“Should I worry my son can’t say things like other children?” a mother asked me. Pretty much all I heard was “Should I worry?” I knew what she meant, but her question was “SHOULD I WORRY?” We think worry is passive, but the truth is worry is like a brush fire with one thought igniting

In the movie “Groundhog Day” Bill Murray’s character is an arrogant self-centered and selfish  weatherman who goes to Gobbler’s Knob one February 2nd to witness Punxsutawney Phil see his shadow and predict six more weeks of winter. For reasons that are not clear at the beginning of the movie, the character is destined to repeat

Read the previous two parts of Ricks story here My sons moved to Portland, Oregon and wanted to come and visit me up in Olympia. After getting over the tidal wave of emotions, I said sure. They arrived a week later in an over loaded Hyundai, with two of their friends. Through the process of elimination,

Gabriel and I had a very brief Facebook conversation about a piece he wrote for us a year ago in collaboration with Aaron Perry, who provided the art. From that conversation came his inspiration to creat the above piece of micropoetry with photography by Nick Harris.

    My son messaged me earlier on Facebook and was commenting on one of my articles that I had written for a magazine publication recently. The conversation started by him asking “dad, did that story really happen? Or was this just kind of a thing that you made up, to submit for this magazine

Review written by Scott Brassart In the addiction/recovery world, infidelity is more common than most of us would like to admit. Many of us cheated while we were active in our addiction. Sometimes we managed to fuse our substance abuse with sexual activity, so our addiction and our cheating traveled hand in hand. Others of

I popped open the lid of the shower gel and breathed in the scent. Paris, 2004, The George V hotel. It was the scent of money and luxury, definitely pre-2008. It was a shower gel I’d taken as a souvenir from the hotel and now 12 years later, I was instantly teleported to smelling, seeing, hearing,

  Read Part I of Ricks story here “On my second day in Germany, I got so drunk that the hangover lasted for three days…….” I drank and got drunk almost everyday that I spent in Germany. When I first got there, I fell in love with their beer and food. I never drank American

  I remember the first time that my father looked at me—really looked at me. I was in his car when my eyes caught a ray of sunlight pouring in through the windshield. He said something like, “Oh! Wow, baby girl. You really have light brown eyes!”  For the first time in my life, I

Raising a teenager can be challenging enough on a good day, let alone when they suffer from mental health and or addiction struggles. We long for our “little girl or boy”, the sweet and compliant child in awe of their parents. But, every parent who has lived through the teen years can tell you about