No parent thinks it will ever happen to them. No one thinks they’ll host their son’s high school graduation party and lie about how excited they are for their kid’s next step – the kid who overdosed just a month before on a mammoth morphine pill and may not even go to college. No one thinks their baby will one day be hooked on heroin or fentanyl. But the unthinkable happened to me and my family. I watched my sunny, smart-as-a-whip second-born become a sullen, moody drug user that I had no idea what to do with. I want to share my story (with my son’s permission) – the ups and downs, the anguish and hope, all that I’ve learned through the long and painful process of supporting him through two stints in rehab and all that came in between. When our journey first started, we kept it to ourselves. I barely understood what was going on. How could I trust others to understand? But I found at some point that I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I started being more open about what we were going through, and the more I shared, the more others opened up about their own struggles. Addiction is often stigmatized, misunderstood and politicized. I want to put a human face to addiction and share how it's affected one family, my family. Writer and creator. Traveler and life-long learner. Wife and mother of four (five, if you count the dog I said I’d never get). Marketing content strategist on BGSU’s marketing team. I was raised in Sylvania, Ohio, the fourth of five girls. Armed with a journalism degree from Northwestern University, I’ve worked at an innovative publishing company in Tennessee, freelanced for newspapers and magazines and eventually found my happy place in higher ed. If I ever get a tattoo, it will be of the two words I try to live by – wonder and wander. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx