with myself.

And for the first time in a long time, I started liking the life I was building.

I liked the quiet.

I liked the peace.

I liked waking up without feeling like I was constantly running from one thing or chasing the next.

I liked the person I was becoming.

I wasn’t suddenly perfect. I still had things to work through, memories that hurt, and parts of myself I didn’t completely understand.

But I was trying.

And I was proud of that.

The Mother I Am Today

Today, I’m a mother to Axel and Kash, and I’m preparing to welcome a little girl into the world.

Three little lives connected to mine.

When I look at my children, I think about the little girl I used to be. I think about what I needed, what I didn’t understand, and how much I wanted to feel like somebody was fighting to keep me.

I think about how confusing it can be for a child when the adults around them can’t seem to get things right.

And I think about the kind of mother I want to be.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’ve always made the right decisions. I haven’t. I’ve fallen short. I’ve made mistakes that hurt me and the people around me.

But my boys have always been happy, and I love them more than I can explain.

I’m proud to be their mother.

I want my children to have the security I spent so much of my childhood searching for. I want them to know they’re loved, even when life is complicated. I want them to have a mother who keeps learning, who owns her mistakes, and who tries to do better instead of pretending she has nothing left to work on.

I can’t go back and change my childhood.

I can’t erase the decisions that landed me in prison or take back every mistake I’ve made since.

But I can decide what I do with everything those years taught me.

I can learn from the things that hurt me instead of letting them decide the kind of mother I become.

I can keep growing.

And I can keep trying to build a life where my children don’t have to spend their childhood wondering where they belong.

Axel

There is another part of motherhood that has hurt me in ways I don’t always know how to explain.

When Shawn and I fell apart, he went back to prison, and I continued down a path that led to more trouble. When I went to jail, Shawn filed for emergency custody, and I lost Axel.

That loss changed me.

No matter what happened between his father and me, Axel was my little boy. Losing time with your child is a hurt that doesn’t simply disappear because the world keeps moving.

Shawn eventually met somebody else, and now she lives in the home where my son lives, in a life I once thought would be mine.

And yes, I’ve got feelings about that.

There is anger in it. Jealousy, probably. Hurt, definitely. And questions I still don’t have answers to.

Sometimes I look at the situation and wonder what exactly was going through Shawn’s head. I wonder how we went from being two people who thought they were building a family to where we are now.

Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my heart. Sometimes sarcasm is easier than admitting that something still hurts.

But underneath all of that is a much harder truth.

That’s my son’s father.

That’s my child.

And there are pieces of that life I cannot simply stop caring about, no matter how much time passes or how much I try to convince myself I’m fine.

I can be angry with Shawn and still love him in my own complicated way. I can resent the circumstances and still want what is best for Axel. I can wish things had happened differently without being able to go back and change them.

Those feelings can all exist at the same time.

I know my past has consequences. I know some of the choices I made played a part in how my life turned out. Taking responsibility for those choices doesn’t mean the losses hurt any less.

And loving my son means continuing to show up for him, continuing to grow, and continuing to work toward the kind of future I want us to have.

Kash

Then there’s Kash.

His father is a man people called Biggsy, a drug dealer who came into my life during another complicated chapter.

Kash’s father is serving time in the penitentiary and won’t be released until Kash is around ten or eleven.

Today was the first day Kash ever spoke to his father.

There are things about my life I never would have imagined when I was a little girl staring at that tiny photograph of my mother. But here I am, living them.

It is what it is.

Life doesn’t always give you the family picture you wanted. Sometimes you have to figure out how to raise children while carrying the weight of your own past. Sometimes you have to explain absences you didn’t create and make peace with things you cannot control.

All I can do is love my boy, give him what I can, and keep trying to make good decisions for the life we’re living now.

And soon, there will be a little girl joining us.

My daughter is due January 2, 2027.

I think about the woman I was at twelve, the woman I was at seventeen, the woman who walked out of prison at twenty-five, and the woman I am today.

I think about everything those versions of me survived and everything they still had to learn.

And I hope that when my daughter grows up and looks at me, she sees a woman who was willing to keep working on herself.

Not a perfect mother.

A real one.

The Pull of the Past

Here’s the part of my story I’m living right now.

For the past year, I’ve been working on myself. I’ve gotten clean, changed the people I spend time with, walked away from things that weren’t good for me, and started building a life that feels different.

I’ve learned how to find peace in silence instead of the echo of my own thoughts.

I’ve learned that chaos isn’t excitement.

I’ve learned that just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s good for me.

And I’ve learned that sometimes the hardest thing to walk away from isn’t a person. It’s the version of yourself that you became around them.

But lately, I’ve found myself finding my way back into the lives of people I walked away from when I was tired.

And I’m torn.

There’s something familiar about those people and places. Sometimes I miss the people. Sometimes I miss the memories. Sometimes I miss the feeling of being wanted, of knowing somebody will be there, of having somewhere to go and somebody to talk to.

Maybe it’s attention.

Maybe it’s loneliness.

Maybe it’s the part of me that still reaches for what it knows because the unknown can be uncomfortable, even when the unknown is better for me.

I don’t know exactly what it is.

I just know the pull is there.

Then there’s another part of me that knows better.

The part that remembers how hard I worked to get here. The part that remembers the tears, the drugs, the mistakes, and the promises I made to myself when I finally decided I couldn’t keep living that way.

That part of me says, Savanna, don’t do this again.

And then there’s that little voice that says I’m already fucking up just by letting myself get close to it.

Maybe I’m scared because I know my own patterns.

I’ve fallen more times than I can count. I’ve made promises before. I’ve told myself I would never go back to certain places, never make certain decisions, never become that person again.

And I’ve had to face the fact that knowing better doesn’t always mean you automatically do better.

I know how easy it is to slip back into something familiar. I know how quickly one decision can turn into another. I know the road back to an old life doesn’t always begin with one huge, dramatic choice.

Sometimes it begins with answering a message.

Showing up somewhere.

Telling yourself this time will be different.

I know those patterns because I’ve lived them.

And I know I might stumble again. I’ve fallen many times in my life, and I can see how those patterns repeat themselves.

But I really don’t want to go back.

I really love the way life has felt over this past year.

I don’t want to lose that peace. I don’t want to spend another few years looking back at decisions I’m making right now and wondering why I couldn’t just leave well enough alone.

I don’t want to rebuild everything again just to prove to myself that I can.

And I don’t want to confuse missing something with needing it back.

Maybe that’s the hardest lesson I’m learning.

You can miss people and still need distance.

You can love people and still recognize that certain situations bring out parts of you that you’re trying to leave behind.

You can want somebody in your life without giving them the same access to you that they once had.

And you can be healing while still feeling the pull of your past.

That doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

It means you’re standing at a place where you have to decide what you want more: the familiarity of what you already know, or the peace you’ve worked so hard to find.

I don’t have every answer.

But I do know I want to protect what I’ve built.

I want to keep growing.

I want to keep becoming the mother my children deserve and the woman that little girl inside me needed.

I want to learn how to miss people without losing myself trying to get back to them.

And I want to stop believing that every familiar door is one I need to walk through.

My Sister, My Past, and the Life Ahead of Me

I think about Crystal a lot.

I think about the little girl who was my whole world. The sister I spent years trying to find my way back to. The woman who had her own battles that I couldn’t always see.

I wish I could tell her about this version of me.

I wish I could tell her that I’m trying. That I’m learning how to live without needing everything to be loud. That I’m learning how to sit in the quiet without feeling like I have to run from it.

I wish I could tell her that I finally understand that surviving something doesn’t mean you have to keep living in survival mode.

I can’t change what happened to her. I can’t get back the years we lost or ask the questions I still carry.

I will always wonder what happened that night. I will always wish we had more time.

But I can keep living.

I can take care of myself. I can keep working toward the life I want. I can love my boys and prepare for my little girl. I can make decisions that give my children a mother who is present, growing, and willing to do the hard work.

I can remember my sister without letting my grief take me away from my own life.

And I can honor the woman I’m becoming by not giving up on her just because the past comes knocking.

I’ve been the little girl who was left behind.

I’ve been the teenager who ran.

I’ve been the woman who lost years, lost people, lost herself, and had to figure out how to start over.

I’ve been angry. I’ve been reckless. I’ve been hurt. I’ve been wrong.

But I’ve also been brave enough to walk away.

Brave enough to get clean.

Brave enough to sit in the silence.

And maybe I need to be brave enough now to protect the peace I’ve found, even when part of me wants to reach back for something familiar.

Because I don’t want to keep living a life where I have to lose everything before I realize what I had.

I want to keep the good things this time.

I want to keep growing.

I want to keep becoming.

The Woman I’m Still Becoming

My name is Savanna L. McKee.

