Hi all!
For my very first blog post I thought long and hard about what topic I wanted to hit on. (By long and hard I mean that, in the fleeting seconds between everything else storming my brain like
“DON’T EAT OUT OF THE TRASH!”
And
“Has Omar pooped today?”
I wondered what I should do before immediately getting distracted again.)
What I ended up landing on was the topic of why I decided it was time to be an author.
So here we go…
If you know me, it’s probably not as a literary sort of person. (And if you don’t know me, Hi! Thanks for reading. I hope we get to know each other!)
I like science. In fact, I’ve dedicated a large portion of my adult life to sciencing! I went to college dead-set on being a chemist of some sort. Jill-the-doe-eyed-high-school-senior didn’t know what she was going to do with her future degree in chemistry, but she knew with her whole heart and soul that she was gonna get it.
In college I discovered that I was pretty good at this science stuff. I excelled in my courses, from calculus to physics to thermodynamics and beyond. I even liked it. It never bothered me that my first class of the day was a 5 day per week 7:00 am calculus class that I had to commute to across the greater Sacramento area. (Okay, maybe that’s a stretch. I’m sure I was very bitter about the fact that other people slept in for their 10am ethics classes but my alarm went off at 4:45…)
I was all in when it came to science. I embraced the long hours pouring over my work and was proud to be up until dawn (chasing the precious hours before my next class, which was, of course at 8am) working my butt off on things I hadn’t even procrastinated.
I’m fond of my college memories,
but while others remember parties, dating and the social infrastructure of growing up, I largely remember working. My friends were my fellow science majors, crammed around the rickety table at the center of the fourth floor working out the latest lessons.
I wouldn’t dare suggest that I didn’t have any fun in college, because I definitely did. I’m saying that science defined the experience, and everything else fit around it.
But I never settled on a career.
In high school I wanted to be a veterinarian, then a criminologist, then a high school chemistry teacher. In college I fell in love with research and wanted to get my phd.
The problem was I didn’t ever make a choice.
Instead of being deliberate with my future I landed in it. My first job was working in the analytical labs for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. After more than five years I bowed out of the pharmaceutical industry and went back to school to get my MA and become a science teacher.
I definitely felt better suited for teaching. Working with hundreds of students at every possible level of achievement was the most thrilling and exhausting thing I’d ever done. I never would’ve guessed that teaching wouldn’t keep me in its stronghold from here to eternity.
But life is funny like that.
You can’t predict how it’ll change, or how you will be changed by it—and that’s exactly what happened to me. I was changed.
My last year in the classroom was going well. I was teaching 4 different subjects (which is a practice in insanity if you haven’t ever tried it before.) I was working with a fantastic group of students (I promise, I bragged about them to anyone who would listen. If you’re reading this, those students—that’s right, I’m talking about you. You were awesome!) I’d even managed to set some boundaries when it came to work life balance.
As the fall semester rounded its corner into winter break I was likewise quickly rounding the corner toward the third trimester of my first pregnancy. Neither the semester nor the pregnancy had been completely smooth, but I was feeling like a success on both accounts.
Then Came winter break…
Two days after Christmas and six days before school was back in session I took my blood pressure.
That one simple, totally normal act changed everything. The numbers were sky high. It was panic inducing and completely unbelievable. I felt fine—no symptoms whatsoever. Just a little machine telling me that both my baby and I were in danger.
From there everything happened in a blur of nightmare and reality.
At the first labor and delivery location a nurse with no class and no bedside manner said, without even looking at me “you’re not going home and your baby is going to be born very soon.”
There were several doses of medication, continuous Doppler monitoring, an ambulance ride, an ultrasound and a bunch of different doctors with varying levels of either terror-inducing pragmatism or reassuring nonchalant-ness.
There was an overload of information—
about the baby, about my health, about delivery, the NICU and the possibility of remaining pregnant. Our minds were spinning tops and the deliverers of news seemed more like carnival barkers than medical professionals.
Somewhere along the way we came to believe that we’d be able to weather the storm and I’d be able to deliver much closer to our due date than, say, today or tomorrow. Maybe I believed it because I was in denial, or maybe there were just enough doctors giving me hope.
Seven days after being admitted
our Charlotte (Charlie) was born at 28 weeks and 5 days and a not-so-whopping 1 pound 11.5 ounces. She came out crying. I remember seeing a quick pink blur before she was whisked away to the NICU.
That was the moment I realized that I had absolutely no control.
I survived the first months after Charlie’s birth by being completely numb. Every act was a product of strict routine—pumping, visiting her in the NICU, sleeping in an RV in the hospital parking lot and doing it again. My husband and I had conversations about the struggle to connect with the reality of what was happening. There was guilt and shock and a whole lot of feeling really, really lost.
