I have been writing and thinking about why we write. This time, my daughter and my son are my muse. I listened intently as she told me during dinner about her desire to start her own company, one where she would simply write and illustrate all the books she wanted to write. Currently she is working on a fourth grade diary series. She has 11 chapters of a short book she called The Golden Sapphire. There is also Kayla and the Little Foot and a host of others in the works too. I marveled at her thinking today and wondered out loud to myself, when does it stop. In other words, I was once like her and I dreamt too of a world where I would simply just tell stories, write them too and some how call it life.

I have always loved books. My father instilled that in me early. I have always loved stories too. I thank the Nigerian Television Authority for their ground breaking show in the 80’s-90’s called Tales by Moonlight. Together, books and that show, taught me the significance of storytelling. Along the way though, life got in the way. Reality check too in college when I was asked to declare a major. I wanted to go for the arts but some how I had great grades and it landed me in the world of pre-medicine and eventually research. I have no regrets there either. Doing the kinds of research I do keeps me full. I am eternally grateful and thankful that I get to study anything simply because I am a researcher. Even better, a grant writer. Writing grants as I do changed my life. But yet still, I look at my daughter and wonder out loud to myself, where did it go. Where did my love for stories go and is it too late to resurrect it. Plus if I would truly develop the style of stories I want to tell, who is my audience and why. For starters, my children. All four of them are as different as night and day with one on the spectrum.

Following dinner, I had a parent teacher conference with my son’s teachers and all of them mentioned how he was at grade level academically. Here is my son for whom everything else is a chore, eye contact, conversations, behaviors, crying, meltdowns, but even with that, the sweet brain of his can be kind, and friendly to strangers, and create an entire puppet show all on his own with two pencils during class. That gift, of being creative is what keeps his brain on overdrive. It’s what even makes me wonder when I’m on the spectrum too. We are so similar it crazy. I can jump from one paper to a full NIH R01 grant and then a picture book all in a week. This is why my posting has been erratic all week. Not only did I complete a full academic paper with references, I worked on a grant going out next week, then completed a potential story for a picture. Like my son, my imaginations are on overdrive these days and all I can say is writing as I do here, on anything that comes to mind, continues to open doors to other things I never knew I had space for in my head. I keep thinking about writing, but truly I want to keep imaginations like this for life.