The Butterfly Knight: A mother's courageous journey from fear to freedom

As a mother of two young boys, one repeatedly hospitalized due to complications from Goldenhar syndrome, which continuously threatened his life, Angie Cross wanted to define her role in the lives of her children. As she strived to define herself, she was haunted by an image from her childhood of the butterfly collections in her father s entomology lab. There, displayed on a table in front of her, were a dozen beautiful wooden boxes with glass lids, handmade by her father. Each one contained the most unique, fragile, and exquisite jewels she had ever seen. As she ran her fingers gingerly over the surface of each box, pressing her nose to the glass, she could see that each winged beauty was carefully and painstakingly categorized, organized, labeled, and pinned to a white background. As this recollection pierced her heart, a shocking question began to rise from the deep. In her desperate attempt to understand her impact and position in the journey of her two sons lives, had she painstakingly placed them in a similar box? And then, from an even deeper place, was she in such a box of her own?