Almost twenty years later...

This is what I looked like when I started writing seriously nearly twenty years ago.  I had longer, curlier, and softer hair, a great complexion, but the same big smile.  I wrote for my friend Karen, who was then the editor of the Burlington Union, my hometown's local paper.  I think I made $35/column, which seemed like a lot of money, especially for doing something I loved.  Politics (a rabid Massachusetts liberal was I), music and concert reviews, all the relationship advice I could offer being a teenager in the throes of young love, adoption, social conscience developed as a child, church-- you name it. I wrote about it.

I'm not sure I was that good.  But Community Newspapers had awards for columnists and I won one.  It was the first commendation I received after realizing at 14, that being a singer was not going to happen (thanks, Dad, though for paying for me to record a demo tape of "All This Time"), my modeling dreams were going up in smoke as I was 5"4, a size 10/12, and my skin was brown.  The acting I did after "Ready to Go" ended up being incredibly expensive; community theater was fun, but not my thing.  I played amazing soccer as a goalie and swam, as far as in the New Englands for back-stroke, but I was never the high school, pro-type athlete.  Neither was did I experience the standard route through high school to college.  Always an over-achiever, I found myself in what no on around me, including me, would call what it was: a pretty major depression.  

Coming out of that funk, meeting a great guy/being the girlfriend of a musician, spending less time at home, working on the 1994 coordinated Democratic campaign in a warehouse in Southie answering phones for Shannon O'Brien, dating a bunch of different, and older, guys, and finding my way in the world, to enrolling in classes, and having a lot of fun. 

Then, I got married.  I had babies.  Life changed.

Life now is defined by being a mom, and specifically about parenting a child with autism, and another with other, more taboo disabilities. It's a lot of fun to read my old clippings, 4 years worth, when my writing was definitely funnier and possibly more fluid.  

It's a kind of coming full circle.  Being nominated for awards for my writing, signing a book contract (which may or may not ever see the light of day, but a publishing house a year ago thought it worth pursuing).  I've worked a lot to be able to tell stories from my life in a way that does not exploit my kids.  It's hard to write about marriage, divorce, dating (from falling in love, hard, to hating someone's actions, some abusive, others just mean), to starting over. 

We all have demons, BUT we all have accomplishments.  Through writing, I can tell the stories of my life, and of my family's life, and maybe make someone laugh, feel emotion, or just walk away from the paper or computer screen thinking about something they hadn't before. 

Happy reading!