Whether you are a parent of a kiddo with cancer, a heart condition, diabetes, cerebral palsy or a thousand other things that have you pacing hospital floors with your child, this book is for you. If you are someone on the sidelines watching helplessly, this book is for you.

If you are a medical practitioner seeking to understand, this is for you. Between the pages of Dear Mama in the Darkness, Hilary Camille Thompson,CLC, is hoping parents find encouragement, hope, inspiration, compassion, and perhaps a new perspective that will help them to see the challenge of raising a medically complex child in a different light.

Hilary’s unique, refreshingly simple, practical, and inspiring approach to their family’s situation has blessed her with the ability to serve adults and teens’ across the country in her online mental health coaching practice. Mama to two great kids, (one on her second heart), she remains a tireless advocate for medical families in her “spare time,” and is now an international best-selling author.

The letters in Dear Mama in the Darkness were written over a period of eleven years, as a testament to the tools she found that enabled her to find joy, even when things were hard; to become better, not bitter. Often parents with sick kids feel alone, exhausted, emotionally drained, existing in a state of survival.

Many times, friends, relatives, neighbors, and social workers are at a loss with ways to support, let alone understand. There are many books that offer ways to help our children in these situations, but very few that offer encouragement and mental health support for the parents.

That’s where Hilary comes in. Poetic at times, tear-jerking, funny, emotionally authentic and sometimes very raw, these letters are meant to empower, inspire, and bless anyone who is fortunate enough to be involved in the care of a sick child.

Hilary’s hope is that, whether you are in a hospital, or your living room, or you’re falling into bed after another exhausting day parenting a sick kiddo, that these pages will bless your “brokenness” with a bit of gold, much like the Japanese art of kintsugi. This message is for moms.

It is for dads. It is for grandparents.

It is for neighbors. It is for the doctor or the nurse or the social worker that wants a bit of understanding.

And anyone else who is part of the scaffolding that a sick child so desperately needs. Within these pages you may find:You are not aloneThere is a way to thrive, not just surviveHealing yourself blesses your childThere is purpose even in hard thingsYou are stronger than you thinkSo is your childThere is away to see life differentlyGrief and loss shape us in surprising waysYou can’t pour from an empty vesselThe right people show upThe person bringing you this book is one of them (especially true if it is you!)No one has to sit in the Darkness alone.

Hilary is here to sit with you in it…and she’s brought a lantern (and a hot latte). .