This time eight years ago, I stepped off an airplane from Korea via Hong Kong, carrying precious cargo – our new beautiful seven-month-old Korean son. It was the culmination of six years of heartache and angst and the beginning of a new outlook.
We had only been home a few weeks when I began to feel I was missing something. The last six years had been filled with constant ‘things to be done’ – paperwork, medicals, police checks, interviews, all juggled in amongst our eldest son growing up and going to school. There was always something to work towards. Now, even though this new little bundle of energy kept me very busy, I needed a goal, something to keep my brain working. I enrolled in a writing course.
I hadn’t written much since I was at school. Even though English was always one of my best subjects, even though I’d dreamed of writing children’s stories and I always had stories bouncing around my head, I never wrote any more than long letters to friends. Basically I think it was laziness. If I had an image in my mind, I could pick up a pencil and make it real in a few hours. It took no great effort on my part. It was just something I could do. Writing, on the other hand, needed thought, planning, care and effort. So I left it alone. Lazy.
The writing course, though not brilliant, showed me that in fact, writing is fun. More than fun. Satisfying. Every bit as much as drawing a picture. I even found I enjoyed writing articles. Of course most of them have been about adoption. In the past eight years (in between all the fuss of adopting our daughter) I’ve had around twenty articles published in various adoption newsletters, magazines and more recently, an anthology. But it was the novel writing exercise that hooked me. Creating a novel gave me a sense of purpose. Now I could set myself goals daily, weekly, yearly and my brain had more to deal with than the weekly shopping or a basket of ironing.
Happy Gotcha day, R!
More on goals another day…
We had only been home a few weeks when I began to feel I was missing something. The last six years had been filled with constant ‘things to be done’ – paperwork, medicals, police checks, interviews, all juggled in amongst our eldest son growing up and going to school. There was always something to work towards. Now, even though this new little bundle of energy kept me very busy, I needed a goal, something to keep my brain working. I enrolled in a writing course.
I hadn’t written much since I was at school. Even though English was always one of my best subjects, even though I’d dreamed of writing children’s stories and I always had stories bouncing around my head, I never wrote any more than long letters to friends. Basically I think it was laziness. If I had an image in my mind, I could pick up a pencil and make it real in a few hours. It took no great effort on my part. It was just something I could do. Writing, on the other hand, needed thought, planning, care and effort. So I left it alone. Lazy.
The writing course, though not brilliant, showed me that in fact, writing is fun. More than fun. Satisfying. Every bit as much as drawing a picture. I even found I enjoyed writing articles. Of course most of them have been about adoption. In the past eight years (in between all the fuss of adopting our daughter) I’ve had around twenty articles published in various adoption newsletters, magazines and more recently, an anthology. But it was the novel writing exercise that hooked me. Creating a novel gave me a sense of purpose. Now I could set myself goals daily, weekly, yearly and my brain had more to deal with than the weekly shopping or a basket of ironing.
Happy Gotcha day, R!
More on goals another day…
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