It Never Goes Away

I couldn't stop writing.

Because at age fourteen my life wasn't all that great, I designed stories in my 'journal' about one that was much improved. Attentive boyfriends that complimented me. Special awards. Friends that cared. It was all right there in the pages, and cathartic-ally so. My mind needed something happier than my reality.

Unbeknownst to me, my older sister was amusing herself daily by reading the ongoing entries. When she couldn't help but mention the name of my pretend beau on one of her weaker days, it was game over. I couldn't write any more hopeful fiction; the magic of that had faded. Years later when I was keeping some very secretive and truthful journals hidden away, my older sister still brought up my fiction.

Apparently it was good enough to have been memorable.


I rarely delved again into fiction; although I've been known to use the occasional embellishment. What good writer doesn't dress up a sentence whenever they can?

I kept myself busy with long letters to relatives and pen pals, and put my all into papers for school, which brought on a high school teacher's comment to my mother: "She writes very lucidly."

I, not accustomed to using words like 'lucidly', had to look that one up. It means bright, shining, transparent, readily understood, clearheaded and rational. In full disclosure, I looked that up just now as well.

I wrote a lot as a teen, but nothing I'd ever thought to have entered in a writing contest or anything. I was a closet writer, thanks to the incident with my sister's ridicule.

The years sped by and I was married, a young mother, a mother again, and a mother again. In between pregnancies I often worked full time doing various jobs, none of which I loved. I fell into professional cake decorating, daycare providing, scan coordinating, preschool teaching, and then doing the books for a business my husband and I started together. On top of that we built two houses and managed an acreage. Who had time for writing?

Yet the urge to really put my heart into it never went away.