How is you relationship with your mom? I’m very blessed to have a close relationship with mine. She isn’t just my mother, but she’s one of my closest friends. We used to hang out quite a bit before I moved to Georgia, and even with the miles between us, we talk frequently.

My mother is a mama bear too. She is fiercely protective of her children and will come out guns blazing to protect us all. You can imagine my horror when I talked with, not one, but two women separately this weekend and they both said verbatim,

My mother was my first pimp.”

It wasn’t like I was attending a conference for victims of sex trafficking or sexual abuse. These two ladies and I happened to meet and start talking to get to know one another. We jumped from hello to My mother was my first pimp before I saw it coming. I was stunned.

I have written several posts about pimps and pimping. I wrote a post about what a pimp looks like. You can read it here. I’ve written about how pimps are smart, which you can find here. I’ve even written about how we can unknowningly pimp survivors by asking them to do things for us that we believe are good for them in the healing process. You can read about it here.  But never have I written about a mother pimping out her daughter. It is because I couldn’t fathom someone carrying a child for nine months, giving birth to her and then handing her over to someone to abuse and sexually torture… but it happens.

The very person who should be the protector and defender in these women’s lives became the abuser and the peddler. Apart from Jesus, I don’t know how you come back from that with any sanity. I just don’t!

Thankfully, Jesus died on the cross for every sin, those we did ourselves and those done to us.

What do you do when someone shares that with you? When someone tells you they had no protector or defender in their childhood and teen years? Honestly, there’s nothing you can do, but you know One who can do something. He can take away the pain, the hurt and heal the wounds. He take the ugliness of what they lived through and use it for good [Romans 8:28].

If you are blessed with a loving mother, even if she isn’t perfect, thank God for her and thank her for loving you. If your mother is like mine, she didn’t have the perfect child either. [I know that comes as a shock to you.]

For those of you with children, hug them and let them know that you love them. It will make all the difference in the world.