Momma Boy
Three months after I arrived, my father took his own life in the basement of our house in northern Wisconsin. I never knew him. What he left me was not grief exactly, but a shape — a fractured family, a widowed mother, and a boy who understood, before he had words for it, that his job was to be the one who never left.
Momma Boy is the story of that tether. Where it came from, what it cost, and how a life that began in death got rewritten anyway.
The Podcast Series
Introduction
Notebook Recap and Explanation
Notebook Recap, Acceptance of Inherited Trauma
Notebook Recap, Stacked Grief
Notebook Recap, You Are Not Self-Made
A Prologue by Bryan Stafford
The Early Years
Notebook Recap and Explanation
Welcome World, Goodbye Dad
The House that Beer Built
The First Escape
The High School Years
More to come! It’s the 1990’s.
Other Thoughts
The Light Shines in the Darkness
I developed this song from my work learning to use music as a therapeutic tool—a way to reach places words cannot. Music moves through the mind, settles into the body, and gives shape to emotion we don’t yet know how to name. In counseling, it can become a bridge between thought and feeling, memory and meaning, despair and hope.
It’s written from the perspective of someone in the depths of depression, but it aligns with the idea of being a cross-bearer. It doesn’t rush past the darkness. But it refuses to believe the darkness is the end of the story. Viktor Frankl taught me that unbearable suffering can be met with meaning; Carl Rogers, that healing often begins not with answers but with being deeply seen. And underneath both, as a Christian, rests my first and deepest hope. In a God who steps into the shadows rather than calling to us from a safe distance.
The Apostle John puts it plainly: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”(John 1:5, NIV). That promise is where this song lives.
I hope it meets you somewhere true. The lyrics are mine, and the video generation is a creative development app’s work.
Overview
This hub gathers everything related to Momma Boy—its backstory, themes, and creative process—tracing how a single creative project can illuminate calling, family, memory, and the holy ground of ordinary work.
Life Vocations 