Chickadee is a true-story, drama about an abuse survivor who must fight through her own mental illness when she sets out on a road trip to identify the body of her murdered abuser, her homeless mother.

SYNOPSIS:

Emma Carter is a suicidal addict, wife, and mother of two who leaves her broken family behind in Galveston, Texas when she learns that her transient mother, Anne has been found murdered in Ventura, California. Emma grew up fighting to survive her existence as Chickadee, the middle child of an alcoholic father and an abusive, drug addicted mother. The night Anne pointed a gun at her was the last time Emma saw her, never imagining the next time would be on a metal slab in a morgue.

After spending the morning attempting to shake off the pill popping hangover from the night before, Emma isolates herself, allowing her husband Jansen to fend for their two, young daughters. She watches with little care as they giggle and smile, playing on the beach until she receives the call that her mother’s strangled body has been found in the stairwell of an elementary school. Even with their abusive relationship, Emma doesn’t think twice about making the trip to ID her mother’s remains. She and Jansen decide not to put their children through the pain. With an alcoholic sister stuck in the past and a self-absorbed brother, Emma is faced with making the journey alone.

As Emma travels cross-country, she’s consumed by memories of her tormented childhood. The pain is fresh and raw as she relives the abuse she’d tried so hard to bury through the years, all at her family’s expense. She recalls her mother’s fists and hateful tone. Emma remembers being forced to ‘mother’ her baby brother even though she was just a child herself. When she arrives, she’s not prepared for the flood of mixed emotion and the way the details of her youth being to change. The homicide detective in charge gives Emma her mother’s belongings, all fitting in a single tub. She finds Anne’s journal from jail and learns heartbreaking accounts of her mother’s own childhood and realizes the abuse is a nasty cycle. The painful truth helps Emma begin thehealing process. She faces her new truth and sees her own responsibility in her failures.

Emma returns home, ready to embrace Jansen, her daughters, and her new life. She and Jansen rediscover their powerful love for one another and her relationship with Bella and Christine is on a new, intentional course. Emma reclaims her existence when she realizes a part of Chickadee is still alive in her today.

A year later, Emma takes her family to visit Ventura. For the first time, she’s ready to share a part of herself that’s been closed off and numb. She tells stories and shares pieces of her history, shedding a new light on the girls’ grandmother. She learns to forgive, not only Anne, but herself when they spread her mother’s ashes at in the ocean off the end of the Ventura pier.