The influential mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who opened up on her struggles battling with depression and alcoholism as a mother on her site at Dooce.com and on social media, is dead.
According to her boyfriend Pete Ashdown, Heather Armstrong died by committing suicide. He added that he found her on Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home.
Ashdown further said that Armstrong had been sober for over 18 months but had recently had a relapse.
Heather Armstrong had two children with her former husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, and was one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers. On her site, Dooce, which she started in 2001, she wrote all about her children, relationships, and other travails.
She documented her successes on the blog and on Instagram. She released a memoir in 2009, “It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.”
Her works saw her get into the Forbes list of most influential women and a time on Ophrah Winfrey’s famous show.
Heather Armstrong and her husband divorced in 2012, after which she started dating Ashdown, a former U.S. senate candidate. Their relationship started about six years ago. T
The two lived together with Armstrong’s children, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time in their home as well.
Heather Armstrong was popular for both good and not-so-good reasons. While documenting her life activities endeared many to her, many too saw her as being a bad parent due to her use of curses while narrating stressed-out activities from pregnancy to breastfeeding, carpooling, etc.
In her memoir, she started her blog in order to share her thoughts on pop culture with faraway friends. Within a year, her audience grew from a few friends to thousands of strangers from all over the world.
Armstrong continued that she found herself writing about her personal life and, eventually, an office job, and “how much 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 took it down but started back up again six months later, writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and how unemployment had forced them to relocate from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah.
Heather Armstrong had a long battle with depression. At a point, it got so bad that she had to enroll in a clinical trial at the University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was put in a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time for 10 sessions.
“I was feeling like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong said in an interview with Vox. “When you are that desperate, you will try anything. I thought my kids deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options to be that for them.”
