Alexa and Royalty

The Story of Alexa & Royalty

Royalty never called her mom.

She knew Alexa was her mother. She’d reach for her, clung to her, followed her from room to room. But the word itself, the one most parents hear so early they stop noticing it, never came. Not at one. Not at two. Not as she grew into a toddler who watched the world from behind wide, quiet eyes.

“My child wasn’t talking,” Alexa says. “My child wasn’t communicating. My child wasn’t able to say, Mom. Parents, we take that for granted because our kids are supposed to say that. But mine didn’t. Mine never called me mom.”

Alexa noticed something was different when Royalty was about six months old. Words that had started to form were disappearing. The small sounds babies make as they figure out language were going away instead of expanding. She told Royalty’s pediatrician. The answer she got was the first of many closed doors.

“I had a doctor tell me, ‘Well, there’s nothing that you can do.’ There’s nothing we can really do until she gets to school.”

When she walked out of that office, she wasn’t willing to take no for an answer. But what was coming next would test that refusal in ways nobody could have prepared for.

Hear Alexa Tell Her Story

Click to Play

Royalty was Alexa’s unexpected baby. She was born during Covid, when the world had gone still and Alexa and her older daughter were stuck at home like everyone else. Royalty arrived and filled something neither of them knew was empty.

Then, a few weeks after Royalty was born, her father was murdered.

“On top of postpartum, on top of being a mom, I was now grieving a partnership,” Alexa says. “It was hard. It was very hard. But I also wanted my children to still be happy. So I grieved very quietly, silently, because I didn’t want my children to see that I was broken.”

She took the love she had for Royalty’s father and redirected it. “I replaced my love and grief for Royalty’s father, placed it with the love and poured it into my girls. And just made a promise that they will always have whatever.”

But grief held quietly still takes its toll. The weight of it, the isolation, the postpartum, all of it pressing down at once with no one to share it, eventually broke through. Alexa had a mental health crisis. She lost custody of her older daughter. Then she lost her job. A few months later, her mother died. Then the rent she couldn’t pay caught up, and the home she’d built was taken. She and Royalty moved in with family. They were homeless.

“The people that I expected to support me and to be there for me, they weren’t there,” she says. “I kind of expected that was what it was going to be. We were always going to be by ourselves.”

She didn’t come from a place where support was automatic. Growing up in South Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood, Alexa was raised alongside her sister, who had her own struggles. Their mother’s attention went where the crisis was. “I didn’t always feel seen,” Alexa says. “I searched for validation. I searched for love.” She developed her own ways to cope, the same way she’d learn to get through everything that came later. But the pattern was set early: when things got hard, Alexa was on her own.

Now she was in her twenties, grieving, homeless, parenting a toddler she couldn’t reach, and carrying the guilt of a daughter she’d lost custody of. And Royalty still wasn’t talking.

“I knew that Royalty was different, and I knew that she needed the support that she needed, and so I couldn’t break and fall apart.”

—

For two years, Alexa pushed for answers. Doctors told her there was nothing wrong, nothing to be done. Family told her it was her fault, that she wasn’t talking enough to Royalty, that she was coddling her.

“For two years of her life, I felt like nobody was listening,” Alexa says. “And I mean, that went for family also. I had my family tell me it was me.”

She enrolled Royalty at the Denise Louie Education Center, and it was there that someone finally saw what Alexa had been saying all along. A teacher recognized the same things Alexa had been describing for two years: the same delays, the same patterns, the same quiet. That teacher connected them to Open Doors, a nonprofit, which connected them to Northwest Center for Kids.

Royalty had just turned two.

—

The first thing Northwest Center did was listen.

“Northwest Center gave me an opportunity to feel heard and to feel seen,” Alexa says. “They validated a lot of the things that I needed. They saw us. They heard us. The way that they dealt with Royalty, the way they talked to her, it felt like a breath of fresh air. For the first time, I was going to be okay and Royalty was going to be okay.”

The services were specific and practical. Royalty started speech therapy every two weeks. A therapist came to her school and worked with both of them, giving Alexa tools: nonverbal cues, sign language, ways to connect with Royalty on Royalty’s terms. The goal wasn’t to force speech. It was to find whatever path to communication worked.

Alexa got a case manager. She got a counselor who met with her weekly, someone who helped her process what she was going through while also helping her support Royalty. “She was somebody that was very open and easy to talk to. She motivated me. Even when I was having bad days, she would just always encourage me that I was doing the right thing.”

When they were still living with family, Northwest Center accommodated. They met Royalty at school. They did Zoom sessions. They didn’t require Alexa to fit into a system that wasn’t built for her situation. “They met us where we were,” she says. “They were willing to accommodate us in any moment.”

