EVERY DAY YOU BREAK MY HEART
I grew up in a very dysfunctional family, with an alcoholic mother who would alternately tell me that I was the most special creature on the planet, and then completely ignore me. To say the least, I was very confused and insecure about my worth well into adulthood. Her drinking progressed significantly upon our moving to Wichita, Kansas when I was 16 years old, following, unwanted, my father who had left us  At that point in the story my feelings, both physical and emotional, shut down completely. I escaped at the end of a year, and at last began my life as a "real" person through luckily gaining an early college acceptance.

In my 20's, after my parents had reunited (unfortunately) and after a dinner on vacation with just me and my parents, I finally got up the nerve to insist my father and I do an intervention with my mother. For a year I was blamed by the rest of my sisters for "causing trouble," but eventually my mother went to rehab and stopped drinking, while her behavior remained, to put it mildly, problematic. A few months after my father died of early Alzheimer's, there was a particularly disturbing incident with my mother, by then a diabetic. After a visit to the emergency room the day after Christmas, in HEAVY denial she claimed that if I told her doctor the truth about her risky behavior and she died, that it would be my fault. This song was written in response to that. It is my hope that this song will resonate, and perhaps help, anyone who has struggled with any kind of addiction, dysfunction and/or denial in their own lives or families.