(based on the novel, Because of Mindy Wiley)
When she told me my father wasn’t dead,
but alive,
then told me he wasn’t my father
after all,
I realized the only people I could ever know
for sure—
that they were who they said they were—
were my children.
Yet, the first would leave me for the faith I had left behind,
the last, for the faith of the mother I had simply left,
so that I lost them both to God—
that same God who had labored for me,
rescuing me from the rubble and ruin
my mother had made of my life,
and all because of one lie.