Natalie Kitroeff

Things were good.

One problem, and this was a very specific problem, was that they were ministers at different churches, making them what's referred to, apparently, as a two-church family.

We had been serving two separate congregations, and it just was too hard to be a two-church family, like running back and forth between all the

meetings and the churches and like we never really spent any of the kind of sacred holidays together.

And so we... In 2013, they found their solution in Tennessee at a church where they could both work.

By then, they had four children and they moved the whole family to a house on a cul-de-sac.

The moment where I was like, oh, we're home, was there were fireflies.

And our kids had not seen fireflies.

And so we all went outside and we called fireflies and that sort of thing.

And of course, the nostalgia, having grown up in the South, to then see my kids doing that, it was like, yeah, very much an indicator that this was home for them.

The whole time we lived there, I kept saying, this is our forever him.

This is our forever him.

In Tennessee, they were doing the thing all parents do, trying to get to know their kids as they turn from who they might be to who they are.

But with their third child, that was harder.

They've asked us to call her Allie.

Allie had been born a biological boy, and from the start, she felt different from their other children, harder to reach.

I think she was the one child.

I always felt like that I didn't know her.

What do you mean by that?

That you didn't know her?