What does one do when one has kids too young and only realizes afterward that they themselves are kids still and not equipped to handle the stress?
I was one such character with two kids under my belt by 23. By 24 I knew I shouldn’t have dropped out of college to marry, but by then I couldn’t send my kids back to where they had come from.
There began my journey of sacrifice-your-own-dreams, you are a mother now. And as my kids grew, I asked myself a million times why parenting was not a mandatory subject in high schools the world over, where so many women children became mothers.
In my particular case…my educational possibilities went to hell when my husband was diagnosed with AIDS, and subsequently died when I was 31 years old, leaving me a house and a car, and no cash.
His death was the catalyst that convinced me that I would educate my two daughters if it was the last thing I did on earth. My children would not make the mistakes I had made.
But if you are an Indian from my kind of family, “education” means seeing your children right through college. So that little goal left me 46 years old when my kids were finally “college-pass,” and I became an empty nester.
Since 23, I had never had the time or the privilege to question who I was…until 46. And when I asked my reflection in the mirror that question I was a has-been nobody, my best years sacrificed to giving my children more than I had received.
Seeing my quandary during one college vacation, my elder child…a proud NYU student, said, “Mama…write the story of your life! I mean how many Indian women married a Peruvian diplomat and lived your life? It would make a bestseller…”
And I thought, why not? The one gift I did have throughout my life was my love for reading. I mean how hard could it be to write a book?
I found out “how hard” when I wrote for 3 years and an Indian agent rejected my effort with the following email comment: this author could become a decent writer if she learned how to write! This happened in 2010.
After 12 days of crying I vowed I would become a “decent writer” or else die trying. After all, I had stood on my head to give my children a star-spangled education. Even if I put in half that effort into learning how to write, just by sheer logic I’d become a good writer.
That, Dear Reader, was the beginning of my nature vs. nurture debate. Could I become a good writer even if I started my journey at the doddering age of 46?
The answer lies in my novels,
DRAGONFLY ESCAPING and DRAGONFLY HUNTING…which are the first two novels in a series of books based on my life story. If you like/believe in women’s empowerment…check them out on Amazon. My writing journey was not easy and it was not cheap…but in 2022 DRAGONFLY ESCAPING won 2 first prizes in the Royal Dragonfly Award Competition for 2022. (The competition name is a coincidence.)
I am especially proud that one of my first prize categories was LGBTQ…where my heroine is emphatically not LGBTQ herself.
I can safely assure you that at 46 I felt like a tired has-been. Today at 61 I feel young, I feel happy, and I feel like I am poised on the threshold of life…ready to conquer the world where I had left off at 23…a young, lost, and terrified mother of 2 daughters I was not in any way equipped to bring up.
If you, Dear Reader, have a dream, don’t let “age” stop you. The years count for how you live them…not in their physical passing…
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