The Strength Found in What’s Absent

Have you ever stopped to notice the little things about your life that feel so normal you rarely think twice about them?

A drawer full of mismatched mugs that tell the story of where you’ve traveled.
A t-shirt from a family vacation.
A kitchen table where meals have been shared for years.

We don’t think about those things because they feel so common, so woven into the background of our lives.

But for our girls, life has not been stitched together with those kinds of ordinary threads. Instead, it has been a cycle of moving—home to home, school to school, caseworker to caseworker. For some of them, by the time they come into our home, they’ve already had 20, 30, even 40 placements.

Imagine that. Forty times of packing up, moving on, and starting over before even turning 16.

And while many of us were guaranteed a place in the world simply because we were born into a family safe, cared for, and rooted, our girls have to stand before a judge and petition just for the chance to have a safe home. Something that should be a right for every child is, for them, something argued and decided in a courtroom full of strangers.

This kind of instability shapes every part of them. Friendships are hard because moving schools so often means gaps in connection, in learning, and sometimes in trust. Education is disrupted, leaving them scrambling to catch up while carrying the invisible weight of trauma most of us can’t begin to fathom.

With that kind of uncertainty, objects often become more dependable than people. A blanket. A stuffed animal. A book that has traveled with them through placement after placement. It’s sobering to realize that, for many of our girls, the most consistent part of their childhood has not been a person, but a possession.

I think of one girl who wouldn’t make eye contact and didn’t want to get out of bed. One day she asked, “How am I supposed to tell someone I love them when I’ve never heard that?”

Imagine never hearing someone say the words I love you. For fifteen years, those words were missing from her life. And yet, by the time she left, she told everyone she loved them daily—because she had finally experienced what it meant to hear it, to feel it, to believe it.

These are not imagined stories. They are real.

The girl who found her voice at 15.
The many girls who stand in a courtroom to argue for safety.
The teen who carried her life in a suitcase through 40 different doors.

And you would be right to say these girls aren’t “normal.” They don’t have the things most of us take for granted as ordinary. But what they do have is something far greater—an extraordinary strength that defies what they’ve endured.

At Tulsa Girls Home, we have the privilege of being part of their journey. Not just to give them a safe place to live, but to remind them that they are chosen. That they are deeply loved. That their story doesn’t have to be defined by instability, but by the hope and future waiting ahead of them.

What amazes us most is watching what happens when they finally find stability.

We see girls come in from failing grades and go on to make A’s.
We see them build strong, lasting friendships for the first time in their lives.
We see them allow themselves to heal emotionally—learning to trust again, to laugh again, to believe again.

These aren’t small victories; they are milestones of growth that reveal the power of resilience when they finally feel protected.

Because while they’ve had to survive with stuffed animals and blankets as their only permanence, we believe they deserve something far more enduring: a true sense of belonging.

And the truth is, so much of this goes unseen. Most people never realize it, yet it’s happening all around us every single day.

But when you truly see it, you can’t help but be changed by the extraordinary strength hidden in their stories.

Written by: Laura Beth, TGH Advocate