Begin again

It's never too late to bloom

When I was thirty-three, I quit my job in product design and walked away from a fifteen year career. My position had evolved over the years from designer to project manager to design director, but the more I accomplished, the more I worked, and I wanted to stay home with my kids while they were still little. I had a three year old and a six month old at the time, so my hands were full without a job outside of the home. As a full-time parent, I loved that I could focus on parenting, and cooking, and saving money at the grocery store each week, but part of me feared that I was giving up my autonomy by choosing to stay home. When the urge to write during nap time hit, I embraced it. Three years later, my first book was published.

my one word for 2024

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At school visits, young people usually ask me if I always wanted to be a writer. The truth is, the idea of writing novels never really crossed my mind when I was younger. Growing up, I was a reader. I devoured every book placed in front of me, from The Babysitters Club to The Complete Works of O. Henry (a massive tome I scored at a flea market with paper so thin it creased beneath my fingers). I loved books so much that I was often caught reading by the light from the hall when I was supposed to be asleep.

Back then, I didn’t know that I would one day write books for young readers like myself, or that those readers would stand in line to get a signed copy from me. At that age, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist. I had a tremendous number of dinosaur books that I had faithfully memorized, as well as fossil kits made of balsa wood that I painstakingly assembled in my room and hung from the ceiling like cheerful, skeletal mobiles. I would have been shocked to learn that I would one day write novels, much less design molded cake pans and breast pumps. As a young person, my aspirations were less like distant beacons than mirages. I knew how to draw, and I was smart, but I didn’t have any real idea as to how those skills could translate into a career. Art was something I did for fun, not something I expected to do professionally. I think maybe that’s why I gravitated toward design rather than fine arts or creative writing. There weren’t many adults telling kids they could make a living from art in the 1980s. Mainly, they were busy telling us not to do drugs.

a great read about starting over

yes, i write in my books LOL

I read this beautiful book over the winter break. You Could Make this Place Beautiful by poet Maggie Smith is an examination of how life as an artist clashes with being a wife and mother. It’s also about divorce, and the patriarchy, and struggling to find the right balance between our art and our lives…those things always seem to be separate, no matter how much we strive to integrate them. A mother is nearly always taking time away from her children to work, while a father is just at work. I wrote so many notes in this book that it feels like a project of my own now. Maybe one day, it will be.