This piece was first published in 2017 as part of an anthology but over the past week, leading up to my first son’s 14th birthday (wtf!!!), it kept coming to mind. Today, on his big day, I pulled it up and reread it and wow… as a writer, it always stuns me to read what I’ve written before! The clarity that got cloudy again somewhere along the way… the clarity that I lost and found a few times perhaps, including just 8 months ago when I recommitted myself to my writing after getting swayed again by the service-oriented mental health field.
But now I’m settling into this writing space with real roots. I’m working on not one but two books, both weaving together memoir and research to explore themes of creativity, feminism and love. Now, with big boys in the house and far less need for me moment to moment, time to write feels truly possible. I wrote often when they were young but it was so hard to be consistent or aspire to book length projects. Now is another time.
As we neared the celebration of my fourteen years mothering, this piece called me back to it to remind me of the commitment I made. Now, as he navigates the teenage years, it’s more important than ever that I teach him our dreams are worthy.
And thus, for my son’s fourteenth birthday, I give you one of the many stories that brought me here, to this moment, writing to you:
As a child, my most treasured gifts were new journals. The feel of the blank pages, waiting for words, brought me indescribable joy. Find me near a stationary store and I would disappear, running my fingers across the fresh paper, dreaming of the stories I could shape. Everywhere I went I felt inspired and dreamed of one day sharing my words with the world, writing books that would find themselves on best seller lists and bedside tables across the continent.
I played with poetry and short stories, and when I entered high school, my talent was recognized by the head of the English department. A small creative writing class was established and a group of 4 or 5 of us would gather on Friday afternoons in the meeting room off the library. There, tucked away from the busy-ness of the school we would dive into stream-of-consciousness writing and writing exercises. In that quiet room, pen moving effortlessly across the paper, I felt like I was truly showing up as I was meant to, congruent with my soul’s purpose. The pain of my broken family, and the depression and anxiety that had plagued me throughout my childhood were transformed into power as they shaped essays and stories, as my truths became words.
But the next year, everything changed.
I entered my Grade 11 English class tentatively but excited. I was fast-tracking, committed to my English studies and my dream of being a writer, so all the other students were a year older than me. I settled in a desk in the middle of the room – not too close but not too far from the teacher.
The other students filed in, most seemingly not all that interested in being there but as the bell rang, they settled in their seats. The teacher, a stern faced woman, rose from her desk and started handing out the class outline, a document that had always excited me. A few simple pages stapled together, telling us of all we would explore and discover together over the coming months. I flipped through quickly, trying not to let the other students see my joy.
Clearing her throat, the teacher started to describe the primary assignment that would make up most of our grade that term. With each word she spoke, doubt and fear washed over me. What she was asking us to do, I didn’t understand at all – symbolism, foreshadowing, pathetic fallacy. These weren’t terms I had worked with before but everyone else seemed to know what was expected. I dared not admit that I did not. I was already pushing it to be in this class a year early, I was not about to prove to anyone that I wasn’t supposed to be there by opening my mouth and admitting defeat on the very first day.
Over the next couple months, I fumbled my way through that assignment. Finally, after many extensions, the teacher laid upon my desk the result of my efforts. I looked down, in horror. A large slash of thick red marker went from corner to corner across the page, topped off with a zero. A zero. A mark of 30% lay beneath the thick red marker but due to never meeting any of the deadline extensions, I had lost each one of those measly 30 marks.
Zero. Hot tears.
Zero. Total failure.
Zero. Dreams crushed.
I had never failed anything before, let alone received a zero. It was so definite, so absolute in its zero-ness that I was convinced it spoke to my talent and potential, or lack thereof. To me, this one zero was everything, and my dream of being a writer became, in that moment, pointless, doomed for failure. I walked out of that classroom heartbroken, leaving my identity as a writer behind, discarded in the old wooden desks marked with years of students’ disillusionment.
In the years that followed, convinced I didn’t “get” literature, I chose the easiest English classes offered at my school, even going down a grade level and at one point switched high schools as the rumour was the other school had a more lenient English department.
Still, I carried my journal with me most places, and when I was without it, wrote on whatever I could find.
One night, wandering the streets after-dark with my friends, all of us up to no good, I came across a large piece of cardboard, left dumpster-side behind an old restaurant. Inspiration hit, a Sharpie was provided and a poem appeared on what was previously just a piece of recycling. My friends loved it but truthfully, I disregarded this, convinced they loved it because they loved me. Even though the burst of creativity had fed my soul, nourished me in ways I knew I was meant to be fed, I considered it frivolous. Yet the cardboard poem lived on my bedroom wall for years, a constant reminder that the words were waiting and inspiration was everywhere.
But on life went. I entered university not knowing what to study, the only English course I dared take counted also as a first year Women’s Studies credit, which was the only reason I took it. Once again we were reading old literature I felt had little to do with my own human experience and I struggled to make sense of the ideas, to connect with the words. Conversely, in other classes I found myself ecstatic with the number of thought essays I had to write, shaping psychology, philosophy and sociology concepts with ease. At one point I was convinced that my calling in life was writing university essays and if my ethics hadn’t gotten in the way, I’m sure I could have made a bundle as an essay writer for busy and disinterested students.
