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⚠️ Content Warning: This post discusses child sexual abuse, sexual assault, trauma, infidelity, sexual addiction recovery, and the criminal justice system. It is intended for adult readers (18+). Please read with care and take breaks if you need them.
The Story Behind a Title I Didn’t Choose—but Absolutely Kept
There are book titles you brainstorm.
There are book titles you workshop until something finally fits.
And then there are book titles somebody hands you in the middle of one of the hardest seasons of your life.
Uncooperative as a Mother is that kind of title.
I didn’t invent it.
I reclaimed it.
For 1,190 days, our family lived between my daughters’ disclosure of sexual abuse and the sentencing of the person who harmed them.
During those years, I learned that there is a particular kind of parent who is easier for the justice systems to work with.
One who trusts the process.
Answers the questions, and doesn’t ask too many of her own.
Doesn’t challenge inaccurate statements or insist that the record be corrected.
Doesn’t require a court order when she believes a court order is appropriate.
And doesn’t make professionals uncomfortable by remembering exactly what was said, when it was said, and what happened next.
Apparently, I was not that mother.
And I’m perfectly comfortable keeping the title.
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I Was Their Mother First
I wasn’t trying to make anyone’s job difficult.
I was trying to do mine.
That distinction became one of the most important lessons of our journey through the justice system.
I could respect someone’s professional role without surrendering my parental one.
I could cooperate with an investigation without teaching my children that every adult with a title was automatically entitled to have access to them.
A title does not guarantee that someone will respect a boundary, honor a no, protect a child, tell the truth, or follow the basic rules of healthy human interaction.
Not professional titles.
Not positions of authority.
Not even familial ones.
My daughters had already paid far too high a price for that lesson.
I wasn’t going to teach them the opposite simply because the adults surrounding them wanted me to let my guardrails down.
Detective. Advocate. Attorney. Judge.
Some of those people would prove themselves worthy of our trust and gratitude. Others would make mistakes. Some would push against reasonable, and ethical boundaries.
But access to my children was never going to be something automatically granted.
They needed to see that healthy adults can hear no.
Healthy adults can explain why.
And trustworthy adults don’t become less trustworthy because a mother asks them to demonstrate that they are safe.
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I Was Already an Advocate
This experience with the justice system didn’t turn me into an advocate.
I had been advocating for my people for years.
I advocated for my husband. I advocated for children with exceptional needs. I had already learned to research, ask questions, communicate with professionals, challenge assumptions, translate needs, recognize when something wasn’t working, and keep going when someone I loved didn’t have the capacity to do it themselves.
I knew how to stand beside my family.
What I hadn’t anticipated was having that advocacy expanded, without trying, to include standing between my family and the legal system.
And the legal system didn’t always appreciate having to go through me to get to them.
But that was exactly where I intended to stand.
I wasn’t standing in the way of justice.
I was making sure justice didn’t require my family to surrender their humanity to participate in it.
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Sometimes Systems Forget the People Inside Them
And ours did. At one point, we had been forgotten.
Not essentially forgotten.
Not it felt like we had been forgotten.
We had been forgotten by both the advocates assigned to our family and the county attorney who had taken over the case while carrying an overwhelming caseload.
Meanwhile, our family was still living inside what had happened.
My daughters were still carrying it. We were still waiting.
Those experiences are part of Uncooperative as a Mother.
But they aren’t the whole story.
Because the justice system wasn’t one person, one office, one attorney, one advocate, one detective, one courtroom, or one failure.
There were also people who treated us with humanity. People who remembered us.
People who listened.
People who gave us information.
People who respected our boundaries.
People who believed my daughters.
People who did their jobs well.
People for whom I remain deeply grateful.
One advocate appreciated my very no-nonsense perspective enough to invite me into a focus group for families like ours. I spent more than a week before the group warning her that I was not going to give a particularly flattering account of every interaction we’d had—including being forgotten.
She still wanted me there, and I respected that.
Because accountability and appreciation can occupy the same story and This book allows them to.
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1,190 Days Wasn’t Just a Legal Case
The legal process had a timeline. Our family still had a life. For 1,190 days, those things existed simultaneously.
There were interviews, emails, phone calls, waiting, hearings, trial preparation, trial, verdicts, and eventually sentencing.
There were also breakfasts.
Laundry.
School.
Birthdays.
Illnesses.
Appointments.
Marriage.
Sibling arguments.
Groceries.
Holidays.
And a baby growing from infancy into a little girl while the adults around her carried something she could not possibly understand.
Our youngest daughter entered our family as we were stepping into this journey. Her earliest years unfolded alongside everything, and strengthened our determination not to allow what had happened to her sisters to become the only story our family was permitted to live.
Because Uncooperative as a Mother isn’t primarily a book about the person who harmed my children. That would be disrespectful to them.
It’s about what happened afterward.
It’s about disclosure and advocacy. Marriage and motherhood. Boundaries and systems. The people who helped and the people who didn’t. The long stretches of waiting when life somehow had to continue anyway.
