If you’ve followed me for long, you know that I have six boys all born within a span of eight years. The oldest is now nine, and the two who fall beneath him are seven and six. They’re the only ones in school right now, so when they’re out for the summer, we make it a highly creative summer—because teaching them creativity is important to me.
I’ve talked about this before, but this summer my older boys and I created some picture books. We haven’t finished the digitizing part of it all, but we’ve finished the drawings and the writing and will be working on putting the final touches on it so we can give some out as Christmas gifts this year. If you’re my family, pretend you didn’t read that.
When I first started the project with my boys this summer, I pretty much had my own ideas about the way things would go. I would write the story, they would draw the pictures. I chose to do this, because young children, while great at coming up with imaginative concepts, aren’t always great at putting words to the paper, and I wanted them to see how I took one of their concepts and turned it into a full story using description, dialogue and conflict. Picture books are the perfect short example of this.
But what I wasn’t expecting was for them to come back, after I’d read the completed whole story to them, and say, “I think it would be better if we did this.” And I certainly didn’t expect them to be right.
Here’s the thing. I could have said, “You know what, smarty pants? I know more about storytelling than you do, because I’ve been doing this a long time.” But the truth is, children are so much closer to their imagination than we are. I remember what that was like. I had whole worlds built in my imagination when I was a kid. I’ve tried to find them now, and they’re nowhere around. I have new worlds, of course, but I suspect that these new worlds aren’t quite as vivid as those worlds I had when I was a kid.
So the best way to create with kids? Listen to them. Let them be experts. Give them permission to lead. Sometimes, of course, they won’t know quite as much about our craft as we do. But when we’re in the beginning stages, when we’re still shaping that invention? Children have a lot of valuable things to say, and if we dismiss them, we’re missing out on something spectacular.
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If you don’t have kids or don’t plan on having kids, don’t think that you’re off the hook from this particular concept. There are children everywhere. We can always learn something from them. Seek them out. Invite them into your home and your creative endeavors. And watch how your imagination blooms.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and the lives and inspiration of my boys. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
In case you don’t already know, a query letter is a letter that is sent to agents or editors when we are trying to get our manuscript traditionally published. A query letter contains some of the elements that will also be used in a book blurb, which is a description of our book that we’ll use on places like Amazon or iBooks or Barnes and Noble, if we’re planning to self-publish. So some of this will be valuable even for the self published authors out there.
The query letters that I have written in my career always have four distinct parts. The first is the introduction, where I say something like The Midnight Hour is a literary thriller of 80,000 words, written in the style of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things.
So it’s sort of an already-published-novel meets another already-published-novel. This gives agents and editors a feel for your book and whether or not they will like it. So make sure you pick smart, accurate comparisons, because if you say your book is written in the style of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and your book’s not even a fantasy, agents and editors will stop reading almost immediately.
The next part of an effective query letter is the body. This is where the book description, or blurb goes in.
Here’s what every blurb contains:
1. The names of the main characters.
2. Something interesting about those main characters and/or what they want.
3. The inciting incident—this is the thing that changes everything and creates the story.
4. The main conflict of the story.
5. Some complications along the way.
6. The stakes—what happens if the character fails in his goal.
7. And an open-ended wrap-up.
Here’s what a blurb looks like in practice. For this example, I’m using an adult mystery/thriller that needs a lot of cleaning up before it goes anywhere.
Step 1: List out the elements.
1. Main characters: Reid Fletcher and Emi Ono
2. Interesting tidbit/what characters want: Reid: unpredictable, charming, storied past. Emi: quiet, dependable. They form the team at Fletcher Agency.
3. Inciting incident: Reid goes missing
4. Main conflict: Local police believe it’s just another Reid Fletcher prank.
5. Complications: Threats start showing up at the office and Emi’s home.
6. The stakes: Reid could live or die.
7. Emi and Park have to find Reid before it’s too late.
Step 2: Put all the pieces together in a coherent way.
Reid Fletcher is an unpredictable, charming literary agent with a storied past. Emi Ono is his quiet, dependable editorial assistant who shows up because of an ad in the local paper. Together they form the team at Fletcher Agency.
But one month into their partnership, just after Reid kisses Emi in a dark hall, he disappears. When Emi calls the local police, they write it off as another Reid Fletcher Prank. They know him well. He’s done this before. He always come back. But Emi’s not so sure.
