Not yet a full judge, but close.
So close.
During these years, I had no contact with my parents.
None.
I did not call them. They did not call me.
I heard through distant relatives that DJ was still working at the agricultural supply company and that Tanya had gotten married in 2016 to a man named Craig Felton who apparently managed a car dealership in Elizabethtown. I heard that my father had retired and that my mother had developed some health issues.
I heard these things and I felt not nothing exactly, but something muted and complicated, a mixture of residual hurt and a strange, uncomfortable indifference.
Zara, meanwhile, was thriving. She was a teenager now, smart and confident and compassionate in a way that made me proud every single day. She was an honor student at duPont Manual High School, one of the best public schools in Kentucky. She played violin in the school orchestra. She volunteered at a homeless shelter on weekends.
And she had a quiet strength about her that reminded me so much of Grandma Lorraine that it sometimes took my breath away.
Zara asked about my parents from time to time. Not often, but occasionally. She wanted to understand why they had done what they did.
I told her honestly that I did not fully understand it myself.
I told her that some people are so controlled by their need for approval from the outside world that they will sacrifice the people closest to them to maintain an image.
I told her that fear and shame can make people do terrible things.
And I told her that forgiving them was something I was still working on, and that it was okay to work on something for a long time without finishing.
In 2019, I was nominated for a circuit court judgeship.
A vacancy had opened up in the family division of the Jefferson Circuit Court, and my name was put forward by the judicial nominating commission.
The process was even more rigorous than the commissioner appointment. I was interviewed by panels of attorneys, evaluated by bar associations, and scrutinized by the public.
My record as a commissioner was reviewed in detail, and my history as a legal aid attorney was examined.
I was transparent about my past. I told the commission that I had been a teenage mother, that I had been homeless, that I had worked my way through school while raising a child.
I told them that my experiences had given me a perspective that many judges did not have, a perspective rooted in empathy, in understanding what it feels like to stand before a system that holds your fate in its hands.
In January of 2020, I was appointed as a judge of the Jefferson Circuit Court Family Division.
I was 32 years old.
I was one of the youngest circuit court judges in the state of Kentucky.
And when I put on the black robe for the first time and sat behind the bench in my own courtroom, I felt the weight of every single moment that had led me there.
Every cold night in the studio apartment.
Every exam I studied for while Zara slept.
Every dollar Grandma Lorraine had scraped together.
Every door that had been closed in my face.
And every door I had kicked open myself.
I wish she could have been there.
I wish Grandma Lorraine could have sat in the gallery and watched me take the bench for the first time.
But I believe she was there in her own way.
I believe she was watching from wherever good people go when they leave this world.
And I believe she was smiling and saying, “I told you so.”
The news of my appointment was published in the local legal journals and newspapers. It was a matter of public record.
And that is when, for the first time in nearly 17 years, my family came knocking.
It started with a phone call from Tanya.
She called me in February of 2020, just weeks after my appointment was announced. She said she had seen my name in the paper and wanted to congratulate me.
Her voice was sweet, almost too sweet, dripping with a warmth that had never been there before.
She said she was so proud of me. She said she always knew I would do something amazing. She said the family talked about me all the time and missed me terribly.
I listened.
I did not interrupt.
And when she finished, I said, “Tanya, you’ve had my phone number for years. You could have called at any time. Why now?”
She stammered something about being busy, about not knowing what to say, about the family going through its own struggles.
I told her I appreciated the call, but that I was not interested in pretending that 17 years of silence meant nothing.
She got quiet.
Then she said, “Well, Mom and Dad would really love to see you.”
I told her I would think about it.
I did not think about it.
Two weeks later, DJ called.
His pitch was different from Tanya’s pitch. He was more direct, more businesslike. He said Mom and Dad were getting older, that Dad had some health concerns, and that it would mean a lot to them if we could all get together as a family.
He also mentioned, almost casually, that he had heard I was doing really well financially.
I asked him where he had heard that.
He said someone in the family had mentioned that Grandma Lorraine had left me something.
I told him that what Grandma Lorraine had or had not left me was none of his business.
He got defensive and said he was not trying to cause trouble.
The call ended awkwardly.
And then in March of 2020, just before the world shut down, I received a letter. Not from Tanya. Not from DJ.
From my parents.
It was written in my mother’s handwriting.
The letter arrived on a Tuesday. It was written on lined paper, the kind you tear out of a spiral notebook, and the handwriting was cramped and slanting to the right the way it always had been.
I recognized it immediately, even after all those years.
Some things your body remembers, even when your mind tries to forget.
I sat at my kitchen table and read it.
It was two pages long.
The first page was a summary of their lives over the past 17 years, presented as though I had been voluntarily absent rather than forcibly removed. My mother wrote about my father’s retirement, Tanya’s health issues, DJ’s wedding, and the grandchildren they now had through DJ and his wife.
She described family Christmases and Thanksgivings as though I had simply chosen not to attend, as though an open invitation had always existed and I had stubbornly declined it.
The second page was where the tone shifted.
My mother wrote that they had recently learned through the family grapevine that Grandma Lorraine had established a substantial trust and that the sole beneficiary was me. She wrote that this had come as a shock to the family because Grandma Lorraine had been my father’s mother and it seemed only fair that Lorraine’s estate should have been distributed among all the grandchildren, not just one.
She wrote that my father was deeply hurt by the decision of his own mother to exclude him and his other children.
And then, at the bottom of the second page, she wrote the sentence that told me everything I needed to know about why they had suddenly reappeared in my life:
We believe the right thing to do would be for you to share what Lorraine left with the rest of the family. After all, we are still your parents, and family takes care of family.
I put the letter down and laughed.
Not because it was funny, but because it was so perfectly, painfully predictable.
Seventeen years of silence.