my story
Hi there, I'm Sara. I'm 57 years young and getting to this place in my life has been a long and winding road, some of it paved with pain, but I am grateful for every single messy detour along the way because they have forced me to grow into a better version of myself.
I was born and bred in Toronto and I have lived and worked in countries all over the world such as Australia, the UK, and Thailand, before settling in Guelph from 2002-2021 with my young and growing family. Professionally I have worked as a photographer, graphic designer, furniture maker, and most recently a glampground proprietor. Most importantly though, I am a single mother to two ‘dandelion’ kids and one ‘orchid’ child named Sam, all in their 20’s.
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life goes off the rails
My two dandelion kids are following the middle class Master Plan laid out for them without too many hiccups, but Sam has always struggled with ordinary, everyday expectations of him. How do I accurately and succinctly sum up the emotional turmoil of the past 25 years? It’s impossible, and although Sam is an open book, parts of his journey are not mine to share and guarding my son's privacy is always a delicate balancing act.
But his journey has had a profound impact on mine, and I will say that for parents such as myself, what I call The Heroic Parent Journey begins when ordinary parenting challenges are a thing of the past and you find yourself in a world of extra difficult trials and tribulations such as school rejection, addiction, mental illness, hospitalizations, incarcerations, teenage pregnancy, homelessness and all that other fun stuff.
Sam's challenges, and his life choices, have had a profound effect on me, and in some cases navigating some of these life experiences has been traumatic at times. However, I am learning how to manage what is known as ambiguous grief ~ the death of my ordinary, everyday dreams for my son.
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what I will share
When Sam was 16 he spent a year and eight months at Pine River Institute, a treatment program that felt more like a therapeutic boarding school. Pine River was a Godsend, and a successful intervention while he was there because he thrived with the routine and safe container that the program created for our whole family. Unfortunately though without this safety net he fell back into old habits after he graduated from Pine River, as did we.
Since then we've all travelled down some down some pretty distressing roads and although I think we are through the worst of it, there is still a long way to go before I would describe Sam as “good” or “doing well”. For example, he has not worked, or attended school, for many years now, and he cannot care for himself without a great deal help. I've seen Sam when he has a sparkle in his eyes, and it's been a long time since I've seen life in them, and sometimes they look completely dead.
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what we've tried
We've tried everything we can think of to navigate this juncture including sourcing other long term treatment programs on farms in Ontario and in BC that look amazing and would meet him where he's at, but he refuses to go to them. I do get it, they are intensive programs that will keep him busy 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and that is a lot to ask of an introvert who needs to guard his energy, I honestly don't think I could do it.
I've tried holding him close by letting him live with me, but it always ended badly and my mental health takes a nose dive. We've tried "letting go" under the assumption that Sam is capable of more than he's demonstrating, but any attempt to let him navigate life on his own has just led to homelessness, and not the couch surfing pulling yourself up by the bootstraps kind, it's led to the sleeping in a park or ATM machine with no shoes kind of homelessness.
Yes, of course we've tried to get him to take medication and attend therapy, but he is non-compliant on both fronts so the mere suggestion from well meaning folk makes me want to scream, or cry, or both (no offence intended, I know people are just trying to help when they make these suggestions, but... like... really? ) I have investigated every woo-woo alternative that there is, and haven't ruled out any of them. But as any parent will eventually discover, once a child is old enough to have agency over their own lives, we can't force our children to do anything.
I have finally accepted that Sam has a developmental delay and other mental health challenges that he is self-medicating with weed for, and we've adopted a harm reduction strategy and surrounded him with whatever supports are available to allow him to live independently, but he's definitely not living his best life at the moment and finding a long-term place to live for someone with his challenges is hard.
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what next?
Whenever I ask Sam what he wants out of life these days he says he wants to live in a tiny house and work on a farm. I love this idea for him, and this dream sounds achievable, but the truth is he’s going to need a great deal of support because he doesn’t have the confidence or the tools to navigate a challenge like this on his own and have it be successful. After so much failure it feels like he has lost faith in himself, and his abilities, but I'm not ready to give up on him.
So the questions I always find myself coming back to are these: If Sam won’t go to a traditional treatment program, how can some sort of alternative treatment program come to him and meet him where he’s at? What might that look like? If I build it, will he come?
The honest answer to the last question is I don’t know, but I’ve spent quite a bit of time dreaming up what I think is a good place to start, and I won’t like myself much ten years from now if I don’t give this idea a good try. So as of February 2026, I'm selling my glamping business and I'm planning to move to the Collingwood area and start a flower farm that employs Wildflower School of Life participants. But that's going to take time to get started, years most likely, so in the mean time I'm launching The Wildflower School of Life program with the help of E3, a non-profit serving Simcoe County that has a mission to uplift community members and families through inclusive support services that educate, enable and empower their clients.
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a seed takes root
You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true? ~ Oscar Hammerstein
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that our orchid children don’t need fixing, they need understanding, and acceptance, and help discovering their super powers. In Sam’s case he also needs something to do in a nurturing environment that will set him up for success. Hence my dreaming up the Wildflower School of Life, a program that will create the safe container that our struggling young adult’s need in order to thrive.
The Wildflower School of Life is a mash-up of the best aspects of the treatment programs I’ve researched, the WWOOF’ing model (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and my own gut instincts about what Sam needs to pull himself up and out of the funk he is in. Basically he needs a farming program that understands his life challenges, and a caring community that will wrap its arms around him and help him thrive.
This feels like a very daunting challenge, but these are four things that I know for sure:
1) I am (and always have been) good at bringing people together and I love being a part of the recovery community.
2) There is a real need for a program like this.
3) The benefits of this will reach beyond just a little patch of land, it will benefit the social fabric of the surrounding community.
4) I cannot do this alone.
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So please join me in making this particular dream come true, because it is definitely going to take a village to get the Wildflower School of Life off the ground. Our "orchid's" are the best of us, they are our super feelers and we have so much to learn from them, but they need a very particular environment in order to thrive. We are part of a dynamic ecosystem that weaves us together, so let’s be a part of cultivating a brighter future for us all.