Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what.  If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff. — Catherine M. Wallace —   Listening

I spoke to Dawn Clancy recently, creator of Growing Up Chaotic, a community for friends and families of addicts and survivors of abuse. Dawn and I met originally when we both wrote for AfterPartyMagazine. She shares some of her story with us and gives us some great advice on how to live a functional life, despite

    Blue, Baby, Blue One of my clients recently lamented, “I always feel blue around the holidays.” How often have you, or someone else, said the very same thing? Anxiousness & Isolation are the primary complaints. How ironic we feel isolation when it turns out there’s plenty of company with those same feelings. Is this

    Thanksgiving is my favorite time of the year. I love that the weather is starting to get cooler. It gets dark a little earlier which gives me warm loving feelings of family and a deep sense Gratitude. It’s a time for me to reflect on how far I’ve come in my life and

      Where were you when I was sitting alone in the parking lot of the motel we called home? Where were you when I picked up that needle and stuck myself with it? Where were you? You knew he had HIV/AIDS. I used to cry and feel so lonely without you there. So

The next two chapters of Rosemary O’Connor’s book, “A Sober Mom’s Guide to Recovery — Taking Care of Yourself to Take Care of Your Kids”, deal with very important topics for anyone in sobriety, but maybe more so for Moms than anyone else. Without good communication skills, our relationships with our kids can be severely

  They say that Warriors fight in faraway countries and distant shores, they are heroes and that is true they protect our freedom and we thank you. Mother Warriors are of a different breed, we have no training or general to take the lead. Our enemy is drugs, addiction, a disease, a despicable one! Our

  Today, I can say with confidence, “I am the Mother”   but my journey did not always look the way it does today.  There was a time when I was very sick with a violent addiction so very lost.  But because of Grace and Mercy I, the prodigal daughter, was allowed to return home. 

  When I don’t know what else to do I make chicken soup. I called a girlfriend I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of months.  “I have breast cancer,” she said. “This s a bump in the road. I’m having surgery next week. We’ll see what happens.” I hung up digesting the weight of

  It is my experience that we can only be as honest and truthful as the limits of our knowledge and experience allows us to be. Richard Phillips Feynman, an American theoretical physicist said “It is impossible to find an answer which someday will not be found to be wrong.” Oh how many times has this