Broken Family
Finding Our Way Home
Tamara Roske
Cultivating hope, healing, and social change through storytelling
When Fate Takes Hold
Coming March 16th, 2027
A Memoir of Loss, Discovery and Destiny
Preface
My Memoir When Fate Takes Hold is not a confession written to entertain, but a record of memories that I kept hidden in the margins of my mind. I have learned that the most difficult stories are not the ones I have told to feel seen, but the ones I have kept concealed.
I was two when the world around me shattered and three, when the fracture hardened into a pattern I did not know how to navigate. My mother’s disappearance, set against the ordinary scene of a purple bedspread and a beloved story, Are You My Mother? left me trying to translate her absence. I was the middle child, a position that felt like an unrelenting negotiation with the universe.
About
Tamara Roske is a writer, mother of six, and Founder of Earth Guardians, a global youth-led nonprofit active in over 70 countries. Her debut memoir, When Fate Takes Hold, traces a path from abandonment to awakening. Despite only attending a few years of school, Tamara had a fierce commitment to learning, which fueled her instinct to survive and make a positive difference in the lives of others.
With more than thirty years devoted to environmental education, activism, and youth outreach, Tamara laid the foundation in 1992 for the Earth Guardian Community Resource Center, an accredited experiential-learning high school in Maui, Hawaii. She then built Earth Guardians as a cross-cultural platform to support youth in developing leadership skills. Tamara led Earth Guardians, supporting tens of thousands of young people as they worked to protect their communities from environmental and climate challenges.
Synopsis
My story begins with my mother walking out of the house, and vanishing for nine years. We were three kids under three and I was the middle child.
Shortly after her disappearance, I was separated from my siblings and left in the terrifying care of a sexually abusive uncle in Montana. This nightmare was punctuated by the erratic appearances of my father as he reinvented himself, taking my siblings and me on his tumultuous journey through a series of emotionally unavailable mother-figures, and illegal careers. My father started dealing drugs with strangers who came and went, and saying he wanted to raise our consciousness, he started smoking pot with us when I was six. Dad would always return me to my uncle when his life took a turn in another direction.
Blog Coming Soon
Reviews
"When Fate Takes Hold is a truly American story--brutal and hard, but also full of that pick-yourself-up, brush-yourself-off spirit. You can feel the author's energy flooding through.”
Bill McKibben, best selling author of The End of Nature
Courageous, captivating and necessary, the ripples of Tamara's journey now told will undoubtedly affirm and uplift many as we all navigate through the obstacles of this complicated and messy world, in search of our light.
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, author of Imaginary Borders and We Rise, currently utilized in high schools and universities across the country.