Long before I was a mom, I was a writer. And it would’ve been interesting to see where I could’ve gone with my dreams, but then life happened and I got pregnant, having lost a baby earlier in my life, I made the very conscientious decision to stop writing. I wanted to enjoy raising my kids.
Because the truth is, writing is a very solitary existence and I had a very real fear that I would ignore my children if I continued writing.
I was never the kind of writer who could stop writing on a dime and pick it back up on the ones-twos. I could not set aside time for writing and hope my babies could respect it.
Being of my DNA, how could they see imaginary lines of thought, crafted into sentences and held together with metaphors and dangling modifiers? They could no more see my boundaries than the man on the moon. And my mental glue couldn’t hold it together when I was interrupted by my little darlings, who liked to run around my stool.
I gave up writing, so I might enjoy their little round hands cradling my face and telling me that they loved me and good night.
I can’t speak of anyone else’s sacrifices, but mine were complete and they were absolute. I personally understood the question in Langston Hughes’ poem, “what happens to a dream deferred?” I knew, because it looked like me.
And so the years passed, until one day POOF! Just like that it was over, my babies went from pre-school to college and I looked around our home and they were gone.
Their sweet dreams were now my memories. All around me and my husband was their stuff of what once was. Melancholy looks like this…
Each thing I touched in the house seemed so dear. I was emotional, crying in the afternoon and sniffling at night, knowing that I needed to find my way back to me.
Almost overnight, we became empty nesters, aging in place with our stuff. Then one day we decided to rearrange the furniture in the house and suddenly I had what Virginia Woolf had written about, “a room of one’s own”, and it included a new view, me as a writer.
It had been seventeen years since I had written fiction. As I redefined myself, I found that I liked to explain things and that I was good at technical writing. I used the internet to find freelance jobs and Twitter as my sounding board and started writing under the pseudonym Technygal.
As a proud BabyBoomer, I found people enjoyed my tweets and my writing. These were the early days of Big Data and tech innovation, it was exciting, disruptive. I took coding classes, not to write code, but to better understand IT technology.
Siri and Alexa were in their infancy, growing up quickly and I understood and wrote about that and artificial intelligence, smart technology and emerging IT, because I loved it.
I was invited to conventions in major cities and had meetings with reps from the AARP to the Washington Post! And somewhere along the line I named a corporation and had my picture on the Nasdaq tower in New York’s Time Square.
Within two years, it came to an abrupt halt when my life completely changed and once again I stopped writing, and just like that POOF! It was over.
I’d have to redefine myself, this time I’d become TechnyGalleries.
Until next time…
DaNice D Marshall TechnyGalleries 