Instead I pursued psychology and received my designation as a Registered Professional Counsellor, committing to help youth find peace and stability in their lives. But still, all I really wanted to do was write. My favourite work days as a Youth Addictions Counsellor were the ones that I got to head upstairs with a cup of tea in my hand and settle in the staff resource room in front of the computer to write my case-reports.
From there I moved on to work as a Youth & Family Counsellor in the school board and explored numerous graduate options. Although I had loved school (all the essays!) I just couldn’t commit to two more years of psychology or social work education. Nothing excited me enough and I often wondered where I would end up, if I was destined to be an under-satisfied and burnt out front-line worker, dreams forgotten.
Then I got pregnant.
Twenty-eight years old, the man of my dreams and a surprise pregnancy. Although we had only been together a year, we knew we were in it for the long haul and decided to go ahead and build a family. So there I was, looking at a few years of pregnancies, breast feeding and mat leaves as we hoped to have another child a couple years after our first. Suddenly graduate school was off the table. Getting a job I enjoyed more than my current one seemed silly since there would be no way I would be able to start somewhere new and make as much as I was making. I felt stuck. Like my life had skidded to a halt. I realized that I was going to become a mother despite having no idea what I was going to do with my career. I was uninspired and out of time.
Staring down a hot and sticky, pregnant and unemployed summer (one of the perks of working for the school board), with friends who would be scaling mountains while I tried to keep cool growing a baby, I jumped when an opportunity came my way to attend a 3 week career and life coaching program. A good long look at my life. That’s what I needed! Even though I couldn’t make a move into a new job, maybe I could make a plan, perhaps even do some courses while on mat leave.
I drove an hour into the city each day, Monday to Friday for three weeks to hang out in a nice air conditioned room doing personality and skills assessments. I dug deep into my feelings about my career, sharing my dreams, hopes and fears with the group of 15 or so other adults on the search for something new. With each assessment I was brought back to writing. Test after test, it kept coming up.
Each time, my breath caught in my throat. Tears brimmed.
Writer.
There it was. Again. And again.
Writer.
And suddenly, with 13 years of perspective and a baby growing inside me, I wondered if maybe that zero had been wrong. If maybe that zero was just a zero, and not my identity. Maybe it didn’t actually say anything about who I was or who I could become.
At the end of the 3 week program, each of us took turns standing at the front of the room to present our newly chosen career path. When it was my turn, I heaved myself out of my chair, having already gained 40 of the 50 extra pounds I carried in that pregnancy. I walked up to the front of the classroom and looked out over the table at these people who had been on this journey with me. With my hands on my growing belly and tears rimming my eyes, I told them that although I didn’t really know where life was going to take me over the next few years, I could promise them one thing:
“I will follow my dream of being a writer, one way or another. I have to because I am about to be the most important role model in this child’s life. And if I’m going to tell him to follow his dreams no matter what anyone says, then I need to follow my own.”
Between the birth of my first son, and my second I started exploring this new commitment. I took courses in marketing and public relations. I had a short writing contract for a green tech company, was a rep for a local family magazine and on occasion did a few stints with the school board to keep some form of money coming in. Mostly, I mothered but did so knowing that my time would come again and I wouldn’t play it safe. I would take the risk and write the words I knew my soul needed to write.
Three years after standing at the front of that room I was crippled with postpartum depression following the birth of my second son, isolated in our little bit of suburbia and exhausted by my full-time job keeping the baby safe from his very jealous older brother. Stress, sadness and disappointment filled every cell in my body. This was not the motherhood I had imagined. Each day felt like torture – a mix of toddler temper tantrums, endless breastfeeding, attempted napping, constant vigilance and my own, deep sadness weighing me down. I was consumed by grief and the only thing that made me feel better was writing.
But this time, I didn’t keep the words in a journal. I put them all online.
My openness and vulnerability were instantly appreciated. I started getting messages from mothers around the world who were reading my words, late at night after the kids had gone to bed or hidden in the bathroom trying to get a few minutes peace midday. Mothers who were sad and frustrated, and convinced they were alone in their experience, were finally reassured that there was another mother out there who shared their pain.
For me, on the keyboard side of the mommy blog, each post brought me into deeper alignment with my soul and I could feel the realizing of my long-held, but once cast-aside, dream. My words, the ones I had kept hidden from the public for years, were finally going out and having an impact, connecting with other women, showing them, and me, that the struggles we faced were not ours alone.
I wrote my way through that depression and grew a business too. Women wanted to write as I did, open and free and honest. I coached them to tell their truths, taught them how to shape their wisdom into words. And suddenly, there I was, writing and teaching women how to write. It was far from a straight path but somehow, with little boys at my feet looking up to me, I had landed myself right in the middle of my lifelong dream. Writing had seen me through the worst, stayed by my side at each turn and finally, when I was ready, gifted me with the courage I needed to share my words with the world and inspire women to share theirs too.
