The Trouble with Being a Writer…

The trouble with being a writer and being a mostly stay-at-home mom with 2 part-time jobs is that most of my current “writing” occurs in my head. While I’m driving or tossing and turning, I’m coming up with article ideas left and right. Actually finding the time to type them up is the conundrum. My baby is a gorgeous sleeper. I have actually trained her to sleep 12 hours a night and take 2 naps during the day. Write while she’s sleeping? Sure thing, I’ll get right to it after I take care of the dishes, laundry, and never-ending pile of bills. Not only am I a wife, mother, and #beststepmomever, I am my family’s CEO. Running a household is a job in and of itself, for which there is no monetary gain, but a surprising amount of satisfaction.

It’s easy to get lost in the joys of motherhood and forget about the writer inside me, dying to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Just like how we refer to forgetfulness as “mommy brain,” I wonder if I will pour too much love, attention, and affection into my children that I will forget how to write well? Am I limited to sharing parenting tips and life hacks? Ugh. I was a writer before I became a mother. I like to think I only get more seasoned as time goes on and I definitely still have a heck of a lot to write.

As soon as I could talk, and then hold a pencil, I’m sure I knew that it was my destiny to become a wordsmith. I learned cursive before kindergarten. Amazingly, my parents spent a crap-ton of money on a computer for me when I was about 10 years old. No one my age had a computer. I had a glorious Tandy on which I could type my usually one-page stories and print them out on fuchsia paper. The first story I can really remember writing on this Tandy was about a unicorn named Truvy. I have no clue what adventures Truvy got into 30 years ago, but I bet if I dig through some boxes and look for fuchsia paper, I’ll be able to refresh my memory. Good old Truvy. God bless my parents for indulging in my dream (and also for getting me the accompanying printer, because really half the fun of having a computer in the early 90s was printing stuff out—with those perforated edges with the holes!).

After the Tandy, I went old school to plain old composition notebooks for my stories. My cousin Bethany and I would spend entire summers writing in notebooks and sharing our stories with each other. I could never come up with anything as good as her best story, which centered around an average girl having a chance meeting with New Kids on the Block and then becoming Joe McIntyre’s girlfriend. It just doesn’t get any better.

At age 16, I wrote on loose-leaf paper in a denim-covered binder what I like to call a novella about life as a teenager in 1997. Before cell phones, before social media. Before stress and accountability. No one has ever read this (not even Bethany) and it is gathering dust under my bed somewhere. The beauty of the written word is that it can capture a time period and just freeze it. If you never wrote it down, it’s like maybe it didn’t happen. I am feeling the itch to write, create, do, influence. I predict some great works in my future. Perhaps I am just standing on a precipice about to take the world by storm. I’m betting on my unicorn Truvy that something great is about to happen. Stay tuned!