Good Enough: A Memoir of Being Taken, Given Away, and Finding My Way Home

Some stories begin in the dark. This one begins in the back of a semi trailer, where a four-year-old boy watches a thin line of light between the doors and learns, far too young, that the world can take everything. What he cannot know is how long the road home will be - or how many hands he will pass through before he finds it. Good Enough is the story of a childhood spent being given away - to grandparents, to an orphanage, to a collapsing house held together by an old woman's stubbornness - and of the unlikely people who kept opening their doors: three families who fed a boy who wasn't theirs, three women he still calls Mom, and an old man whose single handwritten letter carried him through everything that came after. It is also the story of a gift no one could take from him, discovered at a kitchen table when his father drew a picket fence that seemed to recede into the paper - and of the lifetime it took to believe the one thing the boy was never told: that he was enough. Written for his own children, who never knew, this is a memoir about surviving what should have broken you - and walking toward the light anyway.