Today is the day. The inbox smiles back at me reassuringly as I spy a message from The Motherly Collective among the promotional emails and underneath a conspicuous rejection letter from an independent poetry publishing house. I open the email, my lungs full of unspent air as I wait hopefully on the following words.

“I am pleased to pass along your edited and published story….”

The sigh rushes from me with unparalleled speed, followed by a short laugh. I did it. Someone read my work, liked it, and decided it was worth publishing for their readership. Of course, the editor assigned to my story communicated that they were interested in publishing. But until I saw the link for myself, I remained dubious. Rejection comes easily to me. I can believe why someone would say, “We appreciate your time but not your efforts.” In the past six months, I have received twelve rejections for various pieces, seven of which came in this month alone. Not nearly so lofty as William Saroyan’s 7,000 rejection slips, but enough to tell me two things. Firstly, I am making greater strides in submitting my work as well as writing it. Secondly, some of that writing could use review and improvement.

I recognize, too, that I am new to the writing scene. Well, to the literary scene, I should say. I always considered myself a “writer” in the vague, somewhat ethereal, wishful-thinking sense. My first collection of short stories resides in a Winnie-the-Pooh spiral notebook with a purple hardcover front in a box under my bed; open the cover, and you would see the rambling words of a three-year-old version of myself lovingly scribed by my mother in gel pen pinks and blues. My first recollection of a personally penned story was a Magic Treehouse self-insert fanfic I wrote in the first grade (Is it less cringe if you’re six?) that I wish I had kept. Unfortunately, many of my elementary-aged scribblings didn’t make it past the review board of my moody nine-year-old I’m-a-serious-writer-now-guys-I-don’t-write-that-kid-stuff phase. To be fair, that struggling artist mentality paid off. I won my first (and only attempted) contest with a non-fiction story about losing my first pet when I was eleven.

In any case, while I have put pen to paper, word to typewriter, and keyboard click to Google cloud for almost three decades, I only began submitting my writing for serious review this year. There are multiple reasons: the first is that I married young after quitting my first college major. I decided to work while my spouse finished his degree, assuming I would resume college after. But then, reason number two entered my life in the form of our first child. Our second child followed shortly afterward, and I knew secondary education and a writing career would have to wait. The dizzying stage of life surrounded by diapers, zoo visits, potty training, and living in the moment before my children started school took a toll on my capacity for focus. After all, I already have ADHD; It doesn’t take much. And in my experience, parenting is a vast sea of “muchness.” The biggest obstacle to my willingness to share, though, was fear. What if I was wrong? What if the educators, AP tests, scholarship boards, and years of positive affirmation from everyone who cared about me were false? 

Despite my apprehension, in 2021, I felt compelled to share anyway. I participated in submission calls for my daughter’s favorite podcast, landing a slot in the “Listener’s Poetry” episode for a bedtime poem I wrote for my girls. The acceptance of this poem reminded me how much I enjoy sharing writing with others. I had almost forgotten the thrill of showing the world I see to others through my voice or the words of a fictitious character. A spark lit within me. My eldest was in school, my youngest was set to start kindergarten the following year, and I had more free time. I decided to finish my degree. I started writing more poetry and short stories. I  picked up ideas for novels I had bandied about as “someday” projects in my head for years. I felt the old muscles that parenthood had me set aside to atrophy strengthening once more. 

As my mental muscles flexed, my physical muscles shrank. An injury in March tanked my dance career in an instant. The loss of my dance career devastated me (a story for another time). But as a result, I had more time to devote to writing. Gone were the days of sporadic bursts of loquaciousness at 2 a.m. when I could not sleep. Gone were the moments updating Google Docs on my phone in the parking lot of my daughter’s school. No more telling myself, “I’ll just get to it later.” I stopped calling myself a dancer when people asked what I did for work and started calling myself a writer. Granted, I had no published works under my name, but how does that old Descartes philosophy go? “I think (I am a writer) therefore I am” or something like that?

Then one day in August, my father sent me a link to an online literary magazine. “Since you’re writing again, I thought you might try this magazine. They publish fiction about ethics, philosophy, and stuff like that. Thought you might like it.”  I did like it. I had just the story for it, one that I felt was one of my most well-executed yet. I sent it off with high hopes. Two weeks later, I got a reply. It was not an outright rejection but a request for a rewrite. Unfortunately, the editor was more interested in the secondary theme of the work rather than the primary theme. I tried rewriting it to match their expectations and felt the subsequent rewrite paled compared to the first. I wrote an email back, thanking them for their interest and apologizing for not being able to adapt my story to fit their needs. I would be lying if I said coming so close only to trip at the finish line did not sting. 

But today, I am victorious. Today, I do not crawl back to my feet from another knock-down position. Today, I am a writer. What a marvelous thing!