A woman born into the baby boomer generation uses writing and creativity from the age of five to help her to survive a broken family and child-molesting stepfather, resulting in a spiritual journey to a successful, healed adulthood.

Born into the baby boomer generation, Mary Helen Fein’s values and choices often typified the time. At age five, she identified what she calls “Moments of knowing”: moments of knowing more about love and creativity.

As a child, her father was a loving successful New Yorker who left her mother to remarry another woman. Fein’s own mother was very beautiful, but desperately poor and an alcoholic, living in the projects on welfare. To get by, she remarried—but the man was evil, a child molester and a cruel stepfather. Fein traveled back and forth from coast to coast, spending school years with her mother and stepfather, and summers with her father, loving grandmother, and new stepmother.

At age thirteen her mother dies, and Fein embarked on a new life in an upper-class New York suburb. Over the next thirty years she journeys through careers and healing, embracing the “spark” when it arrives over and over throughout her life, affecting her life choices and putting her on a spiritual path to Buddhism.

With themes of spiritual practices, mental illness, poverty, and the power of psychotherapy, this book will appeal to self-help and memoir readers, showing how to find happiness, peace, and enduring love despite a traumatic childhood.