When threats start showing up at the office and, worse, inside her apartment, Emi enlists the help of her friend Park Chen to solve the mystery of Reid’s vanishing act, hopefully before it’s too late.
Not so complicated, right? Fill in the blanks, put it all together.
The next part of the query letter is the bio section. List things you’ve done or books you’ve written or accomplishments that you’ve had in your writing career. (Don’t fudge. See below for some quick tips.)
And the final section of the query letter is the closing, where you’ll thank the agent or editor profusely for taking the time to read your letter. Agents and editors get so many queries every day. It’s significant when they take the time to read yours all the way through.
Here are three things I recommend you remember about your pitch:
1. Keep it interesting.
Don’t tell us every single detail about you story. This can get tricky in something like a science fiction or fantasy story that involves world building. But only tell the barest details that matter.
2. Protect the mystery.
Make sure you leave the description open-ended. It needs mystery so we either have to request the book or buy it in order to read what happens.
3. Don’t beef it up with things that don’t actually happen.
This is often a temptation when you write literary fiction. I always feel it when I get ready to write a description for a literary book. Is it really all that interesting that Character A has been dealing with depression for fifteen years and that Character B is worried that his wife is going to leave him? Literary novels are much more inwardly focused and sometimes don’t even have much action going for them. But deny the temptation to add events that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of the story. Characters can speak for themselves.
Because I know that oftentimes we learn more from what not to do, I’m also going to include here three things we shouldn’t do in a query letter.
1. Make yourself sound more accomplished than you actually are.
I equate this with padding the resume. If you haven’t had any stories or poems or essay published anywhere outside your blog, don’t worry about it. Don’t try to make something up. Editors and agents are good at spotting fakes. Don’t make it be you.
2. Don’t be apologetic.
Sure, agents and editors are super busy and get tons of queries every year. But the fact is, you’ve written a good book. You deserve to have a tiny slice of their time, whether or not it works out for you. Don’t sell yourself short.
3. Don’t send a letter without doing research.
I talked a couple of weeks ago about how it’s important to know agents before you send queries to them. It’s not only a good use of their time, but it’s also a good use of your time. Sending multiple query letters takes a long time. You want to be as efficient as you can be, so do research. And if you don’t know where to do research, check out the blog linked above. It includes some valuable links.
The last thing I want to say about effective query letter is don’t be afraid to adjust and try again. If you find that your letter isn’t getting the responses that you really want, take a look at it with fresh eyes and see where you can adjust. Send it to a copyeditor to make sure you don’t have any mistakes that might be immediately turning away agents and editors. Give it to a trusted friend and ask them for their honest opinion on whether or not it works.
And, above all, don’t give up.
Week’s prompt
Write what comes to mind when you read the following quote:“You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe it.”
—Mary Renault
I don’t know if I’ve ever faced a harder challenge in my parenting years than raising twins.
Maybe it’s because our twins came near the end of the line of boys and they see all their older brothers do, and they expect that life will be exactly like that for them.
Except there are two of them.
Oh, you want to drink out of a big-boy cup because your older brother did it when he was 2? I’m sorry. There are two of you.
Oh, you want to sit free at the table instead of strapped into your chairs because all your brothers did it when they were almost 3? I’m sorry. There are two of you.
What? You want me to leave the baby gate on your door open because you haven’t yet figured out how to climb over it (it’s coming)? I’m sorry. In case you haven’t noticed, THERE ARE TWO OF YOU.
Our twins are identical, two sides of the same egg. Nature’s gift, doctors say. One is left-handed, one is right-handed. They complete each other.
That’s part of the problem. What one doesn’t think of, the other does. What one is afraid to do, the other will try.
It’s like having four toddler wrecking balls walking around the house, scheming about what they can destroy next. I imagine their conversations go a little something like this:
Twin 1: Hey. Hey, bro. Mama’s not watching. Remember how she told us not to touch this computer? She’ll never know. Where is she?
Twin 2: She’s in the bathroom. Remember what we did last time she was in the bathroom?
Twin 1: Oh, man. That was fun. But this computer. She’ll never know. I just can’t figure out how to open it.
Twin 2: Like this. But how do you turn it on?
Twin 1: Easy. I’ve seen Daddy press this button right here.
