The Latest from ExEd Publishing

For three years I built a publishing house with three imprints. Special education guides. Homeschool compliance packages for all fifty states. Advocacy packets. Wellness books. A memoir. Research on parental alienation. Twenty-two disability guides, each in two versions. A course. A journal. It was a lot of work. Most of it is finished and sitting in files. Last week I looked at the whole catalog and understood that I could not carry it. Not because the work is bad. Because a

Nobody tells you that one of the hardest parts of starting over is that you have to make friends again, from nothing, as an adult, with no structure to do it for you. For most of a life, friendship is a byproduct. School gives it to you. Work gives it to you. Your children's schools give it to you, which is how a large number of women end up with a social world composed entirely of people they met through a nine-year-old. It feels like you are good at friendship. What is actu

One of the cruelest mechanics of parental alienation is that it makes the targeted parent look exactly like the problem. This is not incidental. It is structural, and understanding why matters, because parents in the middle of it often conclude that they are failing at composure when what is actually happening is that composure has been made unavailable to them. Consider what the process does. A parent is progressively cut off from a child. Calls stop being answered. Visits c

There is a Japanese idiom built from the characters for four trees. Cherry, plum, peach, and apricot. Oubaitori. All four blossom in spring. None of them blossom at the same time, in the same way, or for the same length of days. The plum comes early and stubborn, sometimes through snow. The cherry arrives in an overwhelming week and then is gone. Nobody stands in an orchard and asks why the apricot is running behind. The idiom means: do not compare. Not in the flattened socia

This one is written directly to you, the parent who is watching a relationship with your child be dismantled, and who feels powerless to stop it. If that is not your situation, I hope it never is. If it is, I want you to know before anything else that you are not imagining it, you are not alone in it, and it is one of the most particular and least understood forms of grief a person can carry. There is a specific anguish in being erased from your own child’s life while you are

In Japan there is an old practice called kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery. When a bowl shatters, the pieces are not hidden or discarded. They are joined back together with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, so that the cracks are not disguised but illuminated. The repair becomes the most beautiful part of the object. The bowl is worth more, and means more, for having been broken and mended in the light. I cannot think of a more useful idea to carry into the second

There is a quiet cruelty in the idea that by a certain age your life is supposed to be finished being built. That the choices are made, the shape is set, and what remains is simply to live inside the house you have already constructed. I believed a version of that story for a long time, right up until my own life declined to cooperate with it. I rebuilt mine in my fifties. Not by choice, at first, and not all at once. A life I thought was permanent came apart, and I found mys

Few terms in the world of family conflict are used as loosely, or argued over as fiercely, as parental alienation. It gets thrown around in custody battles as a weapon, dismissed by some as a myth, and treated by others as an explanation for every difficult relationship between a child and a parent. None of that serves the children at the center of it. So I want to try to say, as carefully and honestly as I can, what parental alienation actually is, and just as importantly, w

People sometimes ask why the lotus. Why name a book series, and half an imprint, after one particular flower. The honest answer is that the lotus knows something I spent most of my life learning the hard way, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I sat down to write. The lotus does not grow in clear water. It grows in mud. It roots itself in the murk at the bottom of a pond, in exactly the kind of place we are taught to be ashamed of, and it uses that muck as food. The

If you have found your way here, chances are you are in the middle of something. A hard season. A question you did not expect to be asking. A decision you are not sure you are ready to make. That is who I write for, and that is who this house was built to serve. So before anything else: welcome. I am genuinely glad you are here.