Love isn’t learned. Love isn’t taught. Love is innate. Kindness may be too. The sun doesn’t know it warms the skin; it just does, and from the moment you step into Sade B.’s presence, you feel that same warmth. A warmth that can’t be missed. It isn’t manufactured. It isn’t a mask. It’s unmistakable—the kind that even dares to shine through when she’s talking about her hardest moments—through her words and through her wounds. Because no matter how the world may have tried to bury Sade’s kind spirit, like a flower blooming through the sidewalk cracks, it persevered. But unfortunately, that never stopped the world from trying.
Sade was born in Los Angeles in 1986, into a complicated family story that even, to this day, she doesn’t fully understand. On paper, her last name switched from Lincoln to Butler somewhere in the early ’90s, when the truth of her paternity finally emerged. “I basically had two dads,” she explains—one who raised her and one whom she never knew. Both of them, along with her mother, are now gone. That absence leaves her piecing together her identity from fragments, with no one left to answer the questions she still carries.
Her early years were full of family gatherings, cousins running around, and Sundays at her grandmother’s house—the “home base” where everyone came together. Her whole family suffered from addiction, but at that earlier age, it all felt so normal. Her grandma drank, her mom smoked primos (weed laced with crack), and the rest of her family dabbled in this or that. By the time Sade was old enough to want a childhood, most of it was already gone. She felt too small in a world that felt too big.
Then came the pain she carried in silence for decades: at a young age, she was violated by a family member. She never told anyone. Not her mom, not her dad, not her grandmother. She stuffed it deep inside, but it changed everything. The outgoing little girl who loved to sing, dance, and perform for her family grew quieter and more distant. She describes it now as a shift—a before and after that split her life.
By thirteen, she was skipping school and roaming the city with a bus pass, pretending to belong anywhere she could. “I wasn’t hood enough for the streets or prissy enough for privileged black kids in Baldwin Hills.” She felt out of place everywhere—too different to be seen. That sense of not belonging would chase her for years.
But even as she struggled, one thing stayed the same: she couldn’t stand to see people hurt. Her mom had a sharp tongue, never afraid to curse out a stranger in public. For Sade, it was humiliating. But instead of following that example, she chose differently. “I didn’t want to be that stereotypical, dark-skinned, angry black woman…I didn’t want to be mean to people. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” That compassion wasn’t something she read in a book, wasn’t something someone sat her down and explained. It was who she was. It was instinct. It was her.
Still, love alone couldn’t shield her from the traps of addiction. Her first drink came at just eleven years old—gulping down leftover pink lemonade spiked with gin from a family party. Soon after, “I was under the table yelling, ‘Martin Luther King had a dream. I don’t want nobody to have their dreams around here!’” It was funny (in hindsight), but it was also telling. From the start, alcohol wasn’t just a casual drink—it flipped a switch, took her somewhere else entirely.
Instead of participating in a D.A.R.E. style program, her brother put her through “Drug 101.” He explained to her the dos and don’ts of drug use—more concerned with her safety than her abstinence. Little did any of her family know that this would open the door to her casual, daily drug use.
By high school, she was skipping classes, smoking weed daily, and numbing herself against the pain she didn’t have words for. She bounced through continuation schools, tried programs like Job Corps, and even got her GED—but every time she got close to finishing something, it seemed to fall apart. She felt herself rebelling against a system that was built to keep her down.
One of the darkest chapters came when she discovered her boyfriend and his mother dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, his young daughter barely clinging to life. Sade had walked into the apartment to find silence. “I went to do mouth-to-mouth on my boyfriend, but he was ice cold.” The horror of that moment burned into her memory. She carried it like a wound, another layer of trauma stacked onto the rest. But even there, love showed itself: she and her boyfriend’s son scooped up the girl, called for help, and did everything they could. In the middle of devastation, her instinct was to save. That moment could have broken her completely—but instead, it became another reminder of just how much love she still had to give, even when surrounded by death.
The concept of motherhood gave her more moments of hope. When her daughter was born in 2010, she thought it might be the anchor she needed. But the reality was harsher. Her daughter’s father drank heavily, and one night, he drove drunk with their baby in the car, crashing and sending everything spiraling. DCFS took custody. Sade tried to fight for her daughter back, but the system is brutal. One mistake could undo months of effort. At one woman’s and children’s program, after a stillbirth and a relapse, she got into an argument. That was all it took—they took her daughter again.
