About a million years ago (okay, it was around twenty – yikes), I wrote a weekly column for our local newspaper. You know, back when people read the local newspaper.
It was a fun little column called Home Front and the essays centered on my life as a mom of three little boys who not only chose to stay at home with them full time but who also morphed into a homeschooler. Of three healthy (read: energetic) little boys that I birthed within four years. Oy.
They weren’t jump-off-the-roof-thinking-they-could-fly little boys. (Although one of them was a draw-on-the-side-of-the-minivan-with-a-rock boy.) But they were constantly hungry and curious and silly and infuriating and they gave me plenty of fodder for my column. Oh sure, I wrote about a few other things but really, it was mostly about them.
After about 5 years, I gave it up. And I sort of gave up writing. Well, public writing anyways.
As much as I wanted to be a writer, it just kept getting overshadowed by everything else: children, homeschooling, our business and, not the least reason, my lack of self-confidence. Instead I descended into my journals and only came up for air once in awhile to submit a re-worked piece somewhere or to write a play for the kids at my church to perform at Easter or Christmas.
Stephen Pressfield, Jeff Goins and countless others of my close, personal writing gurus would all tell me (via their various books on creativity and writing, whose advice I paid cash money for) that, published or not, I AM A WRITER. It’s not negotiable.
And somehow, it’s not. My brain thinks in Times New Roman and in blank pages being filled up. I get excited (no, not that kind of excited) fondling the keys on my laptop. I think about how I would write about some everyday scene I witness on the street and I see the people in my life as characters, not just…well, people. (Sorry, people.) I write all the time, but in an undisciplined, illegible handwriting, only-in-my-head kind of way.
In the last couple of years, the desire to write outside of my head again has been irrepressible. Sort of in an REO Speedwagon I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore kind of way. (Or, for those of you who didn’t live the 80s, in a Justin Timberlake Can’t Stop the Feeling kind of way.)
One of the things I have to reckon with is that it’s okay to put it out there. I’m a 52-year-old woman who doesn’t have small children to hide behind anymore – they’re all very big and while I could actually hide behind them, they’ve all moved out. But I still have things to write about. Even if I never had kids, I would have things to write about.
I spent a couple of years a bit unmoored when the empty nest hit me. Lucky for us, my husband and I enjoyed the re-coupling phase when we became Rick & Bonnie again, not just Gil, Tim and Simon’s mom and dad. Because that happens for awhile, or for always, if you let it. But I also had to figure out who Just Bonnie was – aside from Rick and aside from the boys. And like an earwig of song you haven’t heard in forever that reverberates in your head ad nauseum (I’m talking to you Coward of the County), the thing that won’t let go is: I AM A WRITER.
Well, I argue with myself nonsensically, isn’t everybody? Noooooo…apparently not, says Jeff and Steven and others afflicted with this disease. Not everyone is born with this insane desire to spill the contents of their brain, their heart, their guts out for public consumption. Just like everyone is not a reader (gasp!) or a nature lover or a photographer or a lawyer or a plumber or a philatelist (whatever…look it up).
I am surprising myself with this little blog – this will be week 10 for me. I have not figured out everything yet, but I am seeing the beginning of a body of work again, like that pile of newspaper columns I saved from a million years ago.
It’s kind of my blog snowball. When one snowball gets too heavy, here’s hoping I’ll remember to just start another one. And then another one after that.