The Best Writing Advice I Ever Received

It’s so simple, yet overlooked

As a working mom, I thought my aspirations of being a writer were over. I was a high school English teacher with a two year old, pregnant with another on the way, a mortgage, and a car loan. I could see the epitaph on my tombstone already: She worked in education for 30+ years as a teacher, raised a family, retired in place, and passed away at a ripe age. Not that any of that is bad; it’s not. I love my family, and I feel fortunate. But it’s just not everything I’ve wanted to do with my life.

So at the age of 32, with a two year-old in the stroller, I found myself walking down a dim fluorescent-lit hallway inside a gothic red brick building at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. The short trip up from a nearby suburb was exhausting: car seats, blankets, strollers, snacks, diapers, a hangover of night terrors, and a demanding stack of essays to grade had manifested as an utter lack of sleep. I felt like the walking dead. And inside, I felt like my life was dimming, too; maybe it was time to throw in the towel on my life’s purpose and give it all to these two little humans I’d had a large part in making.

But somehow, in the midst of all of the routines of working-mom life, I had Googled “creative writing masters degrees” and here I was, walking down this hallway for an…