Twin 2: There it is.
(Mama comes back into the room with the baby she just changed.)
Twin 1: Close it, close it, close it!
Twin 2: Walk away. Not too fast, not too slow. Just enough to look like we weren’t doing anything.
I love my twins. Of course I do. It’s just that they were unexpected.
If I could have read a primer two years ago, this is what it might have said:
Every parent of twins needs…
1. An extra dose of patience.
You will need this for many things. You will need it for the stranger at the store who asks to see your amazing bundles of joy and, after looking at their angelic sleeping faces, declares she “always wanted twins” and you want to say, “Oh, really? Then take mine,” because one was up screaming at 3 a.m. and as soon as you got him calmed down two hours later the other one woke up screaming, and as soon as you got that one calmed down an hour later all the other boys were up asking for breakfast. Which woke up the twins, who were also hungry. Again.
You will need it for when they learn to talk and there are so.many.words and so.many.whys and so many demands for everything under the sun. You will need it for the potty training and the big-boy-bed transitions and the constant fighting from dawn until dusk.
You will need it for the times you were helping one out of his pajamas and into his day clothes and you return back downstairs to find all the dust jackets removed from your poetry books and spread across the living room floor like a special carpet for toddler feet, for the six thousandth time (You should probably just put those books away, Mama. Far, far away.).
2. Good decision-making skills.
These will come into play those times they both wake up at 3 a.m. because they’re hungry. Which one do you feed first? (Answer: You’ll figure out a way to feed both at the same time.)
You’ll need these skills when one twin is in the downstairs bathroom playing with a plunger in a potty you specifically remember your older boy didn’t flush five minutes ago when he stunk it up and the other is in his bathroom upstairs finger painting the mirror with a whole tube of eco-friendly toothpaste. Which do you get first? (Answer: The toilet one. Toothpaste is much easier to clean than the mess an overzealous plunger can make.)
You’ll need them when the one who’s known for wandering does exactly that, moves from his nap time place while you take a minute or five for a shower, because it’s been four days since the last one, and you walk out to find him playing with the computer he’s been told 50 billion times to leave alone and, in his panic to close it, he deletes the 1,500 words you wrote this morning before kids got up. What do you do? (Answer: Cry.)
3. A rigorous workout regimen.
When one is running down the street because someone forgot to lock the deadbolt he can’t reach and another is going out back without shoes in 26-degree rain, you’ll want to be in shape for that. I recommend interval training. That way when they stop and change directions, you’ll be ready. You’ve done this a thousand times. Ski jumps. Football runs. All-out sprints.
When they slip, unnoticed (because they’re like ninjas), into the playroom while you’re wiping down the table after a ridiculously messy lunch, and both of them come out with their scooters, you’ll want to be able to wrestle those “cooters” from screaming, flailing bodies without hurting anyone.
And when one collapses in the middle of the park because it’s time to go and he’s not ready yet and the other thinks that just might work, you’ll need strong arms to carry 32 pounds of kicking and screaming twins back to the car, one tucked under each armpit.
4. Containment measures.
This would be things like strollers until they’re 3 and booster seats until they’re 4 and a baby gate on their door until they’re…15. Okay, maybe 13.
It also means leashes at the city zoo on a packed day, even though you said you’d never use them and you can feel the disapproval of other people and you want to say, “Come talk to me when you have 2-year-old twins. These things have saved their lives 17 billion times, and that was before we even got out of the parking lot.”
Containment saves lives. And sanity.
Twins are great. And hard. And maddening. And great. And so hard.
They can disassemble an 8-year-old’s room of LEGO Star Wars ships in 3.1 seconds. They can disassemble a heart with one identical smile and a valiant try at saying “Uptown funk you up” that sounds like it should have come with a bleep.
There’s just nothing like them in the world. You’ll be so glad you get to be their mama.
Especially after they fall asleep.
This is an excerpt from , Parenting Is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, a humor book that does not yet have a release date. To read more of my humor essays, visit Crash Test Parents.
Every now and then, I come upon middle grade stories that are so magical and adventurous I can’t wait to share them with my boys—even if they have girl protagonists at their heart and center.
