The courage was never in the loving.
People keep calling me brave. For loving my son. For supporting him. Then I heard a line from Anne Hathaway that named something I had never been able to say out loud.
Mental health is not a casserole disease.
Meg sat down at a lunch counter, opened this book, and almost broke down in tears on the first page. She’s been navigating her family’s mental health journey for years. What she said about this book stopped me.
Hope and grief are not mutually exclusive.
Some weeks of this caregiving life have held more contradictions than I knew a person could hold. A medication finally working. A new diagnosis arriving. It took me years to understand that both things could be true at once.
What early readers see.
Something I did not expect when I shared the manuscript with early readers: how often someone would say back to me, in different words, the thing I most needed to hear. A reflection on what beta readers give you, and what one early reader helped me see about who this book is really for.
When my child taught me something.
For years, I thought my job as my oldest's mom was to teach him how to navigate the world. What I missed, for longer than I would like to admit, was that he was teaching me too.
What I wish I’d known.
There are things I could not have been told at the start of the hardest years of my family's life. Not because no one knew them. But because some truths can only be earned. I know that now. But I wish someone had tried anyway.
Let people surprise you.
A little over a year ago, I left my last role to fight for my middle child's right to the educational supports and placement he needed. The stories in my head started immediately. This is what I learned about who shows up
Accountability and Accommodation
Yesterday I sat in a room full of HR professionals and heard a line that stopped me cold. "Accountability and accommodation are not mutually exclusive." It applies far beyond the workplace.
The Silence Inside Families
I wasn't ashamed of my child. I was ashamed of being seen as the mom who couldn't fix it. The silence inside families navigating mental health crises runs deeper than most people know.
Notes for the Caregivers
The caregivers are rarely the subject of the campaigns, the resources, or the headlines. This one is for them.