I spent the morning reading an abandoned, unfinished novel that I put up on the shelf just as my photography business started to take off.

Alex, curious to see me with word documents open, rather than editing pictures, asked, So,are you going to be an author now?

Well, I kind of already am one. Or, at least, I was one, once. I turned to look at him, my nearly nine year old son, fidgeting from foot to foot, actively interested in why I’m doing what I’m doing.

I flashed back to the day I received my acceptance into the creative writing program at Lesley, just days after finding out I was expecting him. This baby. This boy. This game changer.

I’m going to go ahead and do it, I told people when explaining why I was choosing to start my MFA just two weeks after giving birth to my first baby. I want my children to know that they can do whatever they want with their lives, they just have to go and do it. This is me doing the same.

There it was. My first heroic act of parenthood. Me, teaching my fingernail sized embryo of a baby, he could go ahead and be whatever he wanted to be, obstacles be darned.

I was such an inspiration at seven weeks pregnant.

I had no idea the challenges I would face, the help I would need, the way that the hours spent away from my newborn son would carve a niche into my heart and spur nearly a decade of writings about motherhood.

 

This morning, going through the novel excerpts and also some older writings of mine online, I found a meme that I posted on my blog in 2007. It was a meme of threes.

The first of three things that I want to do before I die:

1. Be satisfied with something I’ve written, and hopefully have it be published.

And the first of  three things I’d like to learn:

1. How to use our fancy-pants new camera

Two months later, I received the Congratulations! letter from Family Circle Magazine, that my story had won a contest would be published.

A few more years later, I would be photographing the wedding of a Today Show personality.

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t stopped to realize, really, that somehow in the busyness and the madness, things have happened, are happening still. I’ve grown, changed, met and exceeded goals and it’s perhaps time to make new ones.

This morning, sitting with no less than seven word documents open, these novel excerpts like quilting squares, waiting to be seamlessly sewn into one complete finished work, I’m challenging myself, as I once aimed to challenge and inspire my unborn son.

You can do whatever you want with your life, you just have to go and do it.

And now, in less inspirational news, I need to just go and do about a thousand things, ranging from baking for the holiday, to diaper changes to disaster control on all of the “I wrote all morning” messes that happened while I was lost to the world.

(Making the goal, that’s a start enough for today, right?)