Her Words Wooed Me Back to Writing

Please welcome Kir, who is finally a wife after decades of dating, a mommy to twins after years of battling infertility and a writer after filling a mountain of notebooks with her stories. She gives a voice to infertility, fibromyalgia and celebrates other mommies while spinning yarns, eating cupcakes and buying high heels on her blog: TheKirCorner.com.

I know it’s only polite to say nice things about the place we are visiting, but in this case I can’t even contain the smile I have to be HERE, with Erin, in this space.

You see, it’s because of Erin that I am writing the way I am at all these days.
She won’t believe it but I’m going to take you all back and tell you the story that proves without her even knowing and me not really thinking about it until now that Erin is my modern day muse.

Erin and started our relationship in a place of sadness and hopelessness because it was our shared infertility that brought us together. I knew her peripherally on our community boards and when I came back from having the boys I followed (stalked…cough) her blog since she had become a mom to her twin girls through in-vitro like I had.

Little by little we built an online friendship and I often found myself inspired, amused and moved by her tales and stories. I stayed while she changed the name of the blog, the designs and then eventually moved into this beautiful space all the while quietly awed by her raw talent.

Last February, just before my birthday, I was reading Erin’s blog and she was writing a post for the Red Dress Club about character sketches where there needed to be a joke and a cry. I was so intrigued that I followed the link over to the site and well….to say I was smitten is a bit of an understatement, because in truth I found myself head over heels for that writing community.

That day I pushed myself outside of my blogging box and decided to try to write. Write like I hadn’t since my early 20’s, write with imagination and a voice that I had long muted.
I came up with this: Standing in Line. It got five comments from loyal readers who were just as surprised as I was with the new direction I’d chosen that day.

But that piece of fiction lit a fire in my heart and my belly. I found myself daydreaming more, listening to the characters talking in my head as I made dinner and I waited with happy anticipation for the weekly prompts that would spin my stories into reality.

The truth is that I’ve always loved writing. In my earliest memories I can picture myself rolling words and phrases around in my mouth and using a ballpoint pen to spill those images onto the lined pages of my diaries or journals and the loose leaf paper inside my Trapper Keeper but I never envisioned myself as a writer. There was too much pressure associated with that label.

Yet in the past year, I’ve embraced the title and I have found deep, full wells of inspiration of my own making. I believe that the time was just right for it to happen. Call it kismet but I’d found love, I’d survived infertility and I was past the sheen and chaotic time of new motherhood, I was ready to tell my stories.

So thank you Erin, because your talent and abilities set my own in motion and led me to embrace my own “writing roots.”

*thank you so much for inviting me to share your space today, Erin! I am so lucky to have you in my life and so humbled to call you my friend.* (The feeling is mutual, Kirsten!)