Freyja Rain

05/24/2026

https://a.co/d/01tuNozY

Fur-ever Homes: A Coloring Book Celebrating Rescue, Love, & Second Chances: Volume I

05/24/2026

Okay guys it’s officially available on Amazon. Check the list to make sure your pet is included. If I missed anyone, let me know and it will be in the next volume. https://a.co/d/01tuNozY

05/10/2026

***Big announcement***
Being released soon
This is the 3rd and final book in the Still Here series on chronic illness. Watch for future release date. Love you guys and thank each and every one of you for your support!!

Beth

03/20/2026

Get your submissions in before the 30th. You can drop your pets photo, name and adoption date in the comments.

02/24/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1GYDRNot9w/?mibextid=wwXIfr

01/20/2026

My Ex, A Rhyming Public Service Announcement

My ex had the swagger of someone profound,
with the follow-through of a lost Bluetooth sound.
He talked a big game like a man with a plan,
but plans made him itch and responsibility ran.

He said “I’m a catch” with alarming belief,
like sir, you’re a coupon for disappointment and grief.
All confidence, no actual skills,
a walking red flag with a ton of unpaid bills.

He hated “drama,” said it daily, in fact,
while starting it fresh like a hobby he tracked.
He’d light the next fuse, then act so confused,
like chaos just happened while he watched the news.

Every argument started with “you’re too intense,”
said by a man scared of emotional expense.
Then he’d shut down, go silent, go blank,
like a printer offline with no ink in the tank.

He’d vanish mid-fight, just disappear,
then resurface days later like “hey stranger 😌” sincere.
Sir, this is not hide-and-seek or a quest.
You don’t ghost a woman and come back for rest.

Apologies? Oh, he had a style.
“I’m sorry you felt that way,” said with a smile.
That’s not an apology, that’s verbal Febreze,
sprayed lightly over bu****it and denial disease.

He called himself “alpha,” which truly was bold,
considering basic tasks made him fold.
Real leaders don’t announce it out loud.
That’s like yelling “I’m funny” and waiting for clout.

He wanted a queen, demanded respect,
but offered a throne I was meant to erect.
No effort. No growth. Just vibes and a stare.
Like a decorative man with opinions and air.

Now he’s an ex, which feels correct,
like peeling off jeans that just disrespect.
I breathe easier. Sleep deeper. Laugh loud.
No longer explaining common sense to a cloud.

So here’s to my ex. May he thrive. May he roam.
May he someday learn mutual respect can exist at home.
I wish him the best. Just far, far away.
Preferably somewhere without Wi-Fi all day.

