Almost two months ago, I was trying to catch up on my stash of WORLD magazines and came across a book review that piqued my interest so much that I literally grabbed my phone and ordered the book on Amazon. I couldn’t wait for it to arrive.

It was supposed to come the day before we left to go camping with Ian and Abby, and I imagined lounging in a camp chair reading all day long while my baby played happily in the dirt.

The book came; I took it camping; our campsite was on a slope; my baby trundled around precariously and had to be watched every moment; I did almost literally no lounging in a camp chair; the book remained untouched. (That’s okay, we had a lot of fun without getting any reading done.)

So I just started reading the book here and there in the small pockets of time I had where I didn’t feel like doing anything else. And it didn't disappoint. In fact, literally five minutes after I finished it, I printed Sebastian a bazillion train pictures to color like he’d been incessantly asking me to do, and then I closed out the coloring pages tab, and I opened Word, and I started to write.

It was that good.

I had hoped it would be.

The line that most caught my eye from the WORLD article was this one: “God created, so we create.” [Create Anyway, Ashlee Gadd]

Yes, that’s the book. Create Anyway by Ashlee Gadd.

I wanted to be reading it with a highlighter, there were that many quotes and lines and thoughts and sentences that I wanted to mark. If you are a creator, of anything, be it books or blogs or bread or art or clothes or photos, and especially if you are also a mother, I highly recommend you read this book.

Chances are, you’ll be nodding your head the whole way through. You’ll feel seen. And “gotten.” As in, She gets me. This is just how I feel. Now I have words, beautiful words, to explain myself.

And if you’re a writer, chances are, you might just think, I’ve thought that very thing. I could’ve written those words. I wish I had written those words.

She talks about why we create, about how creativity shouldn’t just be seen as leisure but as a necessity. She talks about how gifts were given to us by God, not to be kept for ourselves, but to be given and shared and used. About how, yes, there are others doing what we’re doing, but there’s enough for all of us, that we all bring a uniqueness to whatever it is we’re creating, no matter who has done it before us or who has done it better than us. I could go on and on, and I actually cracked open the book again to try to remember what else she talks about, but it quickly got overwhelming. There was just so much there that I identified with.

It's a beautiful, encouraging book for mothers who are also creators.

“God filled the world with good things and calls us to do the same—to showcase hope, light, beauty, and restoration as part of the ongoing process of God’s glory infusing the earth.” [Ashlee Gadd, Create Anyway]

I just love that so much.

“What if we stopped viewing creativity as something that takes away from our families and viewed it as something that breathes life into our families instead—through the meals we make, the pictures we take, the homes we decorate, the music we play, the stories we write, the gardens we grow? What if, instead of deeming creativity as trivial or selfish, we viewed our personal creativity as a gift, an offering, a contribution capable of blessing everyone around us?” [Ashlee Gadd, Create Anyway]

That was just in the first few chapters, and there is much, much more. Go read it if you need a little encouragement or a kick in the pants to keep up with those hobbies that seem destined to take a back burner to your child-rearing.

Maybe doing both is more accessible than you realize. Maybe even more necessary. More life-giving.

I know I’ve felt guilty for sitting down to write when there were dishes in the sink and crumbs on the floor. And those things do need to be tended to, but so do the things that bring joy and fulfillment.

Speaking of doing both, I didn’t even get the above words all written in one sitting. (Maybe not even in four.) I finished reading Create Anyway twenty days ago, and I wrote the first half of the above post right then and there. I wanted to keep going while it was all fresh in my mind, but my baby and his bedtime called, and as the days went by without any more writing done, I pretty much decided to table this whole post. After all, who really wants to read another book review, at least in a blog post format?

But then my mind started spinning again quite a few days later, as I moved chairs and toys out of my broom’s way, as I bathed the softest, squishiest baby on the planet, as I corralled chaos and disarray when it stormed in the door in the shapes of Alec and Sebastian.

And there I was again, noise swirling around me, words spilling from my brain to my fingers to my phone screen. Grabbing thoughts before they could scatter. Frantically typing bits and pieces, enough to remind me later what I wanted to say when I had a chance to sit down and flesh it out.

Creativity in the midst of mothering. Mothering in the midst of creativity.

When I was little, I always said I wanted to be a mom. To be honest, I didn’t think there were that many other options. And I am thrilled to be a mom. It’s a dream come true in so many ways. Just the other day I was watching my baby play, and I said in my head, Thank You, Lord, for giving me children. Now that I am a mother, there is no other path I can think of that would bring more joy and fulfillment than this. You just can’t replace the love of a child, the knowing of a child.

But there’s still a part of me that has other dreams. Right now, I feel like I will always be a mother, and that is all. But when I look around me and realize that children grow up and that mothers are still people with interests and hobbies after their children are grown . . . it’s almost unbelievable to me, and also slightly exciting. I am not ready for my children to grow up, and part of me is afraid that any hobbies I have won’t hold the same joy when I don’t know that I can go hold a funny little boy when he gets up from his nap, when I know that I won’t have to quit any minute to give a bath or put something on an owie or turn off the water hose for the millionth time or get a snack or wash little hands or turn on a story or read a story or draw a story or . . . you get the picture. Part of the joy of creating for me right now is knowing that there is so much more to my life than what I do or don’t create.

I don’t want this stage of life to end. It is so full and so meaningful.

