About Stephanie King

I didn't grow up without a father. I grew up with one who came and went, warm enough to make me hope, and gone long enough to make me doubt everything that hope told me.

At fourteen, in the middle of an argument that had nothing to do with me, I learned that the man I called my father was not my biological father. I had been conceived through a sperm donor. I didn't get to discover this on my own terms. It was thrown at me like a grenade in someone else's fight.

I now had two fathers. One who arrived and left. And one who had never been there at all.

At thirty-four I submitted a DNA test and eventually found enough to reach my donor father’s family. His brother responded on his behalf and said he was was proud of me from a distance. Glad I existed but unwilling to be known. He declined to meet me and asked for privacy. I felt the rejection land. And then I did what I had always done, swept it under the rug and kept moving.

All my life, I did what daughters like us do. I kept moving. I achieved. I managed. I held everything together and made it look like strength. I served in the Army. At a young age, I reached the Executive level in the Department of Defense. I climbed to Vice President at a relocation company. And I started several non-profits and businesses. I became the woman who could handle anything, because somewhere along the way I had decided that being needed was the closest thing to being chosen.

It took me a long time to understand that every pattern in my life, who I loved, how I worked, what I tolerated, what I chased, traced back to the same place.

That understanding became the Father Wound Cycle™. Not a theory I read in a book. A map I built from the inside out, from my own healing, from the women I walked alongside in the Army, in my community, in my monthly women's group, and in the lives of young women, including friends of my own daughters, who were carrying wounds they didn't yet have words for.

Today I am a wife and a mother of three daughters. I watch my husband show up for them every single day, consistently, without conditions, and I understand now what I was missing and what I spent decades trying to find in every wrong place.

This book is what I wish someone had handed me at fourteen.

It is for you.

-Stephanie