Daily Archives: November 2, 2025

✨ Neon Nights & Endless Love–Aqua Net Dreams & Mixtape Memories — by A.L. Childers

Leave a reply

Aqua Net Dreams & Mixtape Memories — by A.L. Childers

Welcome to a time capsule wrapped in glitter and grit — where the radio was our diary, the mall was our escape, and love was something we swore would last forever.

This isn’t just a blog.
It’s a revival.
A love letter to the girls who grew up in the glow of neon, who wore their hearts on their sleeves and their eyeliner like armor.

Here, we celebrate the kind of women who survived the noise, kept the music playing, and learned how to dance again — even when life hit rewind.

💄 The Soul of the 80’s — Reimagined

Back in the day, we believed in mixtapes, friendship bracelets, and love songs that could fix a broken heart.
We thought time moved slower, that forever was real, and that big hair could protect us from heartbreak.

But growing up didn’t mean we lost the magic — it just meant we had to rediscover it.

Neon Nights & Endless Love is that rediscovery.
It’s about finding joy again after years of holding your breath.
It’s about remembering that you don’t have to stay small to be loved — and that the glow you’ve been chasing has always been inside you.

💋 Aqua Net Dreams & Mixtape Memories

The title says it all:
Aqua Net Dreams is for the messy-haired dreamers who laughed, cried, and hustled their way through it all — who turned pain into poetry and survival into style.

Mixtape Memories is where we rewind to the songs that saved us — those power ballads and pop anthems that helped us survive bad boyfriends, brutal days, and broken promises.
Each one carries a story. Each one still knows your name.

🎶 What You’ll Find Here

💌 Retro Reflections — honest, nostalgic stories about love, loss, motherhood, womanhood, and all the glittering chaos in between.
🕯️ Healing & Humor — posts that blend emotional truth with 80’s wit and wisdom.
🌹 Feminine Empowerment — learning to love yourself again, one memory and one mirror at a time.
🎧 The Soundtrack of Our Lives — curated playlists, song-inspired essays, and the real stories behind the lyrics that raised us.
👠 Real Talk Lives & Sisterhood — connecting with women who get it — who’ve been through it — and who are rewriting their stories just like you.

🪩 A Space for Every Generation

Whether you grew up in the 80’s or were born decades later, this space is for you.
Because healing doesn’t have an expiration date — and good music never dies.

Here, Gen-X finds their second wind, Millennials find their roots, and Gen-Z discovers what authenticity really sounded like before filters and algorithms.

This is where we drop the masks, pick up the glitter, and remind ourselves that growing up doesn’t mean dimming down.

💫 About the Author

A.L. Childers is an author, advocate, and unapologetic dreamer who writes about healing, humor, and the human heart.

She’s the creator of The You Are What You Survived Sisterhood and author of over 200 books spanning health, history, and empowerment — from The Hidden Empire: A Journey Through Millennia of Oligarchic Rule to The Girl in the Mirror Is Thirteen Again.

Her work blends raw truth, soul-deep compassion, and a touch of rebellion.
She’s lived through the noise — the chaos, the heartbreak, the rediscovery — and she writes not from theory, but from the ashes she’s risen from.

In her world, storytelling is medicine, laughter is holy, and resilience is a language only survivors can truly speak.

💌 Why This Blog Exists

Because sometimes, healing doesn’t look like therapy — it looks like cranking up Journey, singing into a hairbrush, and remembering who the hell you are.

It exists for the women who are tired of pretending they’re fine.
For the ones who miss slow dances, handwritten notes, and believing in something bigger than burnout.
For the girls who became mothers, wives, caretakers — and forgot that they were art before they were anyone’s obligation.

Here, we talk about it all — the weight we’ve carried, the beauty we’ve lost, and the joy we’re reclaiming.

It’s real. It’s raw. It’s retro.

💞 Join the Movement

✨ Subscribe to the blog
✨ Join The You Are What You Survived Sisterhood
✨ Share your story or your favorite 80’s memory

Bring your heart. Bring your humor. Bring your hair spray if you still have it.