And yet, someday I want to write books again. Books to share this time, instead of just my own collection of self-published stories. Big, fat books that are hard to put down, that tell a story that goes on and on and on. A long, enthralling series with amazing characters and amazing storylines and amazing development and amazing settings. One of those series that is so hard to put down, that you don’t have to put down because it feels like the story will never end because the books are so big and there’s so many of them. I would love to write like that. Days and days and days of writing, like I used to do.

I didn’t dream big as a child, and less so as a young adult. I was a Mennonite girl, and I expected to one day get married and have children and that would be that. That’s what I did, and that is that, and I am extremely happy.

But part of me wishes I would’ve known that I could dream a little bigger, before I did all that.

I’m proud of the things I accomplished though. I didn’t dream big, but I certainly wrote big. I wrote for hours and hours and hours. At first I was still in school, and I would come home and finish up my homework, and then I would get out my notebooks and my eversharp, and I would write in the tiniest, neatest handwriting, two lines between college-ruled notebook paper, barely decipherable even to me. I would bury myself in stories that I created, some set in this world, some set in a fantasy world. At first it was just stories, tales I would weary of and put away without ever finishing.

A month after I graduated high school, I started the first book that I would actually take to completion. I still have my notebooks with that very first draft, with all that tiny handwriting, each new writing period carefully dated. I can hardly imagine it now. I had an idea; I made up characters to carry that idea; I made up a world to carry those characters; I drew a map; I wrote a glossary; I wrote out that entire book by hand, not one but three times, and I still have the notebooks to prove it.

In June 2009, the story was a vague idea in my head. By November 2009, it was a full-fledged book, and the first draft was complete. I’d done it. I’d finished a story.

You know, that’s the only book I’ve written that Eric has never read. There’s a reason for that. 🙂 Let’s just say that first tries, while gratifying and satisfying in the area of completion, are rarely that gem you were hoping for. Honestly, I hope to never read that book again either. I’ve so far managed to keep Eric out of it, and if it never sees the light of day again, that’s fine by me.

As I said, I wrote three drafts of that book, all by hand, all edited as I went.

I still remember getting my first computer. It wasn’t even really mine at first. I think what had happened was my grandpa got it for himself, didn’t like it, and gave it to my dad, who didn’t really have a use for it but told me he would keep it if it was something I would be interested in using.

To use my dad’s term, boy howdy, I was.

At first, that computer sat out in the dining room, and I would furtively type while my mom and dad wandered past, and I would just hope they wouldn’t snoop or I would have my screen resolution set really small so the words were barely readable even to me.

I think it was when I started taking the computer with me to Madras that it really became mine. I had a cardboard box that held the computer and the keyboard and the cords and the mouse and the mousepad, and I would load that all up and make the two-and-a-half hour drive to my sister’s house, and then I would unload it all and carry on with my writing whenever I could. Even back then, it was children and writing, my time interchangeable and interspersed. When I went back home, that computer went with me. It commandeered my passenger seat more times than I can count, back and forth across the mountains. Eventually it was enough mine that it moved into my room, and it’s been mine ever since. Eric and I even used it as our main computer for quite a while after we were married, slow old thing that it was, but now it’s just a relic taking up space in my armoire, empty and old and special.

At some point I continued on with that original story into another book, but I never got that one finished because I suddenly decided I’d like to approach the story quite differently. There was one character in particular from the second book that really interested me, and I thought, Why not tell the story from her perspective in first-person? I still remember sitting down at my computer in a fifth-wheel in Madras, about to start that book. I finished that one, and then I went on to write a prequel to it.

I commissioned a cover artist to do cover art for all three of those books and printed myself copies using CreateSpace. I spent a lot of time researching how to format them for Kindle and put them up on Amazon for a while.

Somewhere in there, I wrote three other books as well, ones that had nothing to do with those set in an alternate world. Two of them have been read by no one but Dora, Eric, and myself. One of them was lent to an additional privileged two, LaVay and Drew.

None of them are anything I currently want my name attached to, and so they sit on my bookshelf, and they sit on my Kindle, and they sit in my drawer. I had dreams of doing more with them. There was supposed to be a third book set in that fantasy world. I wanted it to go somewhere, to be something I was proud of. And I am proud of them, but there was more work I wanted to do on them that never got done, and I am not that same author now that I was then. I’ve kind of let go of the dream of ever taking them any farther.

And that’s okay. They served their purpose well, and they brought me so much joy and fulfillment.

A little while ago I actually got out all my physical copies and was looking through them, mostly because I couldn’t remember the main character’s name in one of them and that bothered me. Alec came in and joined me, and suddenly I told him, “Mom wrote all these books. Can you believe that?” He was so amazed. I’ll let him read some of them sometime.

I’m not sure when I stopped writing. I know by the time I started dating Eric I had completed all of those six books. That was at the end of 2014, and a month prior to that was when this blog was born.

My writing took a different direction from there, and one I’ve been happy with, but that big series of books I want to write someday still lurks in the back of my mind. 🙂 Maybe after a few more kids and a decade or two? It would be more fun to imagine it if I had any inkling of what I would write about. Maybe that will come.

In the meantime, I'll just be here blogging, whenever I have time, whenever I have something to say, whenever I feel like it. Thanks for reading here! I love to write, whether anyone reads it or not, but there is an element of fun and fulfillment that comes with interaction. 🙂

Don't forget to check out Ashlee Gadd's book if you're in need of some encouragement regarding motherhood, creativity, or both.

And whatever you do and however you spend your time and talents, may you bring glory to the One Who created you.