Becoming A Writer

Looking back, I’ve always been a writer. As a kid I wrote poems and letters to express what I wanted to say when articulating it was too hard. I wrote letters to my parents, my friends, my boyfriends, because letters were safer. I could revisit and edit my words to make sure they were conveying exactly what I wanted the reader to know about how I was feeling. Words said out loud can’t be taken back. Words written can be changed as many times as needed before they are sent. I’ve always had this thing about ‘no regrets’ and writing was a way for me to communicate that fit that view. I didn’t have to worry about saying something I didn’t mean or not getting a specific point across. Sending something I wrote meant it was ready.

When I was 30 my mum passed away. It wasn’t sudden, she’d been fighting cancer for 10 years but it was life altering nonetheless. My first daughter was only five months old at the time which meant I became a mother just as I was losing mine. She wasn’t there to give me advice on how to deal with this little 6.6lb person, to calm me when her fever spiked for the first time, nor did she get to experience any of her important milestones. When she walked at 8 months I didn’t know how that compared to when I first walked because she wasn’t there to tell me.

To cope, I turned to writing. Very soon after she passed away I bought a journal and it became my way of talking to her. It was how I captured what I was feeling in the blur of that first year. The year of firsts as I call it. As hard as it was, I didn’t want to forget the way I missed her and I was sure that in the craze of new mom hormones and the emotions of her loss that I would. I still go back to it at times and re-read what I wrote back then.

Years later after many more life changes (another daughter, a divorce, a second marriage), story ideas started to pop into my head and I decided to write. That’s how it started. That’s how I got here because writing is still part of my healing process. While each of my stories are very different, there are a few themes that are present in all of them like grief, the power of relationships, and food. Lots of food.

My debut novel Not Part Of The Plan is dedicated to her.