—Freyja Rain

01/14/2026

Sample Writing #2 01/13/2026

Chapter: The Other Side of the Badge

I have been married to a police officer for over twenty years.
That sentence sounds simple. It is not.
People think they understand what it means. They picture uniforms, authority, flashing lights, maybe a sense of safety by association. What they don’t see is the life that happens on the other side of the badge. The quiet vigilance. The constant calculation. The way you learn to read a room, a phone call, a silence, the way some people read weather.
I did not marry a job. I married a man. A human being with fears, fatigue, humor, tenderness, and a profession that asks him to walk into situations everyone else is trying to escape.
This is not a story about hero worship. It is a story about what it costs to love someone who spends their life standing between order and chaos.
---
The First Years
In the beginning, I told myself I would not become “that wife.” I would not hover. I would not worry every time the phone rang late at night. I would not let the job reshape who we were.
That lasted about as long as innocence usually does.
You learn quickly that there are two lives running in parallel. There is the life you share at home: dinner, bills, children, exhaustion, laughter, small ordinary moments that make up a marriage. And then there is the other life. The one you are not part of. The one that exists in the spaces between shifts, in stories that are only half told, in silences that arrive after certain calls.
You begin to recognize the difference between “just tired” and something heavier.
You learn when not to ask questions.
Not because you don’t care, but because sometimes caring means not forcing someone to relive what they are trying to set down.
---
The Weight You Can’t See
There are things my husband has seen that will never make it into conversation. Scenes that do not belong at the dinner table. Stories that would sit between us like something alive if spoken out loud.
The job does not stay neatly at work.
It follows him home in his posture, in the way he scans a room without thinking, in the way certain sounds make his body react before his mind has time to intervene. It shows up in sleep that is never quite deep enough. In humor that sometimes edges toward dark because that is the only way to survive what you cannot forget.
As a spouse, you carry a different kind of weight.
You carry the emotional residue of a world you do not see directly but feel constantly. You learn to live beside stress that is not yours but becomes part of your shared air.
And you learn something else too: love does not protect you from fear. It intensifies it.
---
The Phone Call
Every police family knows the sound of certain phone calls.
The ones that come at odd hours. The ones that begin with a pause on the line. The ones that do not sound like routine.
You learn not to panic immediately, but you also learn that calm is something you practice, not something you naturally possess.
There are moments when time stretches thin. When you wait for confirmation that a voice you love is still attached to a body you will see again. When the world holds its breath and you hold yours with it.
People do not see these moments. They do not see the quiet bargaining, the mental rehearsal of what you will do if the worst happens, the way your life briefly rearranges itself around a possibility you are not ready to face.
They see the uniform.
They do not see the vigil.
---
Raising a Family in the Shadow of the Job
If you have children, the job enters your home whether you invite it or not.
It enters through missed holidays. Through birthdays celebrated on different days because a shift could not be changed. Through the quiet explanations you offer when someone asks why Dad or Mom cannot come to the school event, the game, the recital.
You become both parents at times.
You learn to be strong not in dramatic ways, but in the accumulation of ordinary days. In handling the household when your partner is gone for hours longer than expected. In answering questions you do not have the luxury of fully answering.
And you learn to protect your children from things they should not have to carry.
You choose your words carefully.
You edit reality not to lie, but to preserve innocence as long as possible in a world that is not gentle.
---
The Public Eye
Being married to a police officer means living in the space between two extremes.
To some, your spouse is a hero by default.
To others, your spouse is a symbol of everything they distrust.
Neither version sees the person you love when the uniform comes off. The human being who laughs at the wrong moments, who forgets to replace the toilet paper, who carries his own doubts, regrets, and questions about the work he does.
Public conversations about policing are often loud, polarized, and simplified. Nuance does not trend well. Pain is real on all sides, but complexity is rarely allowed into the discussion.
As a spouse, you learn to live with that tension.
You learn when to speak and when to stay quiet.
You learn that loving someone in this profession means holding space for both the flaws of the system and the humanity of the individual inside it.
---
What It Does to a Marriage
Long-term exposure to stress changes people.
Not always in visible ways. Often in subtle ones. In how quickly patience runs out. In how silence becomes easier than conversation on certain nights. In how emotional energy must be rationed because there is only so much to give.
A police marriage does not survive on romance alone.
It survives on adaptation.
On learning how to communicate when one of you is carrying things the other cannot fully understand. On building rituals that anchor you back to each other. On choosing, again and again, not to let the job become the third presence in your marriage.
There are moments when resentment tries to creep in. Moments when you want a life that feels simpler, safer, more predictable. Moments when you resent a profession that asks so much of the person you love and gives so little back in return.
And yet, there is also pride.
Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that comes from knowing the character of the person you chose. From seeing the integrity it takes to keep showing up in a world that does not always offer gratitude.
---
The Cost of Constant Readiness
You live in a state of low-level readiness that never fully turns off.
You plan contingencies you hope you will never need.
You notice exits. You watch people’s hands. You become fluent in the language of caution without ever formally studying it.
This is not paranoia. It is proximity.
When danger is part of your partner’s daily reality, it becomes part of your emotional environment. You do not fear constantly, but you are never entirely free of awareness.
You love someone whose work requires them to step into uncertainty.
And loving someone like that changes the architecture of your heart.
---
What No One Sees
No one sees the emotional labor of being the safe place.
The one where the armor can come off.
The one who absorbs frustration that is not really about the dishes or the bills or the small disagreements every couple has.
You learn to distinguish between what belongs to the relationship and what belongs to the job.
You learn to hold space without becoming invisible.
You learn that strength is not loud.
It is the quiet choice to stay.
---
What Still Matters
After twenty years, I do not romanticize this life.
I do not pretend it is easy.
I do not claim moral superiority for loving someone in a dangerous profession.
What I claim is this: there is a reality behind the headlines that deserves to be seen.
There are families who carry the emotional weight of public service quietly. Who love people the world often reduces to uniforms and slogans. Who navigate fear, pride, exhaustion, and devotion all at once.
I am not married to a badge.
I am married to a man.
A man who comes home tired. Who loves his family. Who believes in doing his job with integrity even when the world is complicated, even when the system is imperfect, even when the cost is personal.
This is what it means to stand beside the work without being the one who wears the uniform.
It is not glamorous.
It is not simple.
It is love, practiced daily in the presence of risk.
And after twenty years, it is still the choice I make.