Time passed, as it always does
and things slowly started to normalize. Charlie grew and we learned how to be an unconventional sort of parents. But some things didn’t reconnect with the passage of time. It was impossible to imagine that less than 24 hours before my daughter was born I was worried about who would grade the AP physics exams! I couldn’t even imagine that students were starting a new semester. I was living on a different planet now. Those worries couldn’t reach me and I was lost unto them.
I checked my work email
for the first time three months after Charlie was born, about 5 days after she came home. Amidst the backlog of messages I found her birth announcement—the one my husband had given while I was incapable. There were a few replies—mostly “congratulations!” and “I had no idea she was pregnant!!” It all felt far away. I was home. She was home. But things weren’t the same. There was no way for things to ever be the same again and I knew it.
After some difficult decision making I told the school that I wouldn’t be coming back for the next academic year.
In my first year as a parent I struggled
with a lot of things—loss of control, loss of my career, loss of security… but it took me a long time to realize the key thing I’d lost.
A couple months after Charlie’s first birthday I realized that I’d lost myself.
I didn’t lose myself because I quit working, or because I’d become a parent, because I wasn’t getting enough sleep or because of the trauma of the whole experience. I lost myself because of all of those things and because I hadn’t done anything to stop myself from being lost.
I was a complete afterthought.
I was afraid I might not ever find myself again. Would I have to wait until I was ready to go back to work? Was I going to need extensive counseling? Would I have to wait until Charlie grew up? Who was I, anyway?
The road back
to myself started with rediscovering what was important. I gave myself permission to reconsider everything, inlcuding my dedication to “science.”
I’d always let science define me, so when I stopped doing science-related work I forgot who I was.
That needed to stop.
It wasn’t that I no longer enjoyed science—in fact, it’s quite the opposite—I still love the sciences and relish learning new things, revisiting exciting concepts, and watching the impact and function of the world. What I discovered was that I’d narrowed my view of what science meant to me rather than expanded it.
A long time ago
I was made of much more than science. Before I succumbed to the pressure of deciding who I was and what I wanted to be I was interested just about everything (except history.) I wanted to raise a dozen dogs at once. I wanted to be a pig farmer. I wanted to live in the woods and run the Iditarod…
I also loved stories. A LOT.
I started writing and illustrating stories as soon as I quit writing my name backwards (true story.) Stories about puffer fish, stories about the pigs and dogs that I would surely own one day…
I had a series about a skunk and all of its forest friends. I even created my own fan fiction for Back to the Future, because… well, why wouldn’t I?
In sixth grade
I won a writing competition with a short story about two girls that got stuck in a cave during a family camping trip. I kept writing on that story for a long time. I don’t know that I would have stopped, except that the computer I was writing it on quit working and the next computer didn’t take the same disks.
In middle school
I wrote a story about sled dogs. It was about 10,000% longer than the assignment asked for. In high school I kept a secret folder on my computer that was overrun with stories, poetry, and brainstorming ideas for epic tales. In college, in between assignments and spurts of irresponsibility I wrote on two novel ideas that were ultimately lost to an unfortunate incident involving a cat, some coffee and my laptop keyboard.
Then I forgot about writing.
From 2006 to 2011 I acted as though that part of me didn’t even exist. I was too busy proving to myself that I could be a successful adult. Career, home, family, science.
In the story that starts with adulthood and ends with the birth of my daughter this was the real beginning of losing myself.
In 2011 a friend created a writing group.
We’d get together, eat, drink wine and mostly not read. Most people came without stories and the whole thing devolved into a great excuse to hang out… but I started to write again.
A little idea turned into a big one, and that big one became a story.
That story was part of what accelerated me to start making active decisions about my career and my life. It moved me to write through some of the most difficult times in grad school. It was there for me when I surfaced for air during summer break after the hardest teaching year in my life…
And it was there for me
when I needed to find myself again. While my daughter fought to grow in the NICU I blogged. It was that simple act that helped me remember a part of myself that I hadn’t acknowledged or given breath to for a long time. In a discussion with my husband about how lost I felt he mentioned writing.
It was like a revelation.
It really meant something to me. Writing didn’t need to wait until later. It was mine and it was me. It’s what I could do.
I could write.
I could create.
And I could do it all while still being present for my daughter. Writing fits into the life I’m living right now.
And then the realization occurred to me—I can do this for more than just myself. I have these books. I have these stories. I needed to finish them and put them out there. This can be a career.
I’ve known all along that it wouldn’t be easy, and I know now more than ever that it takes a lot of time, effort, and work.
But I gave myself to the idea last year and dang it, I’m seeing this thing through.
Maybe it’s a crazy career path, but it’s right for me.
I hope I write forever—
that I don’t ever lose myself to a thousand definitions again.
… and given my history, is it any wonder that my first books are science fiction?
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