Most importantly, it’s about them, and the people who played roles in obtaining justice.
Victim.
Witness.
Defendant.
Parent.
Advocate.
Case number.
Those were words the legal system needed.
But we were always people first.
I refused to forget that—and I refused to quit reminding people of that fact when they forgot.
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Nobody Handed Me a Playbook
One of the strangest parts of walking through the criminal justice system as a family, specifically as the victims’ family, was discovering how much we were expected to navigate without anyone really telling us how.
There wasn’t a playbook sitting on my kitchen counter explaining how to support my children through disclosure, interviews, waiting, trial, verdicts, and sentencing while simultaneously protecting our marriage, caring for their siblings, running a household, and keeping myself functional enough to advocate for everyone.
So during trial week, I started writing…I brain-dumped what I had learned.
We had been told repeatedly that this was a “game.”
Fine. I had years of experiences and time to do it.
I’d write the playbook.
Consider it my trial-week bazinga.
I didn’t have much bandwidth left for puns.
That work eventually became Rooted in Justice, a resource built from lessons I would have preferred never to learn firsthand—and, somewhat ironically, from some of the very mistakes and missteps that demonstrated why families need something like it.
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The Advocate Needs People, Too
I also learned something else during those 1,190 days:
The person carrying everyone else still needs somewhere to put the weight.
There were days I was carrying my daughters.
Days I was carrying my husband.
Days I was carrying details, dates, phone calls, emails, boundaries, questions, appointments, household logistics, and the emotional weight of knowing that something had happened, but I couldn’t make this go anywhere faster.
There were things I couldn’t put on my children.
There were things I couldn’t always put on my husband.
And there were days when other people quietly helped carry me.
That’s why this story includes them, too.
No family makes it through 1,190 days alone.
And Then There Were the Fancy Fingers
Eventually, there was sentencing.
I dressed comfortably because I wasn’t dressing for the person being sentenced, the attorneys, or anyone else in that courtroom.
I was dressing for me.
And because it was March, I put on long green fake nails with gold middle fingers.
My family called them my fancy fingers.
They were present with purpose…
After years of communicating inside everyone else’s procedures, and with an understanding that I would have to appear “unbothered,” it was one tiny way to say something entirely on my own terms. But, silently.
Which may be one of the better summaries of Uncooperative as a Mother.
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Flock First. Fierce Always.
This isn’t a book about being difficult for the sake of being difficult.
I don’t believe advocacy requires automatically distrusting professionals.
I don’t believe every system is bad or every person inside one is the enemy.
And I certainly don’t believe “uncooperative” should mean refusing everything simply because you can.
Discernment is the point.
Know what you’re agreeing to.
Ask questions.
Understand why.
Document what matters.
Respect expertise without abandoning your own responsibility.
Recognize good people when you encounter them.
Tell the truth when something goes wrong.
Protect your dignity, and that of the people you are responsible for.
Honor boundaries…yours and others.
Remember the humans behind the paperwork.
And know who you are responsible for.
I knew exactly who I was responsible for. My Treehouse Ten.
That is the thread underneath this book and so much of the way I live:
Flock first. Fierce always.
Sometimes fierce looks like fighting.
Sometimes it looks like gratitude.
Sometimes it looks like another email, another question, another boundary, another uncomfortable conversation, or another reminder that the names printed on someone’s paperwork belong to actual human beings.
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Why I Wrote Uncooperative as a Mother
I didn’t write this book because I believe our experience should become somebody else’s blueprint.
Families are different.
Children are different.
Cases are different.
Systems are different.
I wrote it because I wanted to offer something I desperately needed during those years:
A view from inside the family unit. Specifically, a parent’s perspective.
Not only what happens in interviews and courtrooms, but what happens at home afterward.
What happens while you’re waiting.
What happens to the siblings.
What happens to the marriage.
What happens when the system makes mistakes.
What happens when someone gets it right.
What happens to the person doing the advocating.
What I wish someone had told me.
What I would do differently.
What I would absolutely do again.
And what can happen when a mother who is expected to cooperate understands that cooperation and compliance are not the same thing—and neither one outranks her responsibility to her children.
If that makes me uncooperative?
Okay.
Find More of Nicole’s Books here
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Nicole Burch is a Trim Healthy Lifestyle Coach, author, and holistic family life mentor helping women and families rebuild through rooted rhythms, personal governance, and sustainable living. Blending nourishment, discernment, and restoration, she guides others toward resilience, peace, and healing—creating lives that are grounded, aligned, and nurtured at home.
Wellness That Withstands.
Rooted. Resilient. Restored.
trim healthy coach disclosure
Nicole Burch is a Certified Trim Healthy Mama Lifestyle Coach, independently offering services based on the THM plan. This coach is not an employee or agent of Trim Healthy Mama, LLC. Coaching services are independently managed, and THM is not responsible for results, business practices, or claims made by this coach.
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