The Accidental Novelist

Once upon a time, a conventional story had a conventional beginning.  I was a special education teacher, happily married with one child.  Then, I became a foster parent specializing in care of children with special needs.  When my husband and I decided to adopt a sibling set with special needs, I went back to school, again (I already had a master's), to become a developmental specialist to help families of children with special needs who were birth to three years old.  This position would allow me to set my own schedule and work fewer hours per week to allow for the increasing needs of my family.

I loved that job; I mean I really, really loved that job.  I loved meeting the families, helping them sort out their schedules and their children's needs.  I loved the kids.  I loved every bit of it.  Just when I thought I knew exactly what I was going to do for a long long time, it changed.  Right before we finalized the adoption of my middle two children, I learned about one more little person.  He was a baby boy, very sick, very small and sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit at our local hospital and, although there were other foster parents who were willing to take him, there were none who could agree to keep him should he need an adoptive home which was very likely.  Well, we could and did.  We eventually did adopt him but his needs made it impossible for me to work enough hours to actually make money as a developmental interventionist.  So, I became something I had always wanted to be but I never thought would happen, a stay at home mom.

Okay, maybe this story isn't completely conventional, but neither is it accidental or wholly unexpected-at least not to me.  So here I was, unemployed for the first time since I was fourteen, loving being at home and not in school for the first time in who knows when.  For a couple of months, I reveled in being at home.  It was wonderful.  It still is wonderful and hard.  The hardest part?  No grown up conversation.  A Southern woman who loves nothing more than to talk, really talk, swap stories, hash out emotions, make a joke, needs adult conversation.  Facebook helped, a chat with other moms and our many therapists helped, but I needed more.

The solution was obvious, it was something I had always wanted to do.  Of course, I would write a book.  A great, funny book about parenting a child with special needs and navigating the educational system.  Clearly, this was my next step.  I began creating outlines, jotting down questions to be answered, anecdotes to illustrate points, funny confessions I had as both a teacher and mother.  Even better, I started chatting with some of the mothers I had worked with, teacher friends, and mom's of typical kids as research for the book.  I was looking for the differences, the questions that needed answering but also for the things we all had in common.

The questions, the gaps, the points of contention, none of them were surprising to me.  They fell nicely into my outlines.  What was more interesting to me were the common denominators.  Most of the women I talked to were mothers.  They loved their children more than themselves.  They felt guilty whether they stayed at home or worked.  They loved their husbands, or ex-husbands, or boyfriends but often felt like they had little left for them and, sometimes, from them.  Most of all,  they all felt disconnected from themselves.  Somehow, in the course of the day to day, their identities became so intertwined with their jobs (in or outside of the home,) their children and significant others that they were lost in the mix.

When I sat down to write, it was these lost women who rolled around in my mind.  These women, so different in circumstance and yet, much like me, they were strangers to themselves.  Over looked, under appreciated shadows of the vibrant women they once were.  Well, I can't write about that, I thought, I don't have the answers, I am just like them.  So I started writing simple stuff in the beginning; introducing myself, my own experience, stuff I'd written for other things 100 times before.  Then, as if they had a mind of their own, my fingers started telling a story.  Not a true story from myself or one of the women I know but a real story, a story of all of us, living and breathing through my main character.  As the story took shape, my character found strength where each of the living women I interviewed did, in those who loved them.  In an astonishingly short time, four months give or take, I had finished an entire first draft of my manuscript, a novel I am proud of but written purely by accident.  Written by someone qualified to write the non-fiction she started but not necessarily the piece that she finished.  Somewhere within those pages, my heroine found her voice and, in hers, I found my own.