System reset

Watch how a woman blossoms when she finally feels safe. 

My children will tell you that my home was a big box of beige, cream and beige colors and light dashes of turquoise and browns with very little bright accent colors as they grew up.

My style was very Midwest contemporary and honestly it looked like my home could be anyone’s living space and not necessarily my own.That all ended about 5 years ago, after writing See You Later. It took some time to self publish and during that time I discovered vintage stores.

When I say that book healed me, it’s not an exaggeration. Some days I cried as much as I wrote, and then I cried some more, because I grieved everything from my childhood to my abandonment to my being widowed to my even wrestling with the fact that I maybe should’ve let Tom run away when he wanted to, when we were teenagers. I even finally made a sort of peace with his tragic ending and his negligent death… I finally realized that he really is gone. I know it might not make sense to people on the outside, but there’s moments that you wrestle with even realizing that that person was real, because it was so brief and it feels like a bit of a dream at times, so there’s days where you feel like he’s not gone. You have to have experienced a tragic ending to maybe understand it. But after I got it all on paper, it healed a lot of old hurt, and when I healed…my home, exploded with color and uniqueness.

I stopped saying yes when I really wanted to say no, because that childhood people pleaser finally let her herself rest a little bit. 

And then I wrote some more and I haven’t stopped, so with each book, I come alive a little bit more.

I wrote in see you later that I really didn’t know who I was a lot of the time, because I was being told who to be and before I knew it I was married and a mommy and then I was widowed and my new title took me over. And then I remarried and became a mommy again and that role was one that I really wanted to excel in, but when the children grow up and out of your home, you really get to discover who you are and I’m in love with who I’ve become in my late season bloom. I’m so glad I wrote that first book, because my entire heart is in there for anyone to see.