Once Was a Time, by Leila Sales, is a story about time travel. Charlotte’s Bromley is separated from her best friend of all time, Kitty, when she jumps into a portal and time travels seventy years forward. Her story initially begins in the middle of World War I, when her father is captured because someone is trying to figure out how to use time portals, and he’s the only one who knows. Charlotte and her best friend attempt a rescue and find themselves in danger. Charlotte is the only one who makes it through the time portal.
She travels to a completely different town and is adopted by a family, becomes friends with some popular girls at her school, all because of her British accent, and tries to adjust to the reality in which she finds herself. But she can’t forget Kitty.
So she embarks on an adventure to find her best friend, following clues that may not be clues at all and, in the process, coming to terms with a present that she might not have ever wanted.
Once Was a Time was such a sweet story of love and friendship and the ties that bind even across many years and cultures. I’ve noticed that in a lot of middle grade fiction, romance has begun to creep in. But this story was so innocent and focused only on friendship. Charlotte was faced with a decision about who she wanted to befriend in her new school—the popular girls or the boy everybody called weird? She faced all sorts of obstacles in finding Kitty again—but love would not let her give up.
Everything about this story—from the time travel aspect to the themes of love and friendship and kindness—was lovely and sweet.
Sophie Quire is a bookbinder in the city of Bustleburgh, working at her father’s shop, Quire and Quire. She happens upon a mysterious book, called The Book of Who. From this, she figures out there are three other books—The Book of Why, the Book of When and the Book of What. She and Peter Nimble, who is the greatest thief in the history of time, set off on an adventure to find the other ancient books and protect them from the book burning that’s happening in Bustleburgh because the powers that be want to rid the city of nonsense (Sound a little Fahrenheit 451-ish? It was one of the books that inspired Sophie Quire, Auxier says in his author’s note.).
The story is full of magic and adventure and fascinating descriptions that bring the imaginary world of Bustleburgh and the lands beyond it fully and thoroughly alive.
Sophie Quire was such a well-thought-out tale, which is what I’ve come to expect from Auxier. One of my favorite things about the book was that it was broken up into four distinct parts—Who, What, When and Why. Each part, of course, had to do with Peter and Sophie trying to obtain the book with the same question in its name. It made for a very linear structure.
One of my other favorite elements of the book was the voice of the narrator. Sophie Quire was told in omniscient point of view, which, if you’ve been around for a while, you know that I absolutely love. I enjoy hearing the voice of the narrator in certain tales, especially magical adventures (for another great narrator-told tale, check out Christopher Healy’s Hero’s Guide books. They’re hilarious.). This narrator was at times humorous, mysterious and wise.
Something else I really enjoyed about this tale was that Auxier included a lengthy author’s note, in which he listed some of his influences when writing Sophie Quire. It’s always interesting to me to see what sorts of things writers use to make their stories better and also what inspired them to dream up the story in the fist place. His author’s note included several titles that I’ve added to my reading list.
And the last thing I really loved about this book was its beginning and its end. Auxier is a master of drawing readers immediately into the story and then sending them out with a bit of hope.
Here’s the opening of Sophie Quire:
“It has often been said that one should never judge a book by its cover. As any serious reader can tell you, this is terrible advice. Serious readers know the singular pleasure of handling a well-made book—the heft and texture of the case, the rasp of the spine as you lift the cover, the sweet, dusty aroma of yellowed pages as they pass between your fingers. A book is more than a vessel for ideas; It is a living thing in need of love, warmth, and protection.”
This is probably one of my favorite first lines ever.
And this is probably one of my favorite closing lines ever:
“I would like to tell you that Quire & Quire remains open to this day, but that would be untrue. The shop closed eventually, and its marvelous talking books soon made their way to other lands and other readers. Most of these books have grown shy in their old age, preferring to sit quietly on the shelf. But if ever you find a very dusty book on a very-out-of-the-way bookcase, put it to your ear and listen closely. What do you hear? The faint rustle of pages, the creak of an old spine, and the hushed song of a story waiting to be read.”
Be sure to visit my recommendation page to see some of my best book recommendations. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, get in touch. And, if you’re looking for some new books to read, stop by my starter library, where you can get a handful of my books for free.
*The books mentioned above have affiliate links attached to them, which means I’ll get a small kick-back if you click on them and purchase. But I only recommend books I enjoy reading myself. Actually, I don’t even talk about books I didn’t enjoy. I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them.
