On Finding My Way Back to Writing After Years Away

I knew this day was coming, but the reality seemed to take root during the end of my daughter’s junior year of high school. I would feel a cold ball of anxiety unraveling in my stomach after I dropped her off in the mornings. Sitting in traffic, I’d find myself sobbing, blowing my nose and wiping tears away with one hand while steering with the other. I’d have a full 40 minutes to ruminate about her impending departure for college.

I was starting to feel unmoored at the thought of losing motherhood as a daily anchor. For almost 17 years, I’d been a single mom to an only child—and don’t get me wrong, most days I’m like hallelujah-thank-you-Jesus-we-made-it, my baby’s going off to college and momma gets a life.

I just don’t know what kind of life.

Motherhood had taken a minute to get used to, but I had grown to enjoy the structure and buffer it provided. As a mom, I had one goal: to raise a happy and healthy kid. I shed my single girl skin and embraced it all. Yoga pants as a wardrobe staple. The PTA. The messy mom car. I went from an introverted, semi-isolated writer to having instant access to a club, a sorority of women who were going through the same thing. I could talk to any stranger with a baby the same age as mine and in no time at all we would be commiserating like besties. As a freelance writer, I went from writing about business stories and entertainment pieces to parenting articles and pitching picture books, with each new developmental stage providing a wealth of new material.

At that point, in the early 2000s, I was writing for the local paper, I had a newsletter, I had a website, and I was immersed in motherhood. As a single parent, writing was my way of being less scared. When I would lay awake at night, wondering how I was going to be able to raise this kid alone without screwing her up, my stories were flares sent up in the dark night to remind others and myself: I’m still here.

Unfortunately, my daughter wasn’t down to be my muse and when she was about five or six, she told me she didn’t want me to write about her. I couldn’t tell my story without sharing hers. So I stopped.

As a mom, you can never have it all. Sometimes you have to be satisfied with just having enough. For me, enough meant providing a stable environment and being able to have flexible jobs where I could be a part of the PTA, pick my daughter up from school and be home with her after she got out of school. You could play a game of checkers on my work history with all of its gaps, part-time jobs, and underemployment. I’ve always encouraged my daughter to go off and conquer the world, but in building her up, I’d let myself go as a writer.

Years later, the world had changed, and I worried if anyone would want to hear what I have to say. I wondered, where did my voice fit in?

I knew I needed something to change, and I had circled around the idea of grad school before. It would be a huge commitment of time and money, both of which were in short supply at our house. But after finding a program that seemed to fit my needs, I threw caution to the wind and applied, a hazy picture of what could be started to come into focus.

Going back to school—an art school, no less—at 46 has been illuminating and frightening. I sometimes wonder if it was genius or lunacy to schedule enrollment in the program so that I would graduate the same year as my daughter. As one of the oldest students, and one of the only African American women, in the program, it has challenged me to assert myself in situations where I don’t always feel comfortable or confident.

A few months ago, another student commented on a short story of mine that she didn’t like the “syntax” and questioned the name of one of my characters for five minutes. When you’re a person of color, you cycle through all of the questions that come up in this kind of interaction: is it race related? Do they genuinely not understand or connect with the text? Is it just a personality issue? A blend of all three?

With one more semester left, the thought of graduating and navigating a new terrain during middle age is daunting—especially when it feels like there is less space in the world for women of a certain age who are getting back in the game. Google being my personal shopper, doctor, and therapist, I searched for success stories of women writers over 40. Nora Ephron was 51 when she directed her first movie; Nancy Meyers was 49, Annie Proulx was 53 when she published a collection of short stories and her first novel at 57. I was also heartened by a Danielle Steele interview that showed her at 71, the divorced mother of 9, still writing with over 800 million books sold. In my head, I added Terry McMillan. She was 41 when Waiting to Exhale, her second book, was published. And she was the only one that looked like me.

Fortunately, my MFA program has exposed a new (to me) crop of writers such as Eve Ewing, Dana Johnson, Khadija Queen, Venita Blackburn, and Morgan Parker, a host of contemporary writers that spoke to me and helped me find myself on the page in ways I have rarely experienced. They were writing about places, emotional and physical, that I knew well. It’s electrifying when the invisible is made visible through shared experiences, when you feel as though you’ve found a canon that includes you fully, not as a best friend or afterthought.

I also look at the success of Tomi Adeyemi, Brit Bennet, Angie Thomas, and others, and I see there’s a path for me.

I think. Maybe.

I don’t know.

I take encouragement wherever I can find it. Sometimes it’s in things as simple as when a classmate approached me after workshop and said they couldn’t wait to read more of my work. And so I keep writing, sending off those flares to say I’m still here.