I never planned to be a writer… but I’ve always been a writer.
When I was eleven, I convinced my mom to buy me an American Greetings CD so I could design and print my own greeting cards on her computer and sell them to customers in her flower shop.
I wrote custom messages for each card and charged a whopping five dollars per card. I never kept the money or saved up to buy anything—it was my way of contributing to our family’s income. Plus, it was my mom’s CD, computer, paper, and ink. For me, it was an expressive outlet.
In many ways, the books I write now, thirty years later, are the same.
Having a baby in the midst of a global pandemic, with no family nearby except my husband and away from a “village” because we were new to the country, meant a lot of figuring things out on our own.
My daughter has inherited my love of books. In fact, the first thing I bought once I knew I was having a baby wasn’t cute clothes or toys—it was a box of about twenty books from BookOutlet.ca.
I’ve been reading to her her whole life, and it’s wild to read my own books to her now.
My sole mission with Wash Day was to create a book that taught her what hair washing was all about. I, like so many others, learned by watching and through trial and error. But I thought it would be nice to have a “manual” for the future—and a prompt for the present—so that the nuances of the process could be remembered and referred to later.
That’s why I write—to remind, to teach, and to make space for stories that deserve to be held and told.
It dawned on me recently that even though my mom and her flower shop are both gone, writing once again is helping to provide for my family. What a full-circle moment!