Hello there TeamConfessioners. Christine and Dave are back today for our third and final chapter of our time together. Parts I and II will be linked in the show notes. Today we talk about how to respond when the hardest things in life don’t happen to you—but to your child. The Patenaudes share the terrifying night an intruder was discovered by their daughter in their home, and the overwhelming road of healing they’re still navigating. 

Let’s jump right in here for the final part of our three part conversation…

Transcript: Confession time Team —This is just a transcript of our conversation and it favors function over perfection. So yes — there will be typos, and moments where the transcript program just gave up. Please read with grace (and maybe your imagination).

Mags: Well, now that we’ve kind of gone through both of you experiencing these major things, I’d love to move on to what happens when your child goes through something. If you want to talk a little bit about that experience.

Christine: It’s a little surreal. Our home was broken into, and our daughter had an attempted assault on her in the middle of the night. It’s probably a parent’s worst nightmare. If you had said to me that someone would break into my house and try to assault my daughter, I would have said that’s impossible. I don’t live in an area like that. It was an unfathomable situation. To this day I’m still trying to figure it all out. We’ve enlisted the help of an incredible therapist who deals with trauma, both for our daughter and for us as a family. It happened in the middle of the night and my husband was living in a different state. By the grace of God, our 15-year-old daughter looked at this man in the pitch-black, kicked him down the stairs, and chased him down three flights of stairs so aggressively that he dropped his cell phone. Without that phone we never would have known who he was or that he lived in our neighborhood.

Mags: Mm-hmm.

Christine: It took about a month for them to capture him. He was a 30-year-old man living in our neighborhood who had multiple restraining orders from different women in different states. This whole situation gave us a huge education in the law and how often it favors the perpetrator.

Mags: Even when this was a stranger lying in wait, in your home.

Christine: What’s interesting is that detectives initially thought she must have known him, which was not the case. Later they actually apologized to her and told her how brave she was. The judge even said that at one point. This was a process that went on for more than a year. She was the only person who could tell the story, so she had to go to the pretrial and testify. Her testimony was what ultimately got him indicted. She agreed to testify again at trial, and at the last minute he took a plea deal because he could have faced 20 years. Because of her bravery, he is now a convicted felon serving time in prison.

Mags: Wow.

Christine: At the sentencing we were able to give victim impact statements. Afterward, a man came up behind us and said, “Thank you. I’m here for my daughter. She suffered abuse from him for four years and couldn’t come today.” For a year we kept hearing how he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then suddenly there was the reality of another victim standing right there.

Mags: Yeah, the history that nobody hears in court.

Christine: Exactly. And Dave and I had no blueprint for how to handle something like this.

Mags: And when you go through cancer or job loss, you can call someone who’s been through it. Nobody has this experience. Before we go any further, though, I just have to pause and say what a badass your daughter is.

Christine: I called Dave immediately when it happened. It was three in the morning.

Mags: Let me interject for a moment because listeners might not realize—you were also in the house. You heard the scream.

Christine: Yes.

Mags: So you went through this as well.

Christine: We ran into my bedroom and locked the door and called Dave. We had the attacker’s phone, and the background image on it looked like our beach neighborhood. Somehow Dave got from two flights away to our house by 9:30 that morning.

Dave: You were also in shock. My daughter chased this creep out of the house, but my wife was there too. The guy had to pass her bedroom to get upstairs. Her home is her sanctuary, and suddenly that sanctuary was violated. The crazy part is that I normally never answer my phone at night—it’s always on vibrate. But for some reason it rang at three in the morning and I picked it up. She told me someone had been in the house. I told her to lock the doors and call the police, and I jumped on the first flight I could get.

If it wasn’t for my daughter chasing him down the stairs and causing him to drop his phone, we never would have known who it was. He lived three blocks away. She showed incredible toughness that night. But the emotional fallout for her has been immense. She’s the kind of person who keeps things close to the vest. Our older daughter would talk about everything. This one doesn’t. Only now, almost a year later, is she starting to open up about the trauma.

Christine: The first person she was willing to talk to was actually you, Mags.

Mags: I didn’t know that.

Christine: Our friendship goes back years, and you’ve always shown up authentically for our family. Those little check-ins you would send her—just saying hi—were enough for her at the time because she couldn’t open up to anyone else yet.

Dave: That was pretty soon after the incident, and it’s taken nearly a year for her to open up to anyone else. The trust there was huge.

Mags: One of the things Tayte said was that sometimes you just have to back away from teenagers and give them space. Even if you know they need help, you just keep offering it.

Christine: I’m not going to lie—that was hard. Every instinct in me wanted to say, “Eat your broccoli,” you know? But I had to be patient and let it be on her terms. Even now I don’t know if what we’re doing will work, but it’s the next step. I choose to believe there’s something bigger than me guiding this.

Mags: Like being a steward of the recovery instead of controlling it.

Christine: Exactly.

Dave: This is going to be a lifelong process for her. The other day she told me she slept with the lights off for the first time since it happened. That’s a big step. When something like this happens you’re always looking over your shoulder. As a father, not being there that night carries guilt for me. Everyone processes these things differently. She’s finally starting counseling and said it helped. Being able to talk to someone outside the family is important because sometimes kids don’t want to burden their parents with their feelings.

Mags: And you’ve set a great example for her in how you handle difficult things. The fact that she’s willing to keep healing is huge.

Christine: It’s wonderful that people praise her bravery, and she deserves that. But there’s also fear and anger and trauma underneath it. We can’t ignore that side of the story either.

Mags: That’s really helpful to hear. Sometimes praising bravery can unintentionally leave no space for vulnerability.

Christine: Exactly. That’s only one side of the story. Only recently has she been able to even consider going there emotionally.

Dave: And for friends on the outside, the most important thing is just letting someone know you’re there. You don’t have to have the right words. Just hold space.

Mags: Mm-hmm.

Dave: Say, “I’ve got your back. If you need me, call me.” Even if they never call, knowing that support exists matters. It takes a village.

Christine: And sometimes just leaving a message and saying you don’t need to call back means everything.

Mags: I do that a lot.

Christine: And it’s priceless, because it reminds you that you’re not alone.

Dave: We’re fortunate to have great friends and family. Not everyone has that, and it can be very isolating without it.

Mags: I would argue the reason you have that community is because of who you are. People are drawn to your resilience and the way you face hard things. Watching you two create this link back to shore—through therapy, friendships, humor, spirituality, and support—has been incredible. It never looked like drowning from the outside. It looked like treading water and building a path back to land.

Christine: Mm-hmm.

Mags: Thank you both for sharing your story today.

Christine: Thank you, Mags.

Dave: Thank you, Mags.