“Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer’s love until death.” - Edna Ferber
I finish my first novel! The pointer on my computer screen hovers ever so delicately over the SEND function of my email. I’m breathless, amazed, exhilarated, unmoving, numb and eerily quiet - all at the same time. I relish the rush of euphoria as this action brings my mind back to another time, another day.
I close my eyes.
I was running late for school and I knew I had to scribble something - anything - down on a blank page and hand it in to my teacher that day. I had nothing. Lack of sleep tugged at my eyes. There were dark circles underlining them in the mirror that morning.
“Come on, come on,” I begged my brain to think of something - anything.
Sighing wearily, I stared out the window of the bus and watched the wind whipping the grass to and fro. What must it feel like to be a blade of grass at the wind's mercy, left to wonder which breeze will bend or break you without a care?
The Wind Torn Grass!
That's it!
Finally, a worthy subject for the poem that I would write and hand in.
I wrote hastily, letting the words fall on the page before me as the bus bumped and rolled.
There were serious doubts. It didn’t matter. I would rather have a sad grade than nothing at all. Something inside me needed to participate. Something inside me needed to accomplish something of worth and meaning, if only to myself.
The following day, the words EXCELLENT! THIS REMINDS ME OF ROBERT FROST, IN A GOOD WAY were scrawled in large red letters on my poem.
A smile slowly spread across my face.
I was giddy with excitement and awe. My English teacher thought highly of what I had written! In red, bold as could be, was testament of what I could aspire to. My teacher had compared me to Robert Frost! I loved Robert Frost! Was it just encouragement or was it the truth?
It didn’t matter.
An exuberant smile stayed fixed on my face for the rest of that day.
In my excitement, I ran like the wind home from the bus stop. Not thinking, my head full of dreams, I burst through the door and showed my mother the paper marked in red. I watched her face for an echo of the exhilaration I felt bursting from every pore of my being.
Nothing.
She looked down at me with fierce dead eyes and slowly began to shred the paper into small torn bits. In a quiet voice she admonished me and told me to never bring anything like that into her home again.
I had forgotten in that moment of unfamiliar excitement, that my mother didn’t like "those big words". My mother scorned and ridiculed books and reading. Slowly, walking to my
room, I refused to let her see my tears.
Opening my eyes, bringing myself back to the present I wonder if my mother had any idea at all what she mistakenly encouraged in the end. Forbidding me to use words beyond her comprehension, refusing me any reading material whatsoever only encouraged me to want them that much more.
And now, with a smile worthy of the moment I finally lower my finger and hit SEND on the computer screen.
My first novel is winging its way by email to an agent!
In the end, the reader and writer in me refused to give up her love of words.
The storyteller in me lives on.
Thank you, Mother.
Thank you...
Indigo
Picture can be found here
Good Evening Ladies and Gents!
