These Dreams of You
a newsletter exploring love, loss, and resilience
My recently published memoir, These Dreams of You: a mother’s story of love, loss, and resilience tells my story of raising and losing a daughter who died young from anorexia. My story is set apart from other stories I have read about loss, mental illness, or loss due to mental illness by the pivot I made after fifteen years of attempting to rescue Colleen from her perfectionistic goal of being the thinnest person alive. A couple of years before she died, I shifted from trying to get her to overcome her eating disorder to supporting her as she lived out her short life in the way she chose. A story written from my heart, my narrative is an unvarnished account of my quest to get my daughter to let go of the behavior that threatened to end her life multiple times, and it is about my realization, when she was 25, that the only way I could truly support Colleen was to honor her wishes.
My intention is to continue to explore, through this newsletter, my experience of holding both acceptance and grief as I both hold onto and let go of my daughter. I would like to invite you, my readers, to explore your related experiences.
My aim is to create a space where readers will feel both encouraged to reflect and to express themselves. A writer myself, I will provide writing prompts. You may want to paint, dance, or go on a long walk, in response to a post. The writing prompts are simply suggestions. You own your creativity.
Here is today’s prompt: Think of a time when a person close to you made a life choice that you disagreed with. What did you do? Did you share your concerns with that person? If so, was that helpful to you? To them? Did you stay quiet? Was that useful to you? To them? With hindsight, might you handle this situation differently?
Prompts are meant to encourage reflection. You may share your writing for other subscribers to read, or not. There are no expectations here.
I was moved by your post about your brother’s pushback when you tried to curb his driving, due to his growing dementia. Alas, loved ones’ “driving while demented“ is often paired with our being “scapegoated while supportive…” especially when we’re trying to keep them safe.
My mother stoutly denied there was anything wrong with her driving, even when my visit with her began with a policeman stopping by to investigate her sideswiping a car.
We compromised; she would go to the DMV to retake her driver’s test accompanied by her favorite niece. In this way, a disinterested third-party could make the call (and rescind her license), because a trusted relative would ensure that Mom followed through.
The outcome was that my mother retained her pride, and I had the comfort of knowing my niece would follow up with my mother.
We were fortunate. Once I had returned home to New England, my mother took out her driver’s license and cut it in half.
Poignant. It left me free to quietly grieve my mother’s decline while having sidestepped an escalation of hostilities.