My Murderer

My Murderer is the name Jensen Brick McCall gives his birth mother, a phrase that turns a history of attempted abortion and rejection into a defining relationship. It begins as a verdict: she tried to end his life before birth and, after he survived, said he should be left to die. But the name does not remain a simple synonym for hatred. As Jensen faces the woman behind it, the phrase holds together his anger, his hunger for maternal love, and the later possibility of reconciliation.

Origin of the Name

Jensen explains the expression through the story of his birth. At 26 weeks, his mother underwent an abortion that failed. He survived, but was left on a table in a dark room to die. Grace McCall, the nurse who first cared for him, saved his life and contacted his mother; she was told to let him die. Jensen says, “My murderer is my mother.” The words make the contradiction explicit: the person he names as his murderer is also the person from whom he longs to receive maternal love.

The expression is grounded not only in what happened before his birth, but in what that history means to him afterward. Jensen describes himself as having existed without really living, and the name gives that feeling a person and a source. His account also marks him as someone who, unusually, has both a death certificate and a birth certificate. Survival is therefore not an uncomplicated happy ending in the phrase’s first appearance; it is a fact shadowed by the intention to let him die.

The Encounter Behind the Accusation

When Jensen goes to meet his birth mother, the name becomes a burden he carries into an actual face-to-face encounter. He stands outside her California home with fear taking hold physically: his hands shake, his teeth chatter, his skin feels clammy, and each step seems to cost him breath. The setting sharpens the contrast he associates with his childhood. Her two-story brick house, white picket fence, garden, minivan, and BMW stand against the rundown projects and streets filled with trash and drug paraphernalia where he grew up. To him, the difference makes the life she offered her other children feel like another measure of what he was denied.

Inside, the label meets a more difficult reality than the word alone can hold. Jensen sits beside his mother, pulls his hand away when she touches it, and avoids looking into her eyes because he fears that understanding and forgiveness might follow. He sees guilt in her and feels both hurt at being unwanted and a deep desire for her love. His account describes an internal struggle in which anger insists on separation while love presses toward connection. He recognizes her as his mother and his murderer, yet also sees that he must move on and let her go. The expression thus names an injury while recording the painful ambivalence that prevents the injury from being the whole relationship.

From Wound to Purpose

Jensen later describes his murderer as the starting point of a search for purpose. He frames his survival as more than an inexplicable exception: he hopes that telling his story may help a young man who is trying to understand why he is still alive when death seemed near. In his account, the turn toward purpose does not erase the events behind the name. Instead, it changes what those events can mean. He writes, “My life began the day I left my life in Syracuse and not the day I was left for dead,” and says that he found himself during the journey to find his murderer.

This movement from accusation to meaning is echoed by the story’s language of help and self-definition. Inya offers support without judgment, and later tells Jensen, “You are not bad energy.” Those words do not directly undo his mother’s actions; they provide a counter to the shame and rejection that have shaped how he understands himself. In this context, My Murderer is one name in a larger struggle over identity: the name records what was done to Jensen, while his search for purpose allows him to describe a life that is not exhausted by that history.

Reconciliation and the Changed Meaning

The phrase’s most decisive change appears in the later family scene. On Christmas Day, Janae Morrison gives birth to Grace Pearl McCall, and Jensen describes himself as having a wife, a daughter, and a family gathered around a table. His mother, once named only as the person who tried to take his life, is now “my now mother.” Jensen has given her a kidney so that she can watch her other children grow up. The act makes reconciliation concrete: the relationship is no longer defined solely by the life she tried to end, but also by the life he chooses to help sustain.

Jensen’s words do not suggest that the past has vanished. Rather, the name My Murderer changes because the relationship changes around it. The woman remains the person connected to his attempted death, but she is also accepted into a family and understood as his mother. Against the opening image of a child left for dead, the ending places Jensen among relatives and presents him as a husband, father, and caregiver. The expression therefore marks both the severity of his original wound and the distance his life has traveled: survival becomes purpose, and accusation gives way to a difficult, chosen bond.