I was sixteen, a junior in high school, when two lines on a test changed everything. My mother was incarcerated. My father had another family — one that made it clear, more than once, that I wasn't really part of it. The only steady thing in my life was a boyfriend just as young and just as unmoored as I was. We were both staying at a friends house because neither of us really had a stable family of our own.
When I found out I was pregnant, the first voice I heard was my own, and it was cruel. You have to end this. You can't even take care of yourself — how are you going to take care of a baby? You'll ruin both your lives. I believed every word of it.
Because I was a minor, I needed my mother's consent for an abortion. So I went to the jail where she was being held. I sat down across from her, behind thick glass, and the apology poured out of me before I even said what I was apologizing for. I told her I was pregnant. I told her I needed her to sign off on a abortion.
She said no.
I couldn't understand it. She was incarcerated, and in the same breath she was telling me to rise to something. I got angry — I said things I'm not proud of, about her own past, about what right she had to tell me anything. She didn't get angry back. She got quiet, and then she got honest, telling me about a choice from her own past that she carried grief over to this day, something she said she could never take back or undo. And in that moment, sitting in a visiting room with a wall of glass between us, everything went still.
I understood, for the first time, that this wasn't a mistake to be erased. It was a life — one I hadn't asked for, but one I was already being trusted with. I didn't have proof that things would work out. I just had a feeling that I wasn't actually alone in it.
Even though my mother wasn't there when my son was born. She was still behind bars. But I was not without help — I carried a strength through that season that I know wasn't mine to begin with.
That's where this shirt comes from.
Jeremiah 1:5 says God knew us before He formed us in the womb. John 1:4 says in Him was life, and that life was the light of men. Long before an ultrasound ever finds a heartbeat, before science can measure the spark — the Source was already there. That's the whole design, distilled: science saw the spark, but Scripture knew the Source.
This piece isn't a slogan I picked because it sounded good on a tee. It's the conviction I was handed in a jailhouse visiting room at sixteen, and it's the one I still stand on.
If you're wearing this shirt, or thinking about it, know what it's carrying: it's for anyone who's ever stood where I stood — certain they don't have what it takes, sure they're too broken, too young, too alone. You're not the first to feel that. And you're not without The Source, either.
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