2/26/25

I Can Fix This: And Other Lies I Told Myself While Parenting My Struggling Child

When Your Adult Child Breaks Your Heart: Coping with Mental Illness, Substance Abuse, and the Problems that Tear Families Apart

Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children Through Conflict and Change

These are names of books I added to my audible account in the months before she died. I only listened to one of them. I Can Fix This and Other Lies. In that book, the author’s kid comes out of it and is strong and well adjusted at the time of writing it.

Did I seek out these books because I intuitively knew something was deeply wrong? Or did believing something was deeply wrong make everything worse? Did I project wrongness onto her and she absorbed and internalized it? Would things have played out differently if I had maintained a positive view of her, if I had believed she was basically normal and doing age appropriate things? I can’t decide if I was right, something was really wrong and we were careening toward a crisis. Or if believing this made it so.