Sign-In
Cart
What the House Holds: A Memoir of Loving a Child You Cannot Save
Hardcover
Biographies GeneralPregnancy & Adoption
Publisher: Eshom Cabin Press
Published: Mar 20 2026
Pages: 214
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Loving a child is instinct. Surviving the child you love is something else entirely.
When Brett and Shane opened their home to a child who had already survived more than most adults ever will, they believed love, structure, and stability could heal what the world had broken. They had read the literature. They had completed the training. They had asked the hard questions. They knew this would be difficult.
They did not know what difficult actually meant.
What the House Holds is a memoir about parenting on the edge of violence, navigating severe mental illness inside a home, and the impossible tension between protecting your family and loving a child you cannot save. Written by an adoptive parent with clinical insight and years of contemporaneous documentation, this book follows one family through the daily reality of raising a daughter with Reactive Attachment Disorder, dissociative features, schizoaffective disorder, and a history of severe early childhood trauma - through false allegations, psychiatric hospitalizations, insurance denials, failed supports, and the kind of exhaustion that does not feel like tiredness.
What the House Holds is also a document of institutional failure - of a child welfare system that placed a child without full disclosure, of psychiatric hospitals that stabilized and discharged on a revolving door, of insurance companies that denied hospitalizations as not medically necessary, of schools and law enforcement and courts that could do very little against a child who had already mapped the limits of every available consequence. The book's closing section is a series of open letters - to her doctors, her therapists, her evaluators, the psychiatric hospitals, the insurance companies, the Department of Human Services, Congress, the police, and the schools - written in the plain language of someone who has spent years communicating through official channels and been failed by all of them.
This is not a book about giving up. It is a book about what love actually costs - and what a family does when every system meant to help has failed.
If you are a parent living what this book describes, it was written for you first. You are not crazy. You are not failing. You are not alone. What is happening in your house is real, and the reason no one believes you is the same reason the author had to start documenting everything: because some things are only credible when there is no other explanation left.
Also in
Biographies General
Bluesland: Portraits of Thirteen Major American Blues Masters
Pete Welding (ED.)
Toby Byron (ED.)
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
The Children of Athena: Greek Intellectuals in the Age of Rome: 150 Bc0-400 AD
Freeman, Charles
Hardcover
Make It a Double: From Wretched to Wondrous: Tales of One Woman's Lifelong Discovery of Whisky
Sackier, Shelley
Hardcover
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Isaacson, Walter
Hardcover
An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents Over Three Centuries
Correia, David
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Cooper, Christian
Hardcover
The Secret Life of the Savoy: Glamour and Intrigue at the World's Most Famous Hotel
Williams, Olivia
Paperback
The Badger: The Life of Bernard Hinault and the Legacy of French Cycling
Fotheringham, William
Paperback
The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
Kinney, David
Wittman, Robert K.
Paperback
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Womens Political Culture, 1830-1900
Sklar, Kathryn Kish
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy: A Family Memoir of Scandal and Greed in the Meat Industry
Cherington, Gretchen
Paperback
Gift of Power: The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine Man
Lame Deer, Chief Archie Fire
Erdoes, Richard
Paperback
My Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
Dessa Wander
Hardcover
Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice
Giuffre, Virginia Roberts
Hardcover
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
Lawson, Jenny
Hardcover
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Kuehn, Christine
Hardcover
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers
Hardcover
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Fedarko, Kevin
Paperback
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Colloff, Pamela
Hardcover