Welcome to a new series of posts that will spotlight all of the characters of Depending on the Morning Sun!
For each spotlight post you will get:
- a list of my favorite stories with the character—and the reasons why
- a brief bio
Let’s begin with our favorite special-needs-mom-fighter, Carrie Reese! 🙂
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My favorite stories with Carrie
It’s all about Carrie’s family, but mostly her autistic son; the good and the bad, encapsulated in this little glimpse of a standard evening in their lives.
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This one, at its heart, is about the determination to move on and the love for our children. That combination can weather much, even an anxiety attack at 30,000 feet.
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It starts with another bad day and a lot of longing for the past which always seems simpler, but I feel strongly for the hopeful tone in this one. It’s like a lifeline you always have to throw yourself.
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It’s all about raw emotions you feel as a special needs parent and what you have to do to cope. Every single day. It’s one of my most unfiltered pieces.
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A portrait of Carrie’s failed aspirations as an artist, her past relations and a philosophical reflection about life all in one. This one was a lot of fun writing, even if the subject is serious!
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That Bio
Born Caroline McDonnell on the Isle of Skye, 9 March 1979, Carrie was supposed to have been the love-child of ex-hippie world traveler, Deborah Sawyer, and Scottish ranger, Calum McDonnell. But the marriage fractured after Calum started drinking in the wake of his experiences in the Falklands War and it ended in divorce in 1995.
Deborah moved back to her native Ohio later the same year and Carrie was thrown into a local high school. Carrie always professed her love for art, but ended up in law school next because she thought it was the ‘safest’ thing to do.
Her brief attempt at getting an academic degree, however, was cut short by the tragic death of her friend, Lin Kouris, which led Carrie to an even more self-destructive journey into substance and other kinds of abuse, while traveling aimlessly in the Americas.
It took another death, that of Carrie’s brother, who was killed by af mine while stationed in Afghanistan, to shake Carrie out of her self-made misery, get clean and begin rebuilding her life.
Soon after Carrie got a second chance when she met newly minted state trooper, Jonathan Reese, while working as a waitress in Flagstaff, AZ, in 2005.
It wasn’t entirely planned, but the year after that came Emma Reese, their daughter, followed by her little brother, Michael in late 2008.
With support from Deborah and her new husband (Carrie’s stepfather), Carrie and Jon defied the odds and got their family to work, despite Michael’s autism diagnosis, and constant problems with money, health and finding time and energy for anything resembling romance.
The backside of that coin, however, is that their family life almost all of the time is just that … work. Will that ever change? Can it change? We’ll have to see in future stories.
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And that’s it for this time – next up: Carrie’s rock – her husband, Jonathan Reese.
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Song: New Order – “True Faith”
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Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash
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