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the blessings MS has provided me through the back door of my life:

5. I have all my life wanted to be a writer. I once rented a hotel room and took my electric Smith Corona there with a ream of good cotton paper, a sweater I'd found in an ugly yellowish brown but it had leather patches on the elbows and so qualified in my opinion as Writer Wear. This was a few months after I'd graduated from college. I even bought a pack of Marlboro's, though I am not and have never been a smoker; but writers like Ernest Hemingway often did, so I thought I'd try it if a slump hit me. I sat in that room balling up the worst opening lines and titles imaginable and tossing them about me to the floor.

At 21, I had no perspective on life experience and mine had been limited to a breezy, fun life. I got good grades. I had plenty of friends whose parents even liked me. I was Student Body President of a huge high school, voted most likely to succeed. I was even, if you'll indulge me, the Homecoming Queen in 1981 at A.S.U. I was the girl every mom wanted her son to marry. I was in the right sorority (Delta Gamma) and we raised money to buy a guide dog for a blind ASU student every year. My parents were still married to each other and loved all of us, if me a bit more than my siblings. Smile. If I interviewed for a committee or honor society, I got in. If I asked for a letter of recommendation, every professor I had offered to write one, well, except for my anthropology professor whose car I once waxed and then wrote a poem for on the back of a monkey poster to bring my shameful C+ up to a B+. It worked. But that is not the stuff of life experience. I had to smoke the whole pack that weekend. I wrote not a single word but instead prayed for some rich life experience.

Sidebar: Be careful what you pray for. Mine was answered in triplicate for the next 25 years of my life. Stop already, God. Enough already. I have at least a dozen books in me now, maybe more.

6. MS afforded me the time to be not only a full-time mother to my child, but a better daughter, sister, friend, and member of the community. It also allowed me to write articles and poems and get them published. Life experience sadly took me down very, very close to the Valley of the Shadow of Death when mine wasn't easy any longer and I just couldn't be the perfect preacher's kid anymore. I spent less than a year of my life addicted to cocaine at the tail end of my doctoral program. It was brutal. I was "mostly dead" though Billy

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