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Hi friend. If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re familiar with my work, maybe you’ve read my recovery memoir, Sober Mercies (Hachette, 2013), or used to follow my blog, Sober Boots. I write about recovery, mental illness, grief, and finding hope after tragedy.
It’s been more than 10 years now since my adult son Noah made a series of reckless decisions that ended in a deadly shooting. (For more about that, see “The Myth of Monsters” below.)
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time working on a memoir about what happened and why.
For so long, I assumed our experience was too rare to be useful to others. Then one day I met a mother in an office supply store who changed my mind. She told me about her son who seemed suicidal and had recently locked himself in her basement. He was addicted to huffing and owned a gun. Something about that conversation opened my eyes to a simple fact: The only thing truly rare about our story is how it ended.
Sadly, millions of families every day are dealing with adult children in crisis related to drugs, mental illness, suicidality or all three. Like us, these parents feel powerless to prevent, yet responsible for, any bad outcome.
Trust me, I don’t have all the answers. But I have a special place in my heart for mothers of troubled sons. I hope you’ll join me in the coming months for honest conversations about what it means to love someone who resists saving.
[Note: I cleared out a lot of older posts. I hope in a few months to start fresh and write more regularly].
The Myth of Monsters
From the get-go, my son Noah was a skeptical kid who took little at face value. When I would tell him, “There’s nothing you could ever do to change how much I love you,” he would take it as a challenge. “What if I robbed a bank? What if I punched Nathan in the face?…
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Remembering Lizzy-Pie
It’s suicide prevention month, and my heart tells me that it’s time to talk about Liz, a young woman I met through recovery back in 2012. I still remember the first time we met for coffee. I was taken by her apple green eyes. The wisdom beyond her years. Her quickness to be vulnerable with…
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Find It in Your Heart
The album, as you’ll discover, was partly inspired by Noah, and the theme of that loss runs heavily through it. Taylor writes, “The songs on the record exist somewhere in the place between the death of my brother, and my need to carve out a bigger life. When my brother died in 2015 I realized…
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