AWP Conference: Philly March 23-26 (two dreams become one)

Howdy Digital Strangers!

Apologies for going MIA for so long. I was working on a secret mission.

I was writing a book! YES, a whole book. A real one. My debut novel. (More on what it’s about in my next post.)

Of course, I was still navigating parenthood through a pandemic with a toddler recently diagnosed with a lifelong neurological motor planning disorder, making speech extraordinarily difficult.

Forgive the lengthy run on, but that’s what the past two years have felt like. One bad run on sentence with a few pretty words sprinkled in to keep us powering through it.

Oh, and I’m pregnant again. SURPRISE.

Like most of you, life has been turned upside down over here. But, I’ve been doing everything in my power make my dream of getting this book published a reality. The trick has been adopting a new dream into the mix. A dream so many take for granted. The dream of speech for my super sweet, smart, painfully adorable almost-three-year-old son, Jackson.

It feels like a cruel joke from the Fates. Just when I dare grow so bold as to call myself a real writer —with words as my only escape or sense of identity outside of isolating, pandemic motherhood— I’m faced with a horrifying reality that my own child may never speak quite right. That he will undoubtedly struggle for years to learn the basic mouth movements that come so involuntarily with speech for the majority of us.

That we will spend $1,000 a month on intensive therapy for the foreseeable future with slowwwww progress (and lots of frustration).

So my dream of being published is now rivaled only by my dream that my son will overcome his hardship. As I spend days in speech therapy, afternoons editing query letters, and endless nights deeply submerged in internet rabbit holes and online support groups for apraxia, my two dreams share bittersweet odds.

~1 in 1,000 kids is diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech. That’s 0.1%. What Jack has is exceptionally rare.

Most editors and publishers suggest the odds of getting published are only 1-2%. But hey, that’s higher than the 0.1% chance my son would have this lifelong invisible disability. So, definitely possible.

And the Universe gives everyone the short end of the stick sometimes. But maybe the odds are still in our favor for other things. And maybe things are balanced, in the end. In the meantime, we can let odds and statistics consume us with fear or we can let them inspire and motivate us to be an outlier.

I don’t know what the odds are that my son will learn to speak normally one day. I do know there’s a 60% chance that he’ll have dyslexia, making reading and learning the imaginative, powerful art of words extremely difficult all over again. But there’s a 40% chance he won’t have it.

Similarly, I don’t know the percentage or how many times my manuscript might get rejected. All I know is there’s a chance it won’t.

If my child can spend his life working to overcome a neurological condition caused by an unfortunate and extremely unlucky birth injury, I can put in the work to make my manuscript marketable. Luck is out of our hands. But the rest is up to us.

Together I think my son and I both might overcome some bleak odds.

So I’m running full speed ahead into what many might call a pipe dream. And though my first writer’s conference was cancelled in February due to Covid (more bad luck), I will get the chance to attend the AWP Conference in Philadelphia next weekend (I’m so LUCKY to be able to get away and focus exclusively on my craft).

Yes, I will also have to miss three of my son’s therapy sessions and one of his music classes, but my dreams are still important too. And I want him to see that dreams can be achieved, in spite of the odds. It just takes a little faith and a lot of work.

My ultimate dream is that he will be able to hold my book in his hands and we can read it aloud together, celebrating the years of hard work we both put into the art and magic of words.