Let me tell you who I am. I am a survivor, a teenage mother, a welfare recipient, and a woman. I am a teacher, life coach, minister, lawyer, and author. I've had my share of breakups, breakdowns, and breakthroughs. I did my work and put my life back together piece by piece. I am I

Yianna Van Zand, and I am here to help you do your work.

Well, it is sunny here in Birmingham, Alabama, but it is cold as broken. Two sisters wrote me. they are desperate to repair the broken relationship with their mother.

It is hard to be a woman and to have a broken relationship with your mother, because your mother really gives you your identity as a woman.

I feel like now I have a sense of brokenness because my mom didn't protect me.

Kim is a 33-year-old mother of two.

She and her husband, Joe, have made their home here in Birmingham.

I've tried to mend the relationship, and those have all been my efforts.

Kim's sister Annette is 31 and single. She's coming in today from her

hometown of Baltimore. Life is short, and it's not God's will for my life to be bitter

towards my mom. Kim and Annette say that when they were little girls, their mom, Charlene,

chose to be with controlling and abusive men,

and they paid the price. They say one of those men physically abused and emotionally neglected them.

They say their deepest hurt is that their mother knew and did nothing.

We were starved. I was locked in rooms. I was forced to use drugs.

It was horrible.

As a mother, I still cannot grasp the understanding of how you can trade your child for a man.

I can't get past that.

Almost two decades later, and after many bad choices, their mother is broke and depending

on the daughters she emotionally abandoned to provide for her.

It went from cell phone bills to can you get a loan for me, to can you put the cable bill

in your name, ultimately providing for her.

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