(This article is a part of our series on Inspiring Stories and is a gracious contribution by Suzanne Rico from SuzanneRico.com. Please contact me if you have a great story to share with our fine parents community!)

When the wind blows from the east in the town where I live in Southern Spain—called a Levante—and the tide from the Bay of Cadiz pushes back up the Rio Guadalete, the strong smell of sewer wafts from our bathroom’s ancient pipes. Since this is a windy area and our apartment is small, I bark at my children if they leave the door ajar and then feel guilty about my bad mood; they have done a better job at adjusting to living in a place that smells like crap than I have.

We moved to Spain last summer after my mom died from cancer. It was an impulsive decision, spurred by a grief so great I felt I had no choice but to try to outrun it. My husband understood that the memories in every corner of our house in Los Angeles–where we had brought my mom to live when she got sick–were salt on an open wound and went along willingly. But our two boys, who were five and seven years old at the time, didn’t have a choice.

We moved from our large, comfortable suburban home into a faded but still grand Spanish palacio in the middle of an old port town famous for being the place where Christopher Columbus once sailed for the Americas. My sister Stephanie had moved there two years earlier with her two pre-teen daughters and husband, a surgeon for the U.S. Navy, and had managed to secure for use the last bit of space in her building—a small, charming cluster of rooms with no kitchen and only a half bath. [Read more…]

(This article is a part of our series on Inspiring Stories)

She lay in the hospital bed exhausted. She was 17 years old and had just given birth to a baby.

Normally, the delivery rooms of Mercy Hospital are filled with joy and celebration. On the day that Josh Shipp was born however, the tears streaming down his mother’s cheeks weren’t those of joy.

What had started out as an exciting prom night had turned into a sobering ordeal of teen-pregnancy, and lying there on that hospital bed, Josh’s mother had a critical decision to make.

She decided she wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of raising a baby.

And just like that, Josh became an Orphan.

At the tender age of a newborn infant, he entered the foster care system – one of the 115,000 children in America waiting for adoption.

Except, in Josh’s case, adoption never quite happened.
[Read more…]

(This article is a part of our series on Inspiring Stories and is a gracious contribution by Mark Hermann from Rock and Roll Zen. Please contact me if you have a great story to share with our fine parents community!)

It’s been a wild and crazy ride in the 51 years of life I’ve lived so far as a creative spirit.

I’ve toured the world with real rock stars including Foreigner and Joe Walsh and gotten a taste of the life that goes along with it. I’ve felt the elation of playing my own music in a big arena, written songs that were placed in TV shows and films and produced Grammy nominated artists. It’s been cool. And though it hasn’t always exactly been a walk in the park, it certainly hasn’t been boring.

But without a doubt, my proudest accomplishment is my family.

With all the ups and downs and shifting sands that define the life of an artist, my family reminds me each and every day what it means to keep it real.

Like when my 4-year old son would rather do his best to tear the strings off my guitar rather than actually learn how to play it when I attempt to show him something. Or when my 9-year old daughter, who refuses to listen to anything else but Harry Potter audio books day and night, asks me who is Bruno Mars? (Whose kids are these anyway?) Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But life wasn’t always like this.
[Read more…]