SARAPHINA Mare
A writer, speaker, and healer whose work comes from lived experience, truth-telling, and years of healing.
The name Saraphina Mare is who I became after years of surviving, healing, and finding my voice again. Mare means sea. It fits the rhythm of my life; moving through storms, tides, and still water. Call me Mare. Before that name, I was just a girl trying to figure out where I belonged.
My mom was in foster care. I was adopted. For years I carried what that meant to me: unwanted, unloved, rejected, not good enough. Sometimes I heard those words. Sometimes they were implied. Sometimes I just felt them.
Loss came early. By fifteen I wasn't speaking to my birth father. At sixteen I lost my adopted dad and grandfather. June 5, 1995 at the age seventeen, my birth mom died. Before I was even grown, loss had already changed everything.
At eighteen I had my daughter. Her due date? June 5, 1996. Even while I was still figuring out my own life, I knew one thing: I didn't want her carrying my same wounds about belonging.
I finished high school. Went to dental assisting school. Built a life for us. Married. Divorced. Remarried. Learned life doesn't go how you think it will when you're young. The hardest loss was my grandmother, the woman who raised me.
In my late thirties, I thought becoming a foster parent would heal what I was still carrying. Give a kid the home I needed.
One kid became five. Four in foster care, one adopted.
What I didn't get yet was how unhealed pain shows up everywhere. Those old feelings, unwanted, unloved, rejected, not good enough, came up every day. In me. In the kids I was caring for.
My pain became their problem. Their trauma became mine.
My marriage struggled. My health fell apart, autoimmune disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Meanwhile I was starting nonprofits, joining others, serving on boards, trying to fix everything around me while I was breaking inside.
Then it hit me: I couldn't help my kids heal if I wouldn't heal myself.
So I started the real work. Not just getting by. Healing.
That's where Saraphina Mare came from.
Now I write, speak, and do healing work to tell the whole story, foster care, adoption, trauma, healing. Not to look perfect. To be honest about what this life actually takes.
Through Low Tide Lighthouse, I help foster and adoptive parents with real clarity and support wherever they are in their journey.
At the heart of it all is one thing.
A woman who decided she wouldn't carry her story alone anymore.
You were never what they said you were.