by Jeanne Marie

Created on: October 19, 2008   Last Updated: February 02, 2009

When The Kids Grow Up I began writing at fourteen but when I started my family at nineteen, I think that the sterilizer vaporized my creativity. I figured that it boiled away with the germs on the baby's bottles. Occasionally, I'd have a poetic burst, but by the time I was twenty-six, I had three children screaming for my attention and my writing ceased.
I told everyone that I was a writer, but my kids kept me too busy to write. "When the kids grow up," I'd say. When the kids finally went off to school, "prove it" anxiety set in. I thought about having another baby, but that seemed rather desperate. I had to face facts. It was time to write. I began slowly, but regained my confidence as the words poured from me. Poems began to accumulate and I'd read them to friends and family. In 1988 I bought an electric typewriter and started to organize my work. I also took my first college class. I enrolled full time, but the schedule overwhelmed me. After one week, I'd dropped all the classes except for one, Country Song Writing.

Many of the students were my age, which was encouraging. I continued to write, even bought a computer, but I often let kids, grandbabies and housework come before my writing. Then in 1994, a drunk driver killed my son-in-law, Donnie. He kissed his wife and his tiny son good-bye that morning and less than ten minutes later, he was dead. His sudden death caused me to reevaluate my life and to focus on what mattered most. I found out that it wasn't clean sheets or dustless floors, not even baking delicious desserts or cooking big meals. Again, I enrolled full-time in college. This time I stuck to the plan. My husband was supportive and he took over some of the household chores. Some, I just ignored.
I decided to treat college like the ocean. The only way to go in the icy cold waves is to close your eyes and to run into the surf as fast as you can. Once you make it past the undertow, the waves are breaking in front of you, not sneaking up from behind and the water feels warmer as your body temperature adjusts. The gentle swell rocks you as you swim and the blue-green horizon stretches out as far as you can see.
I enjoyed learning in spite of the tremendous workload. I usually stayed up past midnight doing homework for Comp. I, memorizing outdated laws for Criminal Justice, (don't even ask me how I landed there) or cramming my head with strange definitions for Biological Psychology and then I'd get up at 5:00 a.m. to study for a test or to finish an essay.

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