We were lucky to catch up with Stacey Powells recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stacey, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Right now I’m working on my book, “The Inch Between Us.” It is a memoir/narrative non-fiction account of what it’s been like for me to be the mother of a felon. My oldest son was arrested on Christmas 2017. He had been a meth and cannabis user for over 20 years and as with many meth addicts, he became violent. I’m diving deep into why my son became the person he did. It’s a complex jigsaw puzzle including drug use, epigenetics. enabling, fate, soul contracts, the effects of high cortisol levels while I was pregnant and so much more.

The book is about rage and disappointment, despair and disgust. It is about how his actions rippled across our family, stretching outward to numerous friends and families other than our own. But it is also about redemption and faith, with the hope that the millions of other parents who have troubled adult children – and there are millions of us – will see that there can be a light at the end of our dark tunnels. It is about how little signs from above have fallen into my lap, showing me that there can be hope for my son. I never would have believed in redemption had I not seen it for myself.
Most of all, it is about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not a process although it may take a while to get there. Instead, it is a choice. Many people are choosing not to forgive Aaron, but me? I’m choosing faith because if there is anything else a mother can do for her children it’s to have faith that they will eventually find their way back, whenever they find themselves lost.

Stacey, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I do many things. I am a music licensing/music cue sheet expert and have been for over 40 years. I started licensing music for video jukeboxes in the early 1980s and then was hired by Ridge Walker at the music department at Paramount Pictures where I stayed for almost 20 years. I still have several music cue sheet clients and also consult with music licensing for film, TV and reprint rights for books.

I’m a wedding officiant which is a great side-gig. I get to be with couples on one of the happiest days of their lives. I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains but spend lots of time in Los Angeles so I marry couples all over California. I also officiate memorials. They are not a very happy event, but it’s a gift to be able to help find comfort for those left behind.

I’m finally writing full time which I love. I published a book in 2022 called “Empty Cupboards,” which is “… The analysis of a breakdown of a commonsensical, menopausing Leo, living in high altitude where oxygen is scant.” There are 31 stories all relating in some way as to why the heck I had a nervous breakdown in 2001. I’m also trying to get a showrunner/producer/director interested in a TV series I developed with my partner, Griff Lambert, called BEVERLY HILLS PHARMACIST. I am the daughter of THE Beverly Hills Pharmacist from the 1970s. The series is based on true events. I also have several other film/tv projects ready to go as well as several other books that need a home with a literary agent or manager.

I am also a playwright and my play STIRRUPS is going to be produced nationwide just as soon as I publish the book. It is about the journey of a woman who goes from a 15-year-old snarky teen to a menopausing, wise women. STIRRUPS is a peak into women’s health during all of our phases. It is so important to use a creative vehicle such as STIRRUPS paired with local women’s health clinics to keep the plight of women’s health in this country in the forefront of all our minds.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

From EMPTY CUPBOARDS: “The Breakdown”

The neurasthenia happened when I was walking upstairs to my bedroom. It was the spring of 2001. I dropped my two boys off at school and inhaled a cream cheese muffin on my way home.
After almost eighteen years, my music licensing job at Paramount Pictures had imploded and I didn’t know how I was going to make ends meet. I was tired of asking my family for help and felt the walls of my brain closing in on itself. On step eight or nine, I halted. My hand was on the wood banister. I staggered and couldn’t catch my breath, then sat down on the carpeted stair. I was experiencing my first panic attack. I thought it was a heart attack or that my asthma was about to go into a full-blown assault on my lungs. It wasn’t the physical sensations that got me.
It was an understanding that, at that moment, if there had been a gun in the house, this book of essays would not exist.
The thought scared me so much I called my mother and told her I needed help.**
Immediately.
I was falling apart. I’m not allowed to fall apart.
I need to keep it together. I couldn’t keep it together.
No one in my family has ever fallen apart. That’s not entirely true but no one talked about my grandmother, my aunt …
An hour later she found me sobbing on the master bathroom floor. If I had been wearing mascara it would have been all over my face. Outstanding bills and letters were spread out in front of me, looking like the hodgepodge of a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle that had been dumped onto a card table. In between erratic gulps of air and a guttural scream that wasn’t my own, my hands had a minor altercation with the contents of the cupboard. The contents of my bathroom cupboard scattered all over the counter and floor. Those empty cupboards taunted me, a reminder of how my well-constructed life had imploded.
Mom helped me into the shower and while I was cleaning off days of body dirt, she found a few psychiatrists in the Yellow Pages. I was eventually prescribed Wellbutrin and Celexa, heavyweight antidepressants which made me pass the two-hundred-pound mark on the scale and kept me numb for eighteen months.
During my indifferent, apathetic and mentally-shut-down state, I cried uncontrollably for hours, ignoring calls, staring at nothing.
I turned a blind eye to what my boys were doing behind my back, unable to engage from my haze of nothingness, leaving them to their own devices. I don’t recommend this as a parenting style for teenagers.
I lamented the fact that I didn’t like the taste of alcohol because I needed something to help numb my brain.
I’d forget to shower and doing laundry became a hassle.
I forgot how to cook healthy meals – pouring endless bowls of cereal to feed my boys, not caring if the refrigerator was almost empty. Sometimes I splurged and made Zataran’s Red Beans and Rice out of a box, but not often. Fast food became a staple.
I didn’t give a shit if the lawn was mowed and let mounds of the dog poop gather in the backyard until the stench rose from the grass and a neighbor complained.
I didn’t care about anything.
I’m not really sure how I even “cared” for my kids during this time but I guarantee it wasn’t very good. My mother helped and some girlfriends did what they could, but for the most part, my boys were on their own, an absolute calamity and disgrace for any mother with two teenagers. When I should have been channeling my inner Laquanda, and stayed in my boys’ business 24/7, I slipped into myself, mostly unnoticed by them. I became a giant faux paux.
Their father wouldn’t take them as often as he was supposed to, mostly as a punishment to me and after a while, I stopped asking and they stopped calling him.
And then the day eventually came when I woke up feeling somewhat like myself.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I knew about Al-Anon. I had been surrounded by addicts and alcoholics my entire life and never knew that there was help for people like me until after my son was arrest. One of my closest friends, Betty R., dragged me to an Al-Anon meeting in Los Angeles. It was for parents of addicts and alcoholics. I cried the entire time. For many years in my life I would be fixing or saving my son from himself and all that energy took me away from me. Al-Anon reminded me how important it is for me to take care of myself first and that we have absolutely no control at all over anyone else’s behavior.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.staceypowells.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/staceypowellslyster/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stacey.powells
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacey-powells-lyster-b3017013/
• Youtube: @staceypowells3120

Image Credits

All images are mine, Stacey Powells