Today I am thankful for my life.

I am so blessed to have come so far in my life. I went through my twenties and thirties without creating anything except offspring; I dared not write anything for fear someone would find it and see what I was thinking. I was even paranoid to answer the phone, for it might be someone with whom I did not want to speak. I could not understand why I felt like that, that nobody liked me, for I was willing to do anything for anybody without regard to myself. But I never wrote anything down. My thoughts were my own, and I was really not willing to share them with anyone else.

I went on like this for two decades, until I was ready to burst, and then my youngest son left some of his poetry lying around and I read it. By this time, I was in college, and my future was not clear, except that I wanted to be a professional something. I did not know what. Anyhow, I read my son's poetry, and it made me realize that poetry could be an outlet for my feelings, as it apparently was for him. So I started writing poetry. It turned out very dark, because my life had been dark. Then I started writing fiction, which actually turned out to be non fiction, for it was my life.

The piece that I was writing was of the time in 1971 when I was at the lowest point in my life, and it took me a long time to finish one little part, for I discovered that I was finding out what had happened to me at that time. I learned that writing can open up doors of memory that have been closed. I am trying to encourage my husband to write more, for he has had a dry spell.