Three years ago, I left the tech company I was working for to focus on being a mom. I was torn between the career I loved and the young son who I knew wanted me home more. Also wrapped in the middle of this conflict was my dream of writing.
It took me two years to extricate myself from my tech career. Initially, I took consulting jobs to make money because having zero income was a crippling feeling. I had spent the better part of twenty years trying to figure out how to make the next year’s W2 bigger than the last.
Yet I had a dream. I wanted to finish my first book and go on to write another one.
A year and a half ago, I had the courage to commit to writing full time. I finally said, “No more technology. Just write.”
The decision became easier when my father passed away. I spent the last few months of his life with him. My sisters and I held his hand until he took his last breath. It was an honor. It was a life-changing experience.
His words kept reverberating in my mind: “Life goes fast. Make the most of it.”
Something about seeing my larger-than-life father pass away was a wake-up call. Stop procrastinating. Commit. Write. Nothing else. A year and a half later I have a draft of my first book and am in the process of polishing my “diamond in the rough.”
I am writing the story of my mother’s life. A beautiful, tragic story that has always made me look at her in awe. She had a mother for only a brief moment in time—she was barely six years old when her mom died—but she remembered just enough to always know what she had lost. Forever. Two years later, my mom’s father also passed away. As a result, she grew up in an orphanage until she was nearly eighteen.
For me, to have a mom with such a life experience has shaped who I am in many ways. Despite her loss and the catastrophic events she suffered—events that could cause anyone to curl inward for the rest of their life—she was determined to make up for it. Even if her journey to motherhood was jarring, she tried her best to give her daughter—me—a mother’s love.
The culmination of pausing my tech career to embrace being a mom, along with my desire to write, led me to where I am today. I find myself extracting the lessons, the pain, and the beauty of my mom’s experience to better understand my own.
I invite you to join me in the process of looking closely at our mothers’ lives to better understand who we are as women, daughters, and mothers ourselves. This is my platform for starting the conversation, knowing that for all of us, deeply rooted in our life experience is our mother’s story.
On this Mother’s Day, consider this: What is your mother’s story? And what has her story meant to your life?
Happy Mother’s Day.
#tellmemom #mymomsstory #whatisyourmomsstory