When Alexa and Royalty moved into their own place, Northwest Center helped with that too. Towels. Cooking sets. An air fryer. The stuff you need to start a home when you don’t have much of anything.

Through the process, the team identified what Alexa had known in her gut all along. Royalty has autism. The evaluation, the formal education plan, the placement in developmental preschool through Seattle Public Schools, all of it happened because people finally took what Alexa was saying seriously.

“I finally had people that listened to me,” she says. “To have people say, ‘There’s resources for you, there’s places for her to go.’ That support, and feeling heard, was big for me.”

When Royalty aged out of Northwest Center for Kids, they moved to the Bridge program. A new team helped Alexa learn how to show up at school meetings, how to work within the system, how to be the advocate Royalty would need for years to come.

The pattern had reversed. For years, nobody would help. Now people were showing up, teaching Alexa the systems, giving her the tools, and trusting her to do the rest.

“I didn’t feel like I had to be strong anymore,” she says. “I know that advocating for your children never ends. But I felt like all of that hard work, everything I felt, it was just solidified. I had people that understood me and they were going to navigate me.”

—

Then Royalty said it.

Mom.

“When she looked at me and she called me mom, I knew everything that I did was okay.”

Alexa cried. She was grateful. She was thankful. But mostly she knew. Every doctor she’d pushed back on. Every family member who told her it was her fault. Every door that closed in her face. All of it had been worth fighting through. The word that other parents hear a thousand times without thinking about it, Alexa heard once and it changed everything.

“She’s been flourishing ever since,” Alexa says. “She has so much language. She talks now, and we’re happy.”

Royalty is four years old. She’s funny, social, a little stubborn, and obsessed with grapes, pizza, and Barbie. She loves school. She has friends. She can tell you her favorite colors (red, blue, yellow, not so much purple). Next year she’ll start at Bailey Gatzert Elementary in a program with more kids and more social interaction, because Royalty learns best by watching her peers. A smaller classroom gives her one-on-one attention, but it’s the bigger world she needs now.

On Saturday mornings, Alexa and Royalty have a standing date. They wake up, put on music, and go get donuts and coffee together. Then they come home, watch their favorite show, and cuddle. It’s the kind of routine that sounds ordinary. That’s exactly the point.

Alexa works at Angeline’s, a YWCA day center and shelter for homeless women in Seattle. She started as an intern through the Community Jobs program, got hired full time, and was promoted to advocate. She runs a weekly meditation group and a women’s meeting where they talk about emotional stability and getting through bad days.

She knows what it feels like when the people who are supposed to help you don’t hear you. When people look past what you’re telling them. When the disconnect between what you’re living and what they’re seeing feels impossible to bridge. So she listens. She gives these women what she went without for so long: someone who hears them, who sits with them in it, and who knows from experience that the hard part can be temporary.

“At work, I give these women kind of something I didn’t have,” she says, “and know that that’s something I needed that would have made life a little bit more supportive for me.” She uses her past, as she puts it, “to allow people the space and the grace for them to be great too.”

In February 2025, Alexa received a parent leadership award through the state of Washington. Her reaction surprised even her.

“It was very weird at first,” she says. “As a parent, you don’t always think that you’re doing the best. You think, I’m just being a mom. I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do.” She pauses. “How could I receive this award for being this great parent? But I don’t even have my oldest.”

The guilt still lives in her. She carries it alongside everything else. But she’s learning to hold two truths at once: that she lost more than most people could bear, and that what she built from it is real and worth recognizing.

“To have someone recognize these qualities in me, even when I didn’t see them in myself, it actually made me feel really good,” she says. “And it kind of launched a confidence in me as a parent, that I was doing something right for Royalty.”

—

Alexa grew up not feeling seen. She raised her children through grief and homelessness and systems that told her nothing was wrong. She fought for Royalty when nobody else would, and she found an organization that fought alongside her. Now she spends her days listening to women who are where she was, giving them the thing she went without for so long.

Her older daughter is sixteen, doing competition cheer, thriving. They’re close, and the bond held through everything. Royalty is four, talking, laughing, learning, and calling her mom every single day.

When you ask Alexa what she’d tell other parents in her situation, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Trust your gut. Trust your instincts. You know your children better than anybody else. Your child is not a study. Your child is not a statistic. Your child is unique, and just never stop advocating for them.”

And when you ask about Royalty’s future, she doesn’t waver.

“She’s going to have a normal life. She’s going to have her own apartment. She’s going to be able to drive. She’s going to have friends, and she’s going to have communities and villages of people that love her. Her future matters.”