Seventeen Years Later.

So much life has happened between then and now, and at this very moment, I haven’t quite caught up with it. Coming back to this blog feels like walking into my old high school. I know where everything is. I remember exactly who I was here. But the rooms look smaller than they did when I lived inside them. In 2009, my daughter was a toddler and I wrote on a legal pad because that was what I had. On August 26, I sat down to write this post after sending that same daughter off to college. I had also just signed with a literary agent. I thought those two things happening on the same day might split me wide open. I was proud and heartsick and so excited I could barely hold still. I started typing, and then I stopped at “at this very moment, I haven’t…” because I truly hadn’t. I hadn’t found words big enough for the day. And then, while this post sat unfinished, more happened. An editor at [redacted] wanted to talk about my book. **My book.** The one I wrote after years of thinking I had stopped being a writer. I got on that call and heard people speak about my work as something they could see a future for. I’m still living inside that conversation. I keep going about ordinary things and then it hits me all over again. I wish I could reach back through this blog and show the woman who started it where she ends up. I wouldn’t tell her everything. I don’t think she needs to carry it all before it happens. But I would let her see her daughter leaving for college, and the younger one growing up, and the apartment with Rue, Bella, and Enzo in it. I would show her the two finished novels. I would let her hear, just for a minute, what it sounds like when someone else believes in one of them. I don’t know what she would make of me. I think she’d ask a thousand questions. I think she’d be proud of us. The strange thing is that I found this blog by accident on the day my daughter left. Seventeen years later, I came back here carrying more life than the woman who wrote these old posts could have imagined. And I still don’t know how to tell her all of it. Maybe I don’t have to do it in one post.