First off, yes, I know it should be Mom and I. I wanted Me and Mom because it was juvenile. And my heroine has some growing up to do. If you do a search on ‘me and mom,’ you will find it is often a child’s way of referring to her relationship with Mom. My heroine Sarah never outgrew the phrase and that’s indicative of her life.

The story opens with Sarah stuck in the staleness of her relationship with her mother. She is overly dependent on her mom and in the process of that she outgrows her mother and the situation reverses. It has changed both of them. Sarah’s comfort zone has become Sarah’s prison cell. Mom has become someone so unlikeable you question if she can be redeemed.

That’s not to say Sarah hasn’t been working hard to redeem the situation. Her shining quality is her ability to touch the people around her. She doesn’t passively co-exist with them, she serves them.

To some degree, the story explores the idea that we are not confined by circumstance so much as by the attitude we allow to develop in ourselves about our circumstances.

Does Sarah need rescued? Maybe. But only if she can rescue as she is rescued. Perhaps love, true love should elevate us, defying the notion that we “fall” into anything, thereby descending. Perhaps we ‘rise’ into love. But if I would have put that as a title, “Me and Mom Rise for Spencer…” you see my difficulty. But Spencer Gundry looking through the fence, unshaven, hair wild, a walk of over a thousand miles behind him and a past he won’t talk about, I ask you, who needs saved here?

Normal things ground us. Normal things ground Sarah. She is nailed to her world, but Spencer Gundry is the proverbial tumbleweed. Notice who is leading on my cover. Notice the light between them. Notice that he can’t touch her, he knows the rules, and they are both looking ahead, not at one another. It all means something.

Sarah’s seemingly meaningless rituals are very much about the need to heal, to understand, and to protect. I rather love her brokenness. I hope you will too.