Medicine Lake.

I love reading.  I escape into books, into the lives and stories of others.  The first chapter book I remember reading was "Charlotte's Web" and I fell in love with a spider and a pig.  When I was a child I would often hide in the bathroom reading and at night I would read long past my bedtime, buried under the covers.

I am in awe of writers who weave stories like tapestries, using only words to create new worlds.  But I also like reading because we all have stories, our lives are stories.  My story begins with a baby born to a family who had already lost five babies.  I was a surprise and a blessing, although it never felt like that to me.  I always felt like an outsider.  My story continues on to this day, through good times and bad, through children and husbands, through deaths and births.  All of my life has led me to this point where I can look back and see myself as I was and how I still hope to be.

The beauty of getting older is that so much of my story has already been written, it is a matter of laying it down on paper, not an insignificant task.  I was telling the big guy the other day about my divorce and my ex-husband, about being locked out of my home, about having the police called on me, about everything awful that happened that year and I told him that somebody said to me, "This must be the worst thing ever." and I said, "No.  The worst thing that ever happened to me was being told Katie was handicapped.  Realizing that the baby that I thought I had, had died.  That was the worst thing ever."  And to this day it still is.

Katie shaped my life, my children shaped my life really.  When my son was only two weeks old I applied to nursing school because I had already realized that there was no way his father would be able to support us or stick around.  My middle daughter was my easy baby, she made me want to be a mother and Katie, Katie broke my heart but she also wrapped herself around that broken heart and held it together.  She still does to this day.

I have been a mother since I was twenty years old.  I have also been a sister, girlfriend, friend, wife, lover, nurse and photographer but I am always a mum.  We all have our stories, how we became the people we are.