Carol Weis

Imagine being privy to the diaries of both a 16-year-old girl and her mom! Based on their two-year journal project, invites readers into the life of a single mom and her teenage daughter, ushering them through the tangle of feelings that come with this familial bond. The dual entries, peppered with poems by both authors, grant a firsthand look at flashbacks of Carol’s recovery from...

Carol Weis bares herself (sometimes literally) in her debut memoir, where she unveils her two lives, before and after, in a collection of alternating chapters that divulge her change. In those chapters, you’ll meet a desperate young woman riddled with anger and fear from childhood trauma and an equally desperate sober, single mom struggling to push those feelings aside to care for her young daughter.

Like many who abuse alcohol, the author grew up in a world where feelings were never discusse...

For her 16th birthday, my daughter wanted to host a co-ed sleepover. I was not on board.

We eventually compromised and I agreed to let boys stay until 11 p.m., but later relented.

Despite my initial concerns, the sleepover was uneventful and my daughter got her birthday wish.

Teenage co-ed sleepovers are not my thing. And though this wasn't our first co-ed party, I'm not sure I was emotionally prepared for this one. Our first took place when my daughter was two. Any display of affection came ...

When I was 12, I fell for a family friend, someone we considered a cousin, which at the time seemed like a safe thing to do. He was 15, making him a desirable older man to my inexperienced eyes. He had a crush on my sister, as she was the same age, and seemed more his type. He lived hundreds of miles away, so access to this older guy was limited to family gatherings and our summer vacations at the Jersey Shore. Besides, he liked my sister.

And then, the Thanksgiving of my freshman year in col...

John’s seeking earned him fame and financial success and love from millions of fans, but it wasn’t enough for his emotionally starved heart.
To me, a sign of a good movie is one that makes me cry at least three or four times. I sobbed during Rocketman. And apparently Sir Elton did the same.
In a piece he wrote the week before the movie came out, he said, “I was in the cinema for about 15 minutes before I started crying…really sobbing, in that loud unguarded emotionally destroyed way that make...

Raised a Catholic, I believe in the spiritual phenomenon of grace — and I believe I became a mother exactly when I was ready.

Special to espnW.com
As much as I love college hoops and all the excitement that comes with March Madness, this time of year often arrives with a little sadness. It's a reminder of one of the toughest years of my life, 1989, the year before I got sober, which led to the ending of my marriage.
My fondness for basketball started from playing the childhood game "Around the World" with my brothers in the driveway of our home, beating them often with the shots I made. In high school, I dated guys ...

One of the things I never considered when I stopped drinking wine was losing friends — losing the women I drank with and ones I had a history with. They were surprised I quit.
Like many of us who enjoy drinking, either at home or on nights out, I surrounded myself with a like-minded circle of friends. People who liked to party and who made me feel OK about the amount of wine I consumed. They helped keep my denial intact, and their presence continued to encourage my drink-too-much lifestyle.
I...

This is part two of Carol Weis’ journey on how she finally stopping drinking.

The day after I stopped drinking, I felt relief. The knots I’d carried around like rocks in my shoulders were gone. I didn’t shake or tremble, like many in detox do.

My desire to drink had been lifted.

It felt like amazing grace. The words to the song played blissfully in my head. The depression I’d experienced from knowing I needed to quit disappeared. It seemed like the blinds had been raised, ...

The feeling had been building for years. A kind of knowing that needed my focus — but I wasn’t paying heed. It was an awareness that I could no longer control my drinking, which was a big part of my life — and something I by no means wanted to give up. This realization had been tapping me on the shoulder and was getting increasingly hard to ignore.
It tried to get my attention in my 20s, when drinking was a normal part of my social life. I drank like everyone else I knew — no more, no less. O...

She knelt in front of the toilet, like I used to do in church. Kneeling before the votives, I’d light a candle with an offering and a prayer. Right now, I was praying for my daughter, asking to take away the pain she held from my relationship with her dad—the kind that went straight to her tummy.
Her father and I were getting divorced, and the angst leading up to it lived inside her gut.
Though I hadn’t actually told her yet, my daughter got wind of what was going on, taking cues from my beha...

It happens when you are three. Your mother is hospitalized with tuberculosis. She contracts the disease right before your first brother is born. She gets sent away to one of those sanatoriums used for longterm illness. During her infirmity, you and your siblings are scattered about, staying with various relatives and family friends, while your mom grieves while she works on healing herself in that far off hospital for 18 long months. The trauma it causes paints permanent scars on your heart.

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To be acceptable to yourself and others, you hide who you are and become who you aren’t.

Most people think of codependency as being in a relationship with a addicted partner. And though that was true in my own years of active drinking, when I got sober, I discovered that codependency is much more...

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