Mooring Comes Undone
Bending over to sprinkle cleanser
in the bidet I am once again bathing
my daughter little red tug boat floats
around chubby legs her open face
churning with delight as tubby toes
tilt and toss the plastic vessel.
Pudgy fingers slap liquid surface
grasping at bubbles as tug leans
and bobs its grinning captain
twirling about.
An inconsolable hand scrubs
as tears slosh into basin that
bathed baby girl years ago
who will soon drift off to
distant ports and yes my
mooring has already
come undone.
Praise for Wake Up, Maggie! Go Away, Mom!
“If you have ever had a teenage daughter, or even been a teenage daughter, this book will bring you laughter, heartache, and everything in between. Carol and Maggie struggled to redefine their relationship as they moved through the difficult menopause and high school years and they did it with honesty and grace, somehow remembering to center the things they both loved and finding their way back to each other again and again. This book is a triumph of love and a testament to the ties between mothers and daughters.”
—Kari O’Driscoll, author of Happy, Healthy Teens: Why Focusing on Relationships Works and Founder of The SELF Project.
“Wake up, Maggie! Go Away, Mom! offers a fascinating duet of adolescence and middle age—hormones, relationships, money woes, college decisions and empty nest anxiety—with alternating notes of humor, anger, and—always—unquestioned love. Mother and daughter co-authors Carol Weis and Margaret Henley fight hard and reconcile, bonding over their shared interest in movies and cooking. Their bracing honesty and emotional curiosity make this a welcome read for anyone who has ever lived through adolescence.”
—Caroline M. Grant, co-director, Sustainable Arts Foundation
“Carol and her daughter Maggie share their combined story in raw and unflinching journal entries from the end of Maggie’s high school years to the start of college. We learn how they experience the same events from their different perspectives, especially fights over the internet, and we read what each person is struggling with in their individual lives—loneliness, friends, love interest—and how that affects their relationship. I was immersed in this story as someone who has sent her children out into the world and was brought back to how sad I was when my daughters left. The events and emotions were familiar and validating, especially the love between mother and daughter. If you’ve said goodbye to a child or are anticipating it, this story will resonate with you. Even when we feel we are alone, we are in good company.”
—Morgan Baker, author of Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes
Buy Wake Up, Maggie! Go Away, Mom! here:
Buy Stumbling home here:
praise for stumbling home
“What a remarkable journey to wholeness. Carol Weis has written a gem of a memoir, with unfettered commitment to detail, humanity, humor, and most of all: honesty. I couldn’t put it down.” —Jennifer Pastiloff, bestselling author of On Being Human.
“Painful, honest, humorous, beautiful, and so relatable. Carol Weis artfully transports us through the incredible journey of her life, its different phases both enmeshed with and stitched together by alcohol, whether it was her own drinking or someone else’s. Her complete liberation from alcohol offers hope and inspiration.” —Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind and The Alcohol Experiment
“Carol Weis’s Stumbling Home is a story of recovery, a reckoning of the relationships that complicate it, and an examination of the years that brought her to that last flute of champagne. A welcome addition to the addiction canon, Weis’s vivid narrative illuminates the experience of navigating alcoholism and recovery as a woman with clarity and piercing details.” —Erin Khar, author of STRUNG OUT.
”Frank, searing, and ultimately hopeful, Stumbling Home is a page-turning story of alcoholism, relationships, and hard-won healing. Any reader whose life has been impacted by addiction will see themselves in these pages. I certainly did.” —Kristi Coulter, author of Nothing Good Can Come from This
“Bravely confronting the fears and the feelings that go along with addiction, recovery, and just being human, Stumbling Home will resonate with so many of us. Carol Weis inspires while reminding us that we are never alone.” —Lisa F. Smith, author of Girl Walks Out of a Bar
“Raw and naked, Carol Weis’s Stumbling Home makes clear the connection between childhood trauma and substance use, plus adult dysfunction.” —Ann Dowsett Johnston, Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol
“In frank, lyrical prose and a nonlinear structure, Weis draws seemingly paradoxic parallels between her own alcoholism and recovery, single motherhood, and childhood trauma. In so doing, she demonstrates the myriad ways in which the expectations put upon women and girls shape our shared experiences and cultural conceptions of femininity and what it means to exist in a woman’s body.” —Amy Long, author of Codependence
“From the riveting opening to the reconciliation of the end, STUMBLING HOME links the anxiety of abandonment to the anxiety of addiction with exceptional clarity and resonance. In exploring both her family and her own personal history with alcohol, Weis offers a memoir punctuated by reckoning, empathy for who we were against who we can become, and layers of grace and vulnerability.” —Wendy J. Fox, author of If the Ice Had Held and What If We Were Somewhere Else
CAROL WEIS 