Without my mother now

It is May 16, 2009. I turned 60 yesterday - I always knew that nobody in my life would ever love me the way my mother did. I also knew that I would never truly be an adult until my mother died. On May 3, I became an adult.

My mother had always been the writer in the family. I dabbled. With her death, I am now a writer and the essays and columns I have had published are now somehow valid.

I began my writing when I began editing the columns my mother wrote during her years in East Sooke, the back of beyond, in the 70's. I took a sentence from one column, a paragraph from another, and put them together into a book.

We published the book quietly 10 2005 and sold 250 copies. I found I could write just like my mother - in fact, I wrote two of the columns from scratch about incidents that happened to her in the 1990's.



I went on to write humour pieces that were published as the "Last Word" in Monday Magazine and they paid me. I was hooked. I wrote articles for Senior Living and then branched out from my home town.



In 2007 I wrote an article about the experience of living with MS and MedHunters published the piece.



Later in 2007, Animal Wellness published "A Nose for the News" in Tail Ends. Also in 2007, "Go Grandma" was printed in Laughter Loaf.



The literary magazine, Kaleidoscope published "Cages", another piece about living with MS, in their Life Stories II edition. That edition was reviewed on www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/2008_04/litmagreviews_2008_04.htm



2008 was filled with caregiving. I was President of Family Caregivers' Network Society

http://www.fcns-caregiving.org/

I wrote about caregiving for the FCNS Newsletter and for Scrivener, a published quarterly by the Societies of Notaries Public of British Columbia.



In 2009, I again found my humour and Long Island Woman http://www.liwomanonline.com/ printed my column "The Manic Jogger" in April 2009.



This is a new journey and I'm excited!