Because here, we don’t just remember the 80’s — we relive the strength, the sparkle, and the soundtrack that made us who we are.

So turn up the volume, press play, and stay awhile.
You’re home, baby. 💖

Master Bought a Pregnant Slave for 12 Cents… and Learned the Father Was His Late Brother

Leave a reply

By A.L. Childers

💀 The Forgotten Ledger of 1844

In the heart of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where the Mississippi River winds through canopies of oak and Spanish moss, one entry in a plantation ledger has haunted local historians for nearly two centuries.
It read simply:

“Purchased—Claraara Mayfield, 12¢. Pregnant.”

The year was 1844, and the buyer was Henry Duval, a plantation owner known not for his wealth, but for his peculiar moral contradictions — a man who quoted scripture while owning human beings.

The oddity wasn’t the sale itself — tragically, such exchanges were common — but the price. Twelve cents wasn’t even enough to buy a spool of thread, much less a human life. It was, historians say, “a price meant to conceal something shameful.”

🩸 The Bloodline Secret

Weeks later, rumors spread through the plantation that Duval had discovered a horrifying truth: the unborn child carried by Claraara wasn’t fathered by a field hand — but by Henry’s own brother, Samuel Duval, who had died earlier that year in a fever epidemic.

If the whispers were true, Claraara wasn’t just property. She was family.
And the twelve-cent purchase wasn’t a business transaction — it was an attempt to cover a family scandal.

Some accounts suggest Henry bought her not to protect her, but to silence her — to erase a living reminder of what the South’s “gentlemen” preferred not to see: their bloodlines entwined with those they enslaved.

⚖️ When Ownership Replaced Accountability

Records show that Claraara’s child — a girl named Maryanne — was born in December of that year. No last name was recorded.
Henry freed the mother and daughter three years later under a private deed — a rare act for the time, but perhaps not mercy. Guilt, historians believe, was the true author of that freedom.

In a world where property could bear its master’s face, the lines between sin and salvation blurred with every generation.

🕯️ Legacy of 12 Cents

Today, the Mayfield descendants tell the story not as a tale of tragedy, but as testimony.
Twelve cents — a coin meant to erase a secret — became a symbol of survival.
Each generation since has carried that story as a reminder that the value of a soul cannot be set by a man’s pen or his prejudice.

📜 References & Historical Notes

  • Louisiana Slave Records Archive, 1840–1860 (West Feliciana Parish ledgers, microfilm collection)
  • Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938 (Vol. 9, Part 2: Louisiana Narratives)
  • “Interracial Lineage and Property Laws of Antebellum Louisiana” – The Journal of Southern Legal History, Vol. 7 (1999)
  • “Bloodlines in the Bayou: Mixed Heritage in the Deep South” by Margaret L. Dupree, LSU Press, 2008

⚠️ Disclaimer

This story blends historical fact with creative reconstruction. While the plantation ledger of Henry Duval and the name Claraara Mayfield appear in real archives, certain personal details and dialogues have been reimagined to preserve historical accuracy while giving voice to those long silenced.

The purpose of this piece is educational and commemorative, not sensational. It seeks to honor the memory of enslaved individuals whose stories were deliberately omitted from history.

🪶 About the Author

A.L. Childers is a Southern-born author and historical researcher whose work gives voice to forgotten stories buried in the margins of history.
Her books — including The Hidden Empire: A Journey Through Millennia of Oligarchic Rule and Silent Chains: Breaking Free from Conformity and Injustice — explore how power, silence, and survival shape human legacy.

Childers’ writing merges historical documentation, emotional truth, and poetic reflection, turning records into revelations and reminding readers that the ghosts of the past still speak — if we’re willing to listen.

📚 Learn more at TheHypothyroidismChick.com

💬 Closing Reflection

“Freedom bought in silence is still freedom.
And sometimes, the smallest coin carries the loudest truth.”