Some days I know the truth, and some days it gets buried so far beneath those old lies I can hardly remember its echo.
This morning I woke up feeling out of sorts. Not unexpected, since there is a baby who had trouble sleeping. Since there was a brain that just wouldn’t turn off. Since there is work and anxiety and worry that has, lately, followed me right into sleep.
But this was something different. Something deeper.
This was me. This was my body. This was lie, a pair of them, rising up from the graveyard, where I thought I’d buried them for good long, long ago.
You see, I wrote an essay that got a whole lot of publicity, and here came all those haters, and their voices stirred those ghosts from their graves. While I was sleeping, the corpses came walking, and when I looked in the mirror this morning, they opened their mouths to speak.
Six weeks you’ve had, they said. Six weeks you’ve had to lose that belly. AND IT IS STILL HERE.
And then they smiled with their rotten teeth and told me the worst part of it all.
Unbeautiful, they said. This is unbeautiful. You are unbeautiful.
I could not argue. Not right now. Not today.
Because today, this moment, their words feel true.
///
The first time I heard their voices, I was too young to know them for what they were.
But I listened to commercials and all those teen magazines and the Hollywood ideal of thin and pretty, and I stopped eating lunch when I was 12. I stopped eating breakfast when I was a freshman in high school. I stopped eating the last meal of the day my first day of college, because, for the first time in my life, there was no one to monitor what I ate or didn’t eat.
I thought I could get away with it and that I would finally reach my target weight, which was bony and completely devoid of any vestige of fat, but I had a roommate who cared. She noticed my rapidly dropping weight and dragged me to dinner at a dining hall every chance she got.
So it wasn’t long before I started purging those suppers.
I would walk with her to the dining hall and eat whatever I wanted, and then, when she was preoccupied with our friends across the hall, I would slip off to the bathroom and do what needed to be done.
When she noticed, I made my excuses. Something I ate made me sick. Stress. A virus, maybe.
She didn’t buy it, so the next stop was laxatives, because that was easier to hide. It was my course load, the pressure to make good grades, the stressful news job that kept me in the bathroom all the time. Laxatives got me through the rest of that semester.
Anorexia got easier when I moved off campus. I kept cans of green beans in the pantry, and the days I felt especially hungry, I’d allow myself one can a day. My roommates were too busy to notice.
Then I met my husband, and there came a night when he left a note on my computer at the newspaper office.
Skinny does not equal beautiful, it said.
I looked at his note every time I sat down in my office chair and every time I got up to leave. I looked at it so often that I started to maybe just a little bit believe it. Some days that became most days that became almost every day. For a time.
That simple note rescued me before my heart could stop from the sickness, but there are other ways to die than the physical ones, and I was already well on my way, gripped by the claws of anorexia and bulimia.
///
Today is a reckoning day, six weeks postpartum, a day when I will visit my doctor again and stand on that scale. A scale that will tell me how much I have left to lose. A scale that will tell me, just a little bit, who I am now.
I hate that this is so.
All this time I’ve stayed away from the scale, because I said it didn’t matter, and I meant it this time. I really did. Because he’s my last baby, and I just wanted to enjoy him without worrying about what I look like. And that’s exactly what I did.
Until now.
I dressed for the morning. Those after-pregnancy transition jeans fit. A transition shirt hid the pooch.
I got my hopes up, I guess.
And then I walk in the doctor’s office and I step on the scale and I see how much weight is left, and I thought it would be different, not as much, and those voices start their howling.
Guess you should have tried harder, they say. Guess you should have exercised more, they say. Guess you should have worried about it a little more often, instead of indulging in your son, they say.
I try to swallow the disappointment, and then the nurse takes me to a room with a mirror, and I have to look at my body before I wrap a flimsy sheet of paper around it, and I can’t help it. I turn away, because I don’t want to look.
I know what’s there.
Sagging skin that may or may not shrink back this time, because this is the sixth time. Lines that mark my midsection and a belly button that’s hardly even a belly button anymore it’s been stretched and pulled and rearranged so often.
Those voices grab all of it and fling it right back in my face. Right back in my heart.
This is what unbeautiful feels like.
///
Just after the first was born, I did not know how a woman’s body worked. So when he slid out and my belly turned to mush, I cried.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Our first day home from the hospital, when my body had only spent thirty-six hours recovering from a thirteen-hour labor, I went for a walk, because exercise has always been my crutch.
