Most clarity doesn’t arrive before consequence. It arrives years later — after the crisis has passed, after the dust has settled, after silence has lived in the body long enough to demand language.

My granddaughter was born in 2019.
That year sits at the center of this story — not because it was the beginning, but because it was the moment when everything I had been trying to understand for nearly a decade became unavoidable.

I am writing this in 2026.

Seven years later. Not from the immediacy of crisis, but from the long aftermath — where lessons settle into the nervous system, where rage either hardens or transforms, where grief becomes something you can hold without being consumed by it.

This piece is written with consent.
My son knows I am sharing this, and he is open to his struggles being part of the conversation. That matters to me. I don’t share to expose or sensationalize. I share to grow — for myself, for my audience, and for anyone who may recognize pieces of their own story here.

Because silence doesn’t heal families. Understanding does.

My eldest son lives with schizoaffective disorder. Like many people on the schizophrenia spectrum, substance use became entangled with his illness early on — not as rebellion or recklessness, but as survival. As an attempt to quiet a mind that wouldn’t rest. To feel something other than fear, confusion, or emptiness.

This is the reality of dual diagnosis.
It is not a moral failure.
It is a nervous system in crisis.

I saw the signs long before 2019 — and it matters to say that clearly. I began trying to get my son help around 2010, when he was still a teenager and the cracks were just beginning to show. At the time, we were living in Missouri. As our family grew, we made the decision to move. My eldest, nearing sixteen, chose to stay behind in Iowa with his father’s side of the family.

I don’t know that forcing him to move with me would have changed anything. What I do know is that adolescence is when his illness began to surface in earnest — and that no single decision, no single location, and no single person explains what followed.

During those years, I went into psychology believing — like so many parents do — that if I could learn enough, understand enough, do enough, I could save my son. What I learned instead was far more sobering and far more complex.

This wasn’t a lack of effort.
It was a lack of infrastructure.

Treatments were attempted. Medications were tried. Providers were consulted. And still, care was fragmented, inconsistent, and often inaccessible. Especially in Iowa — but not only there. Missouri failed him too. Arizona did as well. Different systems. Different providers. The same outcome: short-term stabilization without long-term continuity.

When I write about doors closing, I don’t mean that metaphorically alone. In many cases, the doors simply weren’t there.

Mental health care failed my son not because no one tried — but because the systems were never designed for sustained, relational, long-term care. They are built for crisis containment, not healing. For emergency intervention, not life navigation.

During this time, my son gravitated toward people already living fast and untethered — drawn, as many are, to intensity when stability feels unreachable. This was not one relationship or one defining moment. It was a pattern that repeated itself across years and across states.

There were many women. Many chaotic bonds. Many attempts at connection formed in the absence of regulation and support. The woman who would later become the mother of my granddaughter was not the first, and she was not the last. She, too, was navigating her own collapse inside broken systems that failed long before either of them crossed paths.

If it hadn’t been her, I believe it would have been someone else. This wasn’t about a single relationship. It was about a lifestyle shaped by instability, untreated trauma, and the absence of meaningful care.

And this life was not without consequence.

Years of substance use, untreated stress, and dangerous environments left marks on his body as well as his mind. Today, addiction is no longer the primary battle — but the aftermath is. The side effects of antipsychotic medications. Severe Crohn’s disease. Chronic pain. Nighttime attacks that wake him in terror, fearing heart failure in the dark hours when the nervous system remembers too much. Injuries sustained in unsafe situations. A body that learned vigilance as survival.

This is what survival can look like when care arrives too late — or not at all.

And this is where another truth bends the arc.

I never imagined I would live this story.

As a child, I watched my grandmother navigate her own reality with a schizophrenic son — my uncle — who had a daughter born into chaos strikingly similar to what I would one day experience. I could never have imagined that history would echo so closely.

My grandmother was also a source of trauma. She was wild. Volatile. Abusive. She caused profound harm to my father. For years, I believed she was the primary reason my uncle’s illness took the shape it did.

Now I understand something more complicated.

She was not the cause.
She was part of a system that failed before her too.

And no — I am not the reason my son has the illness he has.

There may be genetic threads. There always are. But mental illness does not assign moral blame, and no parent creates another person’s experience simply by existing. At some point, every individual — even with illness present — must learn how to navigate their reality within the limits and supports available to them.

I would have done everything in my power to help my son — and I did. I supported where I could. I advocated. I stayed present. And when there were no other options left, the law intervened, requiring court-ordered medication because the situation was that serious.

Had adequate systems been in place earlier — coordinated care, continuity, long-term support — the law may never have needed to step in at all.

By the time my granddaughter was born in 2019, addiction was entrenched. Illness had been cycling for years. And despite sustained effort, education, advocacy, and hope, we were still operating inside systems that could not hold the weight of what was needed.

They tried to parent.

The law intervened.
There was abuse.
There was continued use.

Eventually, all parental rights were lost.

Authority over my granddaughter’s life shifted to her maternal grandparents. Because I was my son’s mother, my place was dismissed — as if proximity to his illness invalidated my clarity. As if genetics alone told the whole story.

I have held my granddaughter. Loved her. Known her — briefly. And then lost access entirely. Not in a single moment, but through a slow closing of doors that no amount of love could reopen.

I don’t believe in “never.” I believe she will know me someday. But I grieve the world she is learning to understand now — a world shaped by unexamined pain, hardened certainty, and language that forgets the humanity of others.

I say that carefully, and deliberately. Because what children absorb is not just behavior — it is language, tone, and the emotional weather of the homes they grow up in. When fear goes unexamined, it often hardens into outrage. When outrage is normalized, it looks for targets. And when dehumanizing language becomes casual — spoken openly, defended reflexively — it teaches a child who is worthy of care and who is not long before they are old enough to question it.

This is not politics as abstract debate.
It is the everyday inheritance of worldview.

This is generational trauma.

We inherit coping mechanisms.
We normalize what we survive.
We stop learning — and call it knowing.

At some point, some people decide they are done growing. They mistake certainty for truth. They confuse stagnation with strength. And when curiosity dies, empathy often follows.

I used to speak from rage.
Because rage protected me.

Clarity felt too vulnerable. Because if you are clear — and still dismissed — the rejection cuts deeper. Rage gives armor. Clarity asks you to stand exposed.

If I could do anything differently, it wouldn’t be to care less.

It would be to speak sooner — with clarity instead of rage.
To trust that love does not require silence.
To believe that truth, spoken gently, is an act of care.

CherryCoBiz exists because of this belief.

The “Co” stands for cooperative — shared wisdom, shared growth, shared humanity. What began as a business idea evolved into a living record of learning. A space where wellness, culture, politics, and truth intersect — not as branding, but as experience.

CherryCoBiz is a living legacy.

In many ways, I am pre-parenting my granddaughter from a distance — building a place where her story will belong when she is ready to find it. A place that says: someone saw clearly, loved deeply, and refused to stop learning.

I don’t write because I have answers.
I write because silence has answers too — and I’ve lived with those long enough to know they don’t heal anyone.

This piece is not written to persuade.
It is written to widen the frame.

For those who will recognize themselves here — you are not alone.
For those who may find this helpful — take what you need.
And for those who assume too much while knowing too little — consider this an invitation.

This is what learning looks like when it refuses to stop.