-Freyja Rain/Beth Johnson

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01/14/2026

Sample Writing #1 01/13/2026

Chapter: The Day After

I still have my daughter’s phone number saved in my phone.
I know it doesn’t make sense. The number no longer connects to anything living. The messages never come. The screen stays silent. But I can’t delete it. Not because I expect her to answer. Because deleting it would feel like participating in something I never agreed to. A final erasure.
There is a moment every parent has with their child that feels permanent. Something ordinary. A laugh in a car. A disagreement over nothing. A half-heard “love you” as they leave the room. You never know which moment will be the last normal one. You only realize later that it was the line between the world you lived in and the one you were about to enter.
For me, that line was crossed by fentanyl.
Not in a dark alley. Not in some dramatic, cinematic collapse. It arrived quietly, disguised as something else. It arrived the way it does for most families. Unannounced. Invisible. Lethal.
My daughter did not wake up one morning intending to die. She did not choose fentanyl. She did not seek out a drug powerful enough to stop her breathing in minutes. What she encountered was a system that has normalized chemical roulette. A marketplace where the substance you think you are taking and the substance you actually ingest are rarely the same thing.
This is not a story about addiction in the abstract. This is not a political essay. This is not a morality tale.
This is about what happens when a mother survives something she was never meant to survive. And what you see when grief forces you to look straight at the machinery that took your child.
---
The Day After
There is a strange stillness after death that no one prepares you for. The world does not pause. Traffic continues. Grocery stores remain stocked. People complain about weather, about work, about minor inconveniences that feel obscene when placed beside the absence of your child.
Your body reacts before your mind can catch up. You move through tasks as if someone else is controlling your limbs. You answer questions you don’t remember being asked. You sit in rooms that no longer belong to your life.
And then the silence arrives.
The silence is not peaceful. It is loud. It is full of unfinished sentences, unasked questions, unresolved arguments, and the unbearable weight of “if only.” If only I had known. If only I had seen. If only the world had not become so dangerous that a single mistake can mean death.
This is when most families begin to learn what fentanyl actually is.
Not from public health campaigns. Not from news headlines. But from coroners’ reports, hospital staff, and the cold language of toxicology.
Fentanyl is not just another opioid. It is a synthetic drug designed for medical settings, where precise dosing can be the difference between pain relief and respiratory failure. In the illegal market, that precision disappears. What remains is a substance dozens of times stronger than he**in, mixed into pills and powders with no quality control, no warning labels, and no margin for error.
People think they are taking something familiar. Something manageable. Something they have taken before.
They are wrong.
And families pay the price.
---
When Medicine Became a Pipeline
To understand how we arrived here, you have to look beyond individual choices. You have to look at the system that made those choices almost inevitable.
For years, prescription opioids were marketed as safe, effective solutions for pain. Doctors were encouraged to treat pain aggressively. Patients were reassured. Pharmacies filled prescriptions that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. Entire communities became chemically dependent, not because they were reckless, but because they trusted medical authority.
Then the narrative changed.
Regulations tightened. Prescriptions were cut back. Doctors became afraid to treat pain at all. Patients who had been maintained on legal medication were suddenly left to manage on their own. Some turned to the street. Some sought alternatives. Some simply tried to survive.
At the same time, the drug supply changed.
He**in was replaced by fentanyl because it was cheaper to produce, easier to transport, and far more profitable. It did not matter that it was exponentially more dangerous. Profit does not care about funerals.
What emerged was a perfect storm: a population already dependent on opioids, a medical system that abruptly withdrew support, and an illegal market flooded with a substance capable of killing in micrograms.
This is not a story about bad people making bad choices.
This is a story about a system that created conditions where death became a statistical likelihood.
---
The Myth of “They Knew the Risk”
After a fentanyl death, there is often an unspoken assumption that the person must have known what they were doing. That they accepted the risk. That this was somehow an informed decision.
This is comforting for people who want the world to feel orderly.
It is also false.
Fentanyl is not reliably detectable by taste, smell, or appearance. It is frequently mixed into substances without the user’s knowledge. Counterfeit pills are pressed to look identical to legitimate prescriptions. What someone believes they are taking and what they actually ingest are often completely different substances.