I’m the little girl who was adopted at five. The sister who spent years separated from the people she loved. The kid who ran away searching for her mother. The teenager who made choices that cost her years of freedom. The woman who walked out of prison and had to learn how to live in a world that had kept moving without her.

I’m the woman who fell in love, became a mother, made mistakes, lost things, and kept going.

I’m the woman who lost her baby sister and still carries the anger, the questions, and the grief of that loss.

I’m the woman who spent years confusing chaos with living and is now learning how to be still.

I’m Axel and Kash’s mother.

And I’m carrying a little girl who will soon make me a mother of three.

My past isn’t pretty. There are chapters I wish had gone differently, people I wish I could have held on to, and decisions I will always have to own.

But my past is mine.

I don’t need to pretend it didn’t happen to become somebody worth knowing. I don’t need to erase every mistake to deserve a better future. And I don’t have to be proud of every version of myself to recognize how hard she fought to get me here.

I have lived a lot of life in a short amount of time.

I’ve seen people leave. I’ve seen people change. I’ve learned that love can be real and still not be enough to make two people work. I’ve learned that family can be complicated, that time can take more than you ever expected, and that starting over is a lot harder than people make it sound.

I’ve learned that grief doesn’t follow a schedule.

I’ve learned that getting clean doesn’t mean you never feel the pull of your old life again.

I’ve learned that peace can feel strange when you’ve spent years surrounded by chaos.

And I’ve learned that recognizing an old pattern gives me a chance to choose something different.

I can’t change the beginning of my story.

I can’t go back and give that five-year-old girl the childhood she deserved. I can’t make my sister’s story end differently. I can’t undo every mistake or recover every year I’ve lost.

But I can decide what happens next.

I can protect the peace I’ve found.

I can keep showing up for my children.

I can keep learning how to love people without losing myself.

I can make room for my grief without letting it write every chapter that comes after it.

And I can give myself permission to become somebody different from the girl I once was.

Because sometimes the hardest part of changing your life isn’t walking away from the things that hurt you.

It’s learning not to walk back into them when you’re lonely.

It’s learning that you don’t have to earn love by being needed, that you don’t have to fill every quiet moment, and that you don’t have to return to an old version of yourself just because somebody from your past still recognizes her.

I’ve spent much of my life searching for home.

I searched for my mother.

I searched for my sister.

I searched for love in people who couldn’t always give me what I needed.

I searched for comfort in places that eventually left me emptier than before.

And maybe, all this time, I’ve been learning that home isn’t always a person or a place.

Maybe home is the life you build when you finally stop running.

Maybe it’s a quiet evening with your children. Maybe it’s waking up and being proud that you kept a promise to yourself. Maybe it’s looking at the person you used to be and understanding her without letting her make all your decisions.

Maybe home is finally feeling safe enough to sit still.

I’m not perfect. I’m not finished healing. I still have days when I question myself, when old habits whisper, when grief hits harder than I expect, and when I wonder whether I’m doing any of this right.

But I’m still here.

I’m still trying.

And I don’t want to give up on the life I’ve worked so hard to find.

For the little girl who once held a photograph in the dark and wondered why her mother couldn’t be there.

For the sister I will always miss.

For the boys who call me Mom.

For the little girl who is on her way.

And for the woman I am still becoming.

I owe it to all of them, especially myself, to keep going.

My story isn’t a fairytale. It isn’t a story about getting everything right or finding a perfect ending.

It’s a story about losing, searching, breaking, rebuilding, and learning that a person can carry a lot of pain without having to spend the rest of her life living inside it.

It’s about a little girl named Savanna who wanted to be loved.

It’s about a woman who has made mistakes, survived things she never expected, and is still learning how to choose herself and the life she wants.

It’s about a mother who wants her children to grow up knowing that they are loved, even when life gets hard.

And it’s about somebody who has finally found a little peace and doesn’t want to lose it.

I don’t know what every next chapter will look like.

I don’t know which relationships will mend, which questions will ever find answers, or how many more times I’ll have to learn the same lesson before it finally sticks.

But I know this.

I don’t want to go back to the life I worked so hard to leave.

I want to keep the peace.

I want to keep the progress.

I want to keep becoming the woman I know I can be.

My story began with a little girl who lost her family and went looking for her mother.

It continued with a young woman who lost years of her life trying to find her place in the world.

And today, it continues with a mother who is learning that she can love her past, grieve what she has lost, own what she has done, and still choose a different future.

I’m Savanna L. McKee.

I’m still healing. I’m still learning. I’m still becoming.

And my story isn’t over yet.