From bitterness to baking: How Tamar Powers powered her way out of addiction, homelessness into owning Made With Love Bakery

For three months in 2015, Tamar Powers and her 8-year-old son bathed in the Spokane River.

After going to jail for theft and possession of methamphetamine, getting evicted from her apartment, her father succumbing to alcoholism and the threat of losing her son forever looming over her head, Powers knew it was time for a change.

“I had spent my entire life, from the age of 4, just in chaos and drugs and alcohol,” Powers said. “So I didn’t know any other life. And when I discovered this life, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want every part of this.’ Whatever it entails, I want it. So I just never looked back.”

She and her son, Trace, bounced between staying in homeless shelters and camping in a tent by the river. Three times a week, Powers would walk a mile and a half to Spokane Community College just to catch a bus. From there, she traveled to outpatient drug treatment, received service and then headed back to fetch her son from the shelter.

“I never missed a day of treatment, because I never missed a day of getting drugs,” she said. “So I just figured if I would put the same focus into my sobriety, that I could be unstoppable.”

During this tumultuous period of her life, Powers turned away from drugs and alcohol, choosing to focus on two things – baking and bodybuilding.

Almost 11 years after clawing her way out of a life of addiction, a 48-year-old Powers lives a completely different life from the one she once knew. As a marathon runner, competitive bodybuilder and the owner of Made With Love Bakery, Powers cannot help but feel proud about the life she has built for herself. With 4.9 stars on Google, Made With Love Bakery, 2023 W. Dean Ave., is a testament to her work ethic and desire to be the best mother, business owner and woman she possibly can be.

An average day for Powers consists of waking up at 3 a.m. and baking until her “heart is content.” Seven days a week, from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., Powers sells pastries, cookies, muffins, pies, cakes and more out of a quaint historic building in the West Central neighborhood that was once a butcher’s shop. Inside, a wall is painted with crimson and gold wildflowers, and jazz music plays in the background. All of their baked goods, including the popular Bourbon Bliss that took her a year to perfect, are made in-house.

But 11 years ago, Powers can remember a time when she, her son and a woman nicknamed Cindy Lou walked from the river to their camp site every day. With all of their belongings on Powers’ back, the weight was hurting her and breaking her spirit.

Around the same time that Powers and her son got evicted, she decided that she needed to get sober. Instead of drugs, her passion became fitness. She called the timing of becoming homeless and going through withdrawals something of a “godsend.”

“As I was going through that, I was more focused on staying safe and not getting my son taken away and going to treatment than I was with the nightmares and the headaches and the migraines,” Powers said. “There were so many withdrawal symptoms that I didn’t know were withdrawal symptoms, because I just thought it was stress from being homeless.”

After getting sober and moving into an apartment above the ADEPT Assessment and Treatment center, 1321 N. Ash Street, Powers started working for Knight Construction. A few years later, she transitioned to working as a garbage truck driver for the city before becoming a meter reader with the water department.

But it was not a good fit, she said, and the idea of becoming her own boss gleamed bright in the forefront of her mind. So she elected to start a cheesecake catering company.

“I’ve always loved baking,” she said. “In my addiction, I used baking as kind of an escape within an escape. It gave me something to focus on, and it’s really kind of like my love language.”

Powers went to Callie Johnson, then-owner of Made With Love Bakery, in 2025 for business advice. From their conversations, Johnson decided it was time to hand the reins of the bakery over to someone passionate about baking, as Johnson wanted to take her career in a different direction. Powers was that perfect, passionate person to sell the bakery to.

A decade after becoming sober, Powers has many things that most people might take for granted. She has good credit and life insurance. She has competed in two marathons, including one in South Africa when she hit her four-year sobriety mark. She is even planning on competing in her first bodybuilding competition later this year. But in 2012, none of that seemed attainable.

“Fifteen years ago, I was in the depths of my addiction,” she said. “I had a Jeep at that time, and we were parked out in Deer Park, which is where I lived at the time, in the parking lot of the Catholic Church. We had no place to go. We were living in the Jeep, my dog and my son. I had meth on me, and it was in the middle of the night, like 2 in the morning, and I got out of the Jeep, crying, not knowing where to go, and I was just devastated. It was horrible. But I sat on the side of the Jeep, and I was smoking my meth and crying and wondering where to go.”

Now Powers wants to share her story in hopes that other people entrenched in addiction might be inspired. Her advice, though she admits it is somewhat cliche, is to never give up on the path to recovery. In the future, she hopes to expand her business and employ people who are working toward changing their lives for the better. She would also like to aid fledgling entrepreneurs through the bureaucratic processes required to start a business.

As a 19-year-old, Trace Powers can often be found working side-by-side with his mother. A graduate of Deer Park High School, he plans to pursue a welding career. In the next few months, he’s starting a job at Knight Construction. As for the bakery and his mom, he sees her journey as a tale of strength and unyielding perseverance.

“She just loves this bakery more than me at this point,” he joked. “She’s obsessed with it – 24/7, it’s what she thinks about. I mean, if anybody could do it, it’s her, for sure.”

April 1 will mark Powers’ 11th year of sobriety, and it coincides with the 1-year anniversary of her owning Made With Love. Upon becoming sober, Powers said she had to completely redefine the person she was and wanted to be. While she was 38 when she became sober, she said she mentally felt like a 20-year-old because the drugs stunted her growth. How she carried herself, how she spoke, how she dressed and how she behaved all had to change. She had to pretend to be the kind of person she wanted to be until she eventually managed to become that person. At the time, she felt vulnerable, embarrassed and unsure of who she was.

Today, after extensive drug treatment, endless hours in the bakery and the gym, Powers knows exactly who she is.

“I think that’s why a lot of people turn back to the unsafe, comforting place of addiction, because that’s where it feels safe for them, even though it’s the most unsafe place you can be,” Powers said. “There’s still a lot of things I don’t know as a 48-year-old woman now, but I don’t care. I don’t care because I know me.”