Erica Armstrong, the mom blogger who went public about her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on his website Dooce.com and on social networks, he died at the age of 47. His partner of six years, the former US Senate candidate Pete Ashdownwas instructed to release the statement after he found her dead Tuesday night at her home in Salt Lake City (Utah).
As Ashdown revealed to the Associated Press, Heather Armstrong committed suicide. After working on his sobriety for over 18 months, the blogger may have suffered a relapse that would have led her to make this decision.
The couple lived together with Armstrong’s children Leta, 19, and Marlo, 13, whom the blogger had with ex-husband and business partner Jon Armstrong, whom she divorced in 2012. Additionally, the three children from Ashdown’s previous marriage often visited the family at their Utah home.
Heather created her website Dooce in 2001, becoming a huge network hit with her advice on motherhood, relationships and other life battles. In 2009, with a more established career, Armstrong released his autobiography “The Valedittorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live”, visiting The Oprah Winfrey Show, one of the most popular American talk shows.
Her success landed Armstrong on the Forbes list of the most influential women in media. Being crowned “The Queen of Mom Bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine. Although she has won the hearts of thousands of readers, her career has also been marked by controversy, even going so far as to be accused of spoiling her children.
The criticism started when Armstrong wrote against his boss, the owner of a start-up technology company he wanted to “strangle,” thus costing him his job. After wreaking havoc on the networks, the blogger has continued to cover topics such as her first marriage, life in Los Angeles, motherhood or alcoholism, digging into her deepest feelings with honesty as a flag.
Depression, alcoholism and scathing criticism
As his popularity grew, so did his criticisms, who accused her of bad manners and worse.
One of his last Dooce posts was about a previous win over drinking.
“On October 8, 2021, I celebrated six months of sobriety alone on the floor next to my bed feeling like a wounded animal that wanted to be left alone to die,” Armstrong wrote. “There was no one in my life who could understand how symbolic a victory was for me, however… full of tears and sobs so violent that at one point I thought my body would split in two. The pain sent me rushing into tides of pain. For a few hours I had difficulty breathing.”
He continued, “Sobriety wasn’t a mystery I had to solve. I was just looking at all my wounds and learning to live with them.”
In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture with distant friends. Within a year, her audience had grown from a few friends to thousands of strangers around the world, she wrote.
Armstrong said increasingly he found himself writing about his personal life and, eventually, a desk job, and “how I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor.”
Her employer found the site and fired her, she wrote. She canceled it, but she made a fresh start about her six months later, writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and how her unemployment had forced them to move from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah.
She soon became pregnant. Her pregnancy offered “an endless treasure trove” of content, she wrote, “but I truly believed I would give it all up once I had the baby.”
She didn’t, but she recounted her ups and downs as a new mom.
“I don’t think I would have survived if I hadn’t offered my story and tried to overcome the loneliness,” she wrote.
Armstrong was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but left the religion years ago. She has suffered from chronic depression for much of her life, according to his book. In 2017, after her marriage broke up, the internet star dubbed “the queen of mom bloggers” by the New York Times Magazine lost popularity.
Her depression worsened, leading her to enroll in a clinical trial at the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute, according to an interview she gave with Vox. They put her in a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time for 10 sessions.
“I felt that life was not meant to be lived” Armstrong told Vox. “When you are this desperate, you will try anything. I believed my children deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options to be that way for them.
Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.