Even experienced users cannot reliably tell the difference.
Even cautious people miscalculate.
Even one exposure can be fatal.
The line between “recreational use” and death has been erased.
When my daughter died, I was forced to confront a truth that most families only learn after it is too late: there is no safe margin anymore. There is no such thing as “just once.” There is no reliable way to know what you are putting into your body.
We have created a chemical landscape where survival depends on luck.
And luck is not a public health strategy.
---
What Grief Reveals
Grief changes the way you see everything.
It strips language of its polite distance. Words like “epidemic” and “crisis” stop feeling abstract. They become names. Faces. Empty bedrooms. Phones that never ring again.
I stopped hearing statistics the way I used to. I stopped seeing overdose numbers as data points. Every number became a person who had once been someone’s child. Someone’s sibling. Someone’s entire world.
And I began to notice how quickly society moves past these deaths.
There is sympathy, yes. But there is also impatience. A subtle pressure to “heal,” to “move on,” to return to normal. As if normal still exists after your child’s absence has restructured your reality.
You are expected to grieve quietly.
You are expected not to make others uncomfortable.
You are expected not to ask the questions that have no easy answers.
But grief does not stay contained. It demands meaning. It demands to know why this keeps happening. It demands accountability from systems that prefer to remain faceless.
I did not lose my daughter to a personal failing.
I lost her to a public failure.
---
A Crisis That Refuses to Stay Invisible
The opioid crisis is no longer confined to any one demographic. It does not belong to one neighborhood, one income bracket, one stereotype. It crosses every line we use to pretend tragedy only happens to “other people.”
Rural communities. Suburban families. Urban centers. Young adults. Chronic pain patients. Teenagers experimenting. Veterans. Mothers. Fathers. Children.
Fentanyl does not discriminate.
What has changed is not human vulnerability. What has changed is the lethality of the environment.
We are living in a time where a single mistake can end a life. Where experimentation carries consequences once reserved for the most extreme forms of risk. Where survival increasingly depends on knowledge that is not consistently available, and on resources that are unevenly distributed.
Public awareness campaigns exist, but they are often reactive rather than preventative. Harm reduction tools save lives, but they are not universally accessible. Treatment options are inconsistent, underfunded, and burdened by stigma.
And in the middle of all of this are families who never expected to become part of this narrative.
Families like mine.
---
What No One Tells You About After
No one prepares you for the administrative side of death.
Paperwork. Phone calls. Medical language that feels obscene in its detachment. Decisions you are expected to make while your nervous system is still in shock.
No one prepares you for the way guilt behaves. How it attaches itself to every memory. How it rewrites the past with new endings. How it convinces you that if you had been different, more alert, more protective, more everything, your child would still be alive.
No one prepares you for the loneliness of being surrounded by people who want to help but cannot touch the thing that hurts.
And no one tells you how much anger will live alongside your grief.
Not anger at your child.
Anger at a system that made her death so easy.
Anger at the normalization of chemical risk.
Anger at a culture that treats these losses as unfortunate but inevitable.
There is nothing inevitable about this.
---
What Still Remains
I am still here.
Not because I am strong in the way people like to label survivors. Not because I have found peace. I am here because there is no alternative that allows me to honor my daughter’s life.
I carry her with me in ways that cannot be measured. In the work I do. In the questions I refuse to stop asking. In the refusal to let her become just another number in a crisis that has already claimed too many.
This book is not about fixing everything. It is about telling the truth in a culture that prefers distance.
It is about refusing the narrative that these deaths are simply the cost of modern life.
It is about insisting that behind every statistic is a person who mattered.
My daughter mattered.
And the world we are living in needs to be confronted with what it is doing to its children.
Not tomorrow.
Not after another funeral.
Now.
-Freyja Rain

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01/08/2026

The website is up now. Follow me at

Freyja Rain is an American author and creator from rural Georgia, known for blending emotional truth, imagination, and a quiet undercurrent of magic into every story she writes. Her work spans children’s literature, narrative nonfiction, and contemporary fiction, and her voice remains steady acros...

08/17/2024

I am so proud of how this Resin and Walnut Charcuterie Board is turning out. Final step will be to demold this bad boy tomorrow and clean up the edges. Then she’s off to her new owner. Contact me for info.