When my daughter, Allison, handed me a lovely gift-wrapped book for Mother’s Day I had no idea how much it would change my life.  I ran my hands gently over the cover:  Women Who Think:  Tales of real-life parenthood, edited by Camille Peri & Kate Moses of SALON Magazine. 

“Mom, I gave you that book in hopes that you’ll get back to your writing,” she said, emphasizing the word writing.  “Oh,” I remarked, looking over the cover.  “I thought you gave me this book so I’d get back to my thinking.” Allison smiled.  “Well, that too.”

I’d given up any dreams I’d had of writing some years before, when my life changed and I went to work full time.  Instead, I'd spent more years than I care to remember in an exhausting routine:  Go to work, come home, go to sleep, get up, and do it all over again the next day. 

But now, standing close to my daughter this warm May afternoon in a lovely Georgia garden, I watched happy bees filled with purpose, buzzing around the wisteria.  I envied them their honey-making business.  For the first time in years I wanted to flitter around like those bees, busy and alive.  I wanted to do more than just go to work and come home.    

Standing arm and arm now with my daughter, inhaling the fragrance of gardenias and magnolias, I thought back to the rainy afternoon when I had begun packing to move out of our family home.  Out went the tear sheets, congratulations notes, acceptance letters, essays and magazine articles, contributor copies of magazines that held my stories, humor pieces and more.  Out went the Christmas cards I’d begun to collect from various editors, all of which had been pinned triumphantly to the bulletin board in my home office.

After kissing Allison goodbye, I left for the airport in Atlanta, and boarded the plane for my flight back home to Spokane, Washington.  When the plane took off I opened the book, thinking I’d read only a few chapters.  To say I couldn’t put the book down would be an under statement.  I finished the last page as the plane touched down.  Driving home from the airport, I realized this book reminded me that the first rule of life is to never give up on yourself. The women in this book hadn’t, and neither would I.

Even before I pulled into the driveway, I thought back, again, to that dreary afternoon when I’d packed up my office.  That very week an editor at Avalon in N.Y. had asked me to write a teen romance, a hard-cover book, library edition; the same week an editor at “Good Housekeeping Magazine” asked if I’d be interested in making a few changes to a short story, “Blue Berries” from my master’s thesis, that they were considering for publication.  I’d never written either one of them back, but of course a grenade had just gone off in my life.  The memory brought tears to my eyes.  

I could hardly believe that reading the book my daughter gave me would open an entire hope chest of banished dreams.  I’d even given up an opportunity to write a weekly humor column in a Bellevue, NE newspaper, oh-so-long ago.  Until now it had been years since I’d even let myself think back to this hurtful period of my life, when I let other people make decisions for me.  But no more!  As I slipped into a hot bath that evening, random thoughts bounced around in my mind like fire flies.  Even though I’d let opportunities slip through my fingers before, I knew I wouldn’t allow it to happen again.  Ever!    

Before work the next morning I stopped to buy a new notebook and ink pen.  I was excited about writing again and made a decision to start with a memoir for my children.  The week went by in a blur.  Pent up emotions poured out of me and into my new notebook every day during my lunch hour.  I  started getting up at 3:30 a.m. just to spend time on the computer before I left for work.  My memoir began to have a life of its own. 

Shortly after I’d returned from Georgia, I read an announcement in our Sunday newspaper about a class to be taught at a Barnes & Noble bookstore near our house  ~ Recapturing the Creative Spirit ~ to begin the following Tuesday evening.  That next day I left work early to stop at the book store to enroll.  I found my way to the book aisle that held the suggested text, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.  Reading the back cover alone soothed me like someone with a throat infection who’s finally gotten hold of penicillin.  Opening the first page was magic.  I remember sitting down on the floor in-between the aisles, letting my purse and jacket land in a pile.  Several people stepped around me.  “Excuse me,” they’d say.  I hardly noticed them.  I forgot about dinner. 

