Chapter 3 - Writing

2025 in the rearview mirror

My writing went down to a trickle in 2024-2025, due in part to circumstances and in part to a reset of my relationship with writing. It’s been a journey.

In 2010 I started a blog while on bed rest expecting the twins. I learned lessons the hard way, figured out parenting advice for myself, and wrote about it.

My goal was to bring readers along with me on the journey: parenting teenagers and toddlers together, the decision to homeschool, to move to the country, being a Catholic woman in the big bad world. As my children grew older, three things happened concurrently: my children grew-up, the world blew-up, and I went through a separation that completely changed my identity as a Catholic woman and mother.

Writing about expecting, nursing, and raising young children alongside teenagers was no longer my reality and the advice I dispensed lacked the hands-on experience that had been my calling card.

My teens and preteens took the one-two punch of the pandemic and separation right in the teeth and faced challenges that I could not share publicly, even if tangentially through my own experience. I also fell in love with someone in the public eye and had to be more circumspect about what I shared online. My traditional sources of inspiration dried up gradually and I found a new fertile ground in the emotional fallout from the separation. I couldn’t write about the positive things in my life: falling in love, building a new life, overcoming parenting challenges. But I could write about my own existential dread, about my world unraveling. Oddly enough — and I’m not sure I can explain why — I felt like I owed unhappiness to my children for blowing up their lives. As if I had to repay the sadness and grief with an equal rendering of sadness and grief. As if it wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

The sadness and grief were not performative: my life from the Fall of 2020 until the Spring of 2024 was a spiral to the bottom. I was learning about accepting the unacceptable, rolling with the punches, and adapting to a new normal I had no desire adapting to. I did not create unhappiness, but I embraced it. Wore it like a pelt.

There is a picture doing the rounds on Instagram going “do you remember when you prayed for what you currently have?” and every time I saw it I would shake my fist at the sky and yell internally: “I NEVER PRAYED FOR THIS, TAKE IT BACK!”

On a particularly sad day when I got irrationally annoyed at Glen’s unwavering belief in me, I cried out: “Can’t you see that everything is SHIT?” He looked like I had slapped him and said: “I get to hang out with you every day, and I think that’s pretty awesome.” Ok, so other than being in a relationship with someone who is madly in love with me, and living in a cozy little home we made our own, where I get to fall asleep in your arms every night, and see you first thing in the morning…. other than that!

I tried adopting a Buddhist outlook of acceptance but it rang hollow: I didn’t want to accept the way things were, I wanted to change them. I listened to Tara Brach religiously, I got angry at Tara Brach for not understanding that things should not be accepted. They say you can’t change events but you can change how you respond to events, well I chose anger. I was trashing and flailing, writing about unfairness, close calls, and coming to terms with being broke, old, and exhausted. I hated my life and had no ability to change it.

Don’t get me wrong: there is recovery and healing in the above. Writing helped me turn the page on the most painful chapters of my life. Writing helped me articulate my own boundaries, understand my own limits, and accept the pace of recovery. But writing also forced me into a murky pool of introspection.

Writing about the last murky pool while swimming in the next helped me burn off the residual crisis before tackling the next one. But when things started to turn around, the introspection yanked me out of a place of tentative hope and back into a place of fear. Writing became an event that had to be managed based on my ability to cope with the anger it stirred in me. And so it slowed to a trickle.

I did not notice this pattern until January 2025 when I wrote the first draft of this post and spent 3 weeks editing down the long plume of toxic gas I had released on the page. I rewrote the post 5 times, paring down the snark and settling of accounts until it felt polished, the sharp edges blunted out. My conclusion was hopeful, looking forward. Or so I thought.

Shortly after publishing, my mom mentioned my post and said: “It’s really hard to read what you’ve been through.” It made me realize that for the readers who were not intimately familiar with the details of what I had been through, the post read hopeful. But for my loved ones who could read between the lines, the hopeful conclusion read like a prayer more than a statement. For my sake, and for the sake of my loved ones, I needed to stop scratching healed scabs.

Things are still hard, I screw-up all the time. But today, I can write about how my kids and I fail, repair, and move on stronger. I am no longer thrown into a storm of self-loathing that I need to turn into anger to keep it from swallowing me whole. I feel like I have something to share again.

What’s coming next in writing? Honestly, I don’t know. I will keep posting here. I am very attached to the idea of writing a book someday, although I don’t know what this means. I have a dream of writing a book and having it adapted to screen. This dream has no specificity, no theme, or no roadmap. It has only been living in my brain for 20 years. I always understood blogging and newslettering as a way to keep writing through the busy parenting years and show up at the starting line warmed-up and ready. My dad, an accomplished editorial writer in his own right, former journalism instructor in the glory years of Algonquin College, newspaper publisher, but most meaningfully for my purpose, my biggest admirer, used to give this advice to people asking how to start writing: just start writing.

Is this the starting line? Am I there yet? I’ll just start writing and find out.