Mama Mothy Publishing
Haven
By Mama Mothy
About This Book
Haven
Haven is the story of an ordinary woman carrying an extraordinary amount of invisible history. Childhood hurt became adult hurt in different forms, but life continued anyway. She isn’t healed. She isn’t a hero. She doesn’t forgive everything. She’s simply Haven—living one day at a time, noticing the people around her, and still stopping when someone needs a hand.
The Story
The Story
Haven has spent a lifetime learning how to keep going. Her childhood was shaped by pain, punishment, neglect, and experiences no child should have been expected to understand. She grew up, and from the outside, life changed. The people changed. The circumstances changed. The ways she was hurt changed. But growing up did not make everything easier. Haven follows one ordinary woman through childhood and adulthood as she carries the weight of what came before while continuing to face what comes next. She is not on a journey toward becoming perfectly healed. She does not forgive simply because someone is sorry, and she does not believe suffering automatically makes a person stronger. She gets hurt. She makes mistakes. She gets angry. She laughs. She loves. She gets tired. She wakes up the next day and somehow keeps living. And while carrying a life that others cannot see, Haven still notices the people around her. Sometimes she helps. Sometimes she can’t. Sometimes she simply lives. This is not the story of an extraordinary woman. It is the story of an ordinary one whose history is invisible to almost everyone who meets her.
Character
Who Is Haven?
Haven is ordinary. She is the woman you pass in the grocery store, the person standing beside you in line, or the stranger who stops when you need help even though you never thought to wonder what kind of day she was having.
She has been hurt, and she has hurt others. She has made mistakes, carried anger, laughed at inappropriate times, loved deeply, and sometimes simply tried to make it through another day. There is nothing about looking at Haven that tells you where she has been or what she carries with her.
She isn’t a hero or a martyr, and she is not here to prove that suffering makes people stronger. Haven is simply a woman living with everything that has happened to her while facing everything that continues to happen.
Some days she helps someone else stand. Some days she struggles to stand herself.
And some days, she just lives.
Behind the Book
Why Tell This Story?
There are women everywhere carrying lives no one around them can see. They go to work, raise families, buy groceries, laugh with strangers, make mistakes, get angry, help people, go home, and wake up to do it all again the next day.
Their lives may look ordinary because, in many ways, they are.
Pain does not always announce itself. Trauma does not always look like someone falling apart, and surviving does not always end with healing, forgiveness, or a triumphant story about becoming stronger.
Sometimes surviving simply looks like living.
Haven is for the women who understand that. The ones who have been hurt and still stop when someone else needs help. The ones who can understand someone without forgiving what they have done. The ones who carry their own darkness without allowing it to decide how they treat everyone they meet.
This story does not exist to celebrate suffering. It exists to acknowledge the people living alongside it.
To say, quietly:
I see you.
You were here, too.
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Symbolism
Moths are ordinary creatures. They are often overlooked, dismissed, or compared to butterflies as though beauty belongs to one and not the other. Yet there are thousands of kinds of moths, each existing in its own way.
Some moths cause damage. Some are responsible for pollination that might not happen without them. Some are breathtakingly beautiful, while others will live their entire lives without anyone stopping long enough to notice them. And some moths simply live.
Haven is much the same. She does not need to turn into something more beautiful, more useful, or more extraordinary for her life to have value. She can carry darkness and still offer light. She can be hurt and still stop for someone else. She can make mistakes, cause harm, help others, or sometimes do nothing remarkable at all.
The moth is not a symbol of transformation.
It is a symbol of existence.
You do not have to become a butterfly to deserve your place in the world.
Why a Moth?
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A Note
Before You Read
Haven contains difficult and sometimes explicit experiences involving childhood abuse, sexual violence, neglect, emotional abuse, illness, family conflict, betrayal, and other forms of trauma that continue into adulthood.
These experiences are not included for shock value. They are part of Haven’s life, and they are told from the perspective of someone living through them, remembering them, and trying to understand what they meant.
Some moments may be uncomfortable, upsetting, or familiar in ways you were not expecting. Please take care of yourself while reading. Skip a page, close the book, walk away, or decide that this is not a story you want to continue.
You do not owe a book your discomfort simply because you started reading it.
Haven will still be here if you choose to come back.
Status
Current Status
In Development
Haven has existed before.
The story was written through childhood and into adulthood, but somewhere along the way, the adult years were lost. Rather than trying to reconstruct only the missing pieces, I decided to return to the beginning.
So Haven’s story is being written again, from the start.
Some of what existed before remains. Some has changed as old memories have been revisited and given new words. Other pieces are being written for the first time, connecting a childhood already told to the adulthood that followed.
There is no release date yet. This is a story that needs to be written at its own pace.
For now, Haven is simply moving forward again, one page and one year at a time.
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