Within days I began writing the morning pages recommended in the book.  This, too, felt like a needed drug.  My life had become infected with sadness.  Who besides my daughter had noticed?  Certainly not me.  And with my Pollyanna personality kicked into high gear, my usual coping mechanism, I doubt that many others noticed, either.

But now, with sadness being replaced with a new spirit, alive with feeling, like those bees in that Georgia garden, I started a gardening journal.  I noted when the iris bloomed, when I found a bird’s nest, when the lilac burst forth in color, and when I needed to separate the chives. This was the summer the oregano tried to take over the garden. This was also the year the peonies finally bloomed, after years of lying dormant.  Just like me, I thought early one morning, standing in the garden in my bathrobe with a cup of coffee, to lean over and touch that first peony blossom.  “You can do it,” I whispered.  “It’s okay to bloom now.”

In the months that followed I quit a stressful job and found one closer to home with less tension.  The monthly classes at the book store were just what I needed. Take charge, they told me.  You can do it.  I finished the book early!    I wrote essays, sketches, bits for my memoir – every word feeling like infection oozing from a boil.  Breathing became so much easier.  Imagine my surprise!

That fall I began to write my first novel, about a woman who cuts all of her strings, emotional and otherwise, and moves to Benson’s Cove, an imaginary seaside community on the coast of Washington State’s Whidbey Island.  Here my character, Addy Westcombe, would spend the summer helping her Aunt Tilly with her bookstore.  For me it was a matter of dreaming up an ideal life for myself, and I couldn’t think of a better new beginning.

It’s amazing to me that I’ve imagined a whole new life for a character who slipped into my mind one day during a long, hot shower.  Soon there were more characters – a whole community full of people, living in my mind, all with problems in their lives much larger than any I’d encountered in my own life, but none that flattened any of my characters the way I’d allowed a sad divorce to flatten me.

Over the past year I’ve pared my work down to part-time. Some days, driving along in the car, I’ll have conversations with the residents of Benson’s Cove.  They argue with me. They argue with each other. They even gossip upon occasion.  One day at a red light I found myself wondering if writing a novel is like having a nervous breakdown, where you aren’t sure what’s real and what isn’t.  It’s okay, I tell myself now.  You’re not crazy.  You’re a writer.   Early in my novel, my protagonist has a moment of realization, digging in her garden one summer day, when she pulls up a chrysanthemum plant with slugs swarming among the roots.  “That’s it,” she says out loud, holding up the pitiful plant.  “This is what my life has become.  A pitiful plant where I’ve allowed other people to feed off me.  I have no direction for myself.”  With that she dumps the plant into the trash and adds a healthy dose of slug bait to the garden.

The last thing Addy does before going to bed is to write a letter of resignation to her employer.  In two weeks flat she’ll begin her new life in Benson’s Cove.  Of course romance is in the cards for Addy Westcombe, who will struggle with the lessons she must learn.  Eventually, though, she will learn her lessons, and much sooner than I have learned mine.

Typing the title of the novel on the first clean, crisp piece of paper opened up the wound in my heart.  One thing I’ve discovered is that writing is the best therapy I’ve encountered, and as my friends point out, a lot cheaper, too!  Best of all, my heart has finally begun to heal.

I’m happy to say that I’ve gotten more reasonable, and no longer get up at 3:30 a.m. each morning to write.  But I am usually at my computer by 6 a.m. most days.  This fall I plan to attend a writing conference with a synopsis of my first novel in my hip pocket, and big dreams sitting on top of my desk.  Fortunately for my self-esteem, publishing is not my total end-goal, but it helps to keep this as a possibility.  The most important thing for me is admitting that writing is an essential nutrient for me.  It’s gratifying to again be filled with purpose, and know I am back in life’s race, and not sitting on the sidelines.

Like the peonies in my garden that needed water, sunshine and time to bloom, I needed time and space to nurture my own writing life.  I used to think that if I were a flower, I’d be a pale pink azalea, but I’ve changed my mind.  I’ve come to think I might just be a hot-pink peony, ready to burst forth in color with the first hot breath of summer.  At least this is what it feels like to me, deep down inside.  I welcome the bees to come and taste the honey.

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