Three weeks after he was born, I was out running, with a uterus that hadn’t even fully shrunk and hips that were only just sliding back into place and joints that could not really take the jarring pressure of a five-mile run.
So when I injured myself, because my body wasn’t ready for what I was demanding of it, when I had to take six more weeks off from exercising, I simply quit eating. I pretended I wasn’t hungry. I let my husband finish off those meals people so kindly dropped by.
And then one day he shook me by the shoulders. You have to eat, he said. This isn’t the way to do it.
And I knew he was right. But it was so hard. So hard. Because every time I looked in the mirror, what I saw was unbeautiful.
Anorexia and bulimia make it hard to see anything else.
///
So this is what unbeautiful feels like.
It feels sad and sharp and hard and achy and impossible and shocking.
Most of all it is shocking.
We can go whole years knowing and believing and living the truth, and then one thing, one tiny little thing, can raise the dead and make them walk again.
It happens for many reasons, this feeling unbeautiful. It happens because someone says an insensitive comment about our bodies that hits us right where it hurts. It happens because we live in a society that tells us skinny equals beautiful and don’t you dare argue. It happens because we look in the mirror and the body looking back is not the one we think we need or want.
Unbeautiful, the kind that makes us starve or cut and bleed or stick a finger down our throat, it is a sickness. An addiction. There is no cure.
There is only one day at a time.
Every day we are offered the choice to look in the mirror and shake our fists at those living-again lies and say, No. I don’t believe you. This body is not unbeautiful. It is strong. It is amazing. It is the loveliest beautiful there ever, ever was.
Because this is the truth.
So after my doctor finishes her examination and releases me and walks from the room, I return to the mirror, and I dress again and then snap a picture, because I want to remember.
I want to remember the day I looked at my body and finally, finally, finally said out loud, if only to myself, what was true.
This body, I say. I am so very proud of what it has done. It has housed and carried and nourished six boys and a girl we will meet in glory. So what if there is still an after-belly six weeks later? THIS BODY HAS DONE SOMETHING AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL. It needs to revel in that. So I will let it take its time.
And I mean it.
Those corpses, the anorexia and bulimia that have breathed down my neck all morning, start crawling back to their graves, because you know what?
Recently, the family and I took a short trip to see my mom, who still lives in the hometown where I grew up. My mom and I got to talking one night about some of the stories I’m brainstorming right now, and she mentioned that she’d love to see a story about my great-grandfather, who, as a child, lived in a railroad car. This fascinated me, of course. He was a railroad man through and through, and, after spending some time in a war, he came back to help lay the railroads in Texas.
My mom kept a whole bunch of documents and old photos that show my great-grandfather and his brothers standing in front of the railroad car where he lived. She dug out some papers with facts like how long they lived there and what the railroad car was called and all their family members who came to visit them.
From this document, I learned that my great-grandfather had an uncle who was a newspaper man. He came to visit my great-grandfather’s family in the railroad car, which seemed to be significant because, on this visit, my great-great uncle would not get out of bed, claiming he had a crazy wife and didn’t want to go back home to all the madness in his life.
Now. All this was fascinating, and I’m currently doing research on railway cars and railroad tracks in Texas. But what was even more significant was the story that all this told about my family. Here was proof of our bend toward the melodramatic. We could trace the origins of it to my great-great uncle.
But the story also showed me my writing roots. I have a degree in journalism. It’s where I started my writing career. And to know that I had an great-great uncle who made a living as a journalist is further proof that I am exactly who I was made to be—and it proves where I’m going.
The past is often hard and painful for us to sift back through. I’m in the middle of writing a memoir that has, so far, taken seven months to write, because the past is much harder to write about than the fictional stories of people, at least for me. Some people think we should just let the past lie. But I believe that our past can show us not only who we’re meant to be, but where we’re going in our future.
That’s what all those old documents showed me as I sifted through them at my mom’s house. I had never met the people mentioned in some of the stories. They died before I was even born—some of them from really bizarre things, like the aunt who died from a squirrel bite. But they left me something—a path forward. They made it through their hard times and became better for them. That means I can, too.
What we can all learn from this is that our pasts have something to teach us, if we’re willing to mine them.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and family. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
