A Message to Every Survivor Still Healing: You Are Not Your Trauma
Tina Strambler has a message for anyone still carrying the weight of their past. It’s a message she wishes someone had whispered to her during the long nights at High Sky Children’s Ranch, when she lay in bed wondering where her brother was sleeping. It’s a message she needed to hear during the years she […]
The Scars on My Thighs: Why I Stopped Hiding My Past
There are parts of abuse that live beyond memory. They live in the body. Long after the details blur, the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. For Tina Strambler, those memories are etched into her skin. “Even now, decades later, I still carry scars on the outside of my thighs,” she says quietly. […]
13 Years in Foster Care: The Truth About Growing Up “In the System”
When people hear that a child spent 13 years in foster care, they often imagine one thing: institutions. Cold halls. Rigid schedules. Kids drifting in and out with no real connections. Loneliness. Detachment. Children growing up without roots. Tina Strambler is here to tell a different story. “High Sky wasn’t like that,” she says of […]
The Simple Act of Kindness That Changed Everything: A Sack Lunch Story
It wasn’t a grand gesture. There was no ceremony, no speeches, no dramatic rescue. It was just a brown paper sack, handed over quietly in a fifth-grade lunchroom. But for Tina Strambler, that sack lunch changed everything. “Sometimes it’s not the big moments that save you,” Strambler reflects. “Sometimes it’s a brown paper sack, a […]
Becoming the Mother I Never Had: Breaking Generational Cycles
When Tina Strambler held her firstborn son in her arms at twenty years old, she felt something she had never experienced before: belonging. “He was mine,” she says simply. “Truly mine. Not the system’s. Not a judge’s. Not a caseworker’s. He was a piece of me that no one could take away.” That moment in […]
How I Learned to Forgive My Mother Without Forgetting the Pain
Forgiveness, Tina Strambler says, is one of the hardest things she has ever learned to do. “It wasn’t a moment,” she explains. “It wasn’t a prayer. It wasn’t a decision I made once and never struggled with again. It was a process. A long one. A painful one. A necessary one.” For years, Strambler carried […]
The Moment Everything Changed: When a Teacher Noticed My Bruises
Some moments in life divide everything into before and after. For Tina Strambler, one of those moments happened in a small school nurse’s office with faded posters on the walls and a cold, crinkly sheet on the exam table. She was in kindergarten or maybe first grade—still little enough that her feet didn’t touch the […]
What Foster Care Taught Me About Real Family (It’s Not About Blood)
When people ask Tina Strambler who raised her, she never has just one answer. “I wasn’t brought up by a single set of parents, or a single home, or a single influence,” she explains. “I was raised by a village.” That village was High Sky Children’s Ranch in Midland, Texas, where Strambler spent 13 years […]
