by Amber Agarand

Created on: December 06, 2008

I thought motherhood would be the end of a lot of things for me. I'm a very young mother though and I saw my pregnancy at 17 as the end of my childhood and time to be realistic. Rather then being an ending though it became a new beginning. For me having a child was very much the opposite of the end of my writing but rather the beginning. My son gave me a whole new outlook on life one that I believed through writing about I could share more fully with other people who weren't parents yet. My son became my inspiration.

As soon as I found out I was pregnant I found myself obsessed with writing down every detail, every thought, every feeling. Now I find that my pregnancy journal became too detailed and that I will probably not be able to share it with my son until he's much older. But that pregnancy journal led to a much bigger project. I'm now writing a book. Maybe a book that I never plan for anyone to ever actually read but my son and possibly some of my family. Writing became my outlet as a mother though. It became so many things to me, my coping strategy, my escape, but most of all the place where I put down in words as descriptive as possible how much I truly love my child.

So many new mothers deal with things that are so beyond them, diaper rashes, teething, all the way up to those toddler years where your trying to keep sticky fingers off of your keyboard at the same time as running for the bathroom every time your child squats hoping to stick them onto that potty. Sometimes at the end of a long day it sounds ridiculous to sit down to a keyboard and write something thoughtful, meaningful, and adult. I suggest new mothers do what I do, skip all the thoughtful, meaningful, and adult stuff and move on to what's really important. Write down all the thousands of reasons you wished you had put more thought into whether or not you should have children. Write down all the things that are frustrating you, all the things your child does that are driving you insane, all the things that have you at your wits end. Then read it over and add to it, some of the things you wrote about will make you laugh, some will make you wonder what your child will think when they're reading this after they've had their own children, and some of it will make you smile because those little monsters are just so cute when they're being bad sometimes.

I find that after my son has gone to bed I like to either curl up with a good book or create my own. Sure I could spend that hour while I'm waiting

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