MY STORY: A seed gets planted

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. 

It has also given me a sense of purpose that has been eluding me and given birth to the idea for The Wildflower School of Life, a program that connects struggling young adults aged 20-30 to Care Farms. Behind every not-for-profit organization is a painful life story that has been turned into purpose, this is mine.

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life goes off the rails

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 (aka professional putterer). Most importantly though, I am a single mother to two ‘dandelion’ kids (thriving and resilient) and one ‘orchid’ child (sensitive and struggling) named Sam, all in their 20’s.  

My dandelion kids are following what I call the 'Middle Class Master Plan' laid out for them with just a few small bumps in the road that they successfully navigate, but Sam has always struggled with the 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 himself is an open book (one of the lovely things about being on the autistic spectrum), parts of his story are not mine to share, and guarding aspects of my son's story is always a delicate balancing act.

But I will say that Sam's challenges — and his life choices — have dragged me on to a path that I call "The Heroic Parent Journey," where ordinary parenting challenges are a thing of the past and us "Heroic Parent's" find ourselves in a world of extra difficult trials and tribulations such as school rejection, peer rejection, addiction, mental illness, hospitalizations, incarcerations, teenage pregnancy, homelessness and all that other super fun stuff.

I will add that this fork in the road has had a profound effect on me, and 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 I had for my son.

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what I will share

When people ask me what Sam's diagnosis is I don't know how to answer that, he's had so many different one's over the years that I just call it Sam Syndrome, a hodge-podge of challenges from being a super feeler that threw his life off course from a young age. When Sam was 16 he spent a year and eight months at Pine River Institute, a treatment program that is more like a therapeutic boarding school for kids struggling with a severe failure to thrive. 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 seven years now and he is pretty shut down in many ways. He also cannot care for himself without a lot of help, the routine life skill stuff isn't happening right now and I would say he is mentally closer to 15 than 25.

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. The eyes are definitely the gateway to the soul, and sometimes his look completely dead.​​​​​​ As a mother this is heartbreaking to bear witness to. A few months ago a caregiver I hired to help Sam told me "it's hard to see someone so young care so little about his life." Yeah, it is.

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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 own mental health takes a severe 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, the sleeping under a bridge on the Gardner Expressway with no shoes on kind of homelessness. Which oddly Sam didn't mind as much as we did, he seemed to kind of like the adventure of it all, mostly because no one had any expectations of him. So, in order to make it bearable for myself, I came to reframe these homelessness stints as Sam's version of a gap year. I certainly found myself in some pretty dodgy situations when I spent a year backpacking around the world after university in the 90's, and my parents didn't have a clue where I was (or even what continent I was on) until I did my monthly phone call home. But the reality is that Sam's "gap years" were much more derelict and have no end in sight without some sort of intervention.

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 every parent will discover, once a child is old enough to have agency over their own lives we can't force our kids to do anything. It's also hard when someone has little insight into how unwell they really are.

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 set of challenges is hard. While we navigate this juncture he's been living in motels in the Collingwood area for a year now paid for by his father which is not just expensive, it's unsustainable.

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what next?

As Oscar Hammerstein famously said, "You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?"

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, but I'm not ready to give up on him.

So the questions I always find myself coming back to when I'm trying to figure out how to best help Sam re-engage in life 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 a program that I think would engage him and I won’t like myself much ten years from now if I don’t give my idea for the Wildflower School of Life a good try.

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turning pain into purpose

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that our super-feelers don’t need fixing, they need understanding, 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 heal by connecting them with Care Farms in their community. 

The Wildflower School of Life is a mash-up of the best aspects of the treatment programs I’ve researched (John Volken Academy, Caritas, Bridewell Garden's, Gould Farm), 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. 

So as of February 2026, I'm selling my glamping business near South River 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.

This feels like a very daunting challenge, but these are five things that I know for sure: 

1. I am good at bringing people together.

2. I love being a part of the recovery community. 

3. There is a real need for a program like this, Sam is not the only super lost soul in his 20's.

4. The benefits of this will reach beyond just a little patch of land, it will benefit the social fabric of the surrounding community.

5. I cannot do this alone. ​​

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it takes a village

So please join us 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 super-feelers are the best of us, we have so much to learn from them, but they need a very particular environment in order to thrive. Please reach out to me if any of my story resonates with you, we are part of a dynamic ecosystem that weaves us together, so let’s be a part of cultivating hope and a brighter future for us all.