It broke something in her. Instead of trying again, she ran. She told herself she wasn’t really that bad. That smoking weed and drinking weren’t enough to disqualify her as a mother. That her daughter was safe with her mom, who also smoked. “Why fight?” she thought. Why fight a system that seemed impossible to win against? She saw her daughter almost every day at her mom’s house. Things felt okay.
When her son was born in 2015, Sade thought it might be her second chance at motherhood. She wanted to be the steady, dependable parent she hadn’t been able to be for her daughter. But almost as quickly as he came into her life, the cycle of abuse and addiction closed in. His father became verbally and physically abusive, angry that Sade had slipped back into smoking weed, furious that she couldn’t just “fix” herself on command. “He tried to beat the alcoholic out of me.” She tried to stay, tried to hold it together for her baby boy, but the chaos only deepened. Eventually, DCFS stepped in again, and custody became complicated. Sade carries deep shame about not being the full-time mom she imagined, but she still shows up in the ways she can—the ways that count. With him, she gets to be the “fun parent”—the one who takes him to do things, who makes him laugh, who gives the warmth she always longed for as a child.
Years slipped by. Addiction grew louder. Relationships grew more dangerous. By the time her mom passed in 2019, Sade was running from her abusive partner, smoking crack with an old man she barely knew, and sleeping in her car when she couldn’t face going home. “I didn’t want that life. I didn’t want to be that person.” One day, she stood up and literally walked away—from the drugs, from the man, from the chaos—and into a rehab program.
For a while, things worked. She drove buses for Foothill Transit, holding down steady work and paying her own bills. For the first time in years, she could breathe. But when she got a DUI, the shame came rushing back. Bus driving had felt like her lifeline—the proof she could do something, anything, right. Losing it felt like confirmation of every worst fear she held about herself.
And then, more heartbreak. Within one year, both her nephew and her niece were murdered. She spiraled into grief. “Why not me instead of her?” she asked, mourning her niece, who left behind a young daughter. “She was a good mother. I couldn’t even keep my kids. Why didn’t God take me instead?” The drinking got worse. She lost weight, lost time, lost herself.
When Sade finally came to Beit T’Shuvah, she wasn’t sure she could do it again. “When you’ve been to rehab and failed, you stop believing in yourself.” But this time felt different. She walked in with a terror that only comes when you know that it’s all over—that everything is about to change. She joined the choir and sang sober for the first time in her life.
“I don’t remember the last time I sang without alcohol—from my heart. I always wanted to join a choir, but I always felt like I wasn’t good enough for God. Every time I went to church, I felt like I was the only sinner there.”
But Sade began to learn that God wasn’t angry with her, that sin wasn’t about shame, but about trying again after missing the mark. She let herself cry and be held. She built friendships with people she might never have spoken to outside these walls. She began to believe that love—the thing that had always been her truth—was also her path forward.
“I’ve been allowed to be strong, but I’ve also been allowed to ask for help. I’ve been allowed to build friendships and community. I didn’t know I could be seen like this.”
Today, Sade knows what she wants: to help others. “I have the passion, I have the experience, and once I get the knowledge, I’ll be unstoppable,” she says with quiet confidence. Every day, she works to be a bigger and more meaningful part of her children’s lives. But there are two things I can tell you for sure: First, they love her, and second, she is a good mother. While many of us in this community have struggled with parents who don’t want us, Sade’s kids will never. They will always know how deeply she loves them because it pours out of her with every word, every smile, and every tear. If one thing is clear, it is that she lives to love and that she loves her children.
And a mother’s love is truly immeasurable.
Because love isn’t learned. Love isn’t taught. Love is innate. And if you listen closely, you’ll hear it—the refrain that has carried her through her movement. It isn’t erased by addiction, shame, or loss, snuffed by chaos, or buried by tragedy. It is everlasting. Sade is still filled with it, and she gives it out freely. And maybe that’s the real miracle of her recovery: not just that she survived, but that her heart remained intact, overflowing, waiting to be shared. Shared with this community that has showered her with that exact same level of admiration. How could we not? Because if you have ever spent a moment around her, you know one simple truth:
Love has a name.
…and it’s Sade.