When I went to counseling with my now-ex husband after well over a decade of marriage, one of the things I thought was miniscule even after he took great exception to it was my casual remark to our therapist, “If you don’t have dreams, what do you have?”

My ex said, “Oh, thanks a lot.” He missed my point, and I missed his.

I was very happy with my treasure trove of four children; I didn’t think I had nothing. That he would take my remark to mean that nothing in my life mattered to me was a good indicator that we did not belong together.

We should always be stretching our imaginations, exploring the limits imposed on us from within or without, and we should be stepping toward what feeds us. I didn’t think that was objectionable. I thought everyone understood the power of having dreams.

The images here are snapshots of the first few hundred words to a novel I started in my twenties and still haven’t written. (Essay continues below.)

I typed these words when I was 28, the mother of four kids under age eight. I had not gone to high school. I had built up a year’s worth of college credits with one full-time semester before I had kids and one or two classes a semester until I got pregnant with that fourth child, when I dropped out again. So, really, the words in the pictured manuscript above are all to my credit, for good or bad, because I am a reader. (I have to admit that I purposely read a lot of Danielle Steel as a twenty-something, wanting to provide my children with something better than I had growing up and better than they had then, and also I just really, really wanted to write. And people really, really wanted to read stories like hers.)

At age 32, several months after I had a life-altering spine injury that put me on my back and kept me from going back to my job as an arbitration administrator, I found out I hadn’t worked enough to collect disability (raising four children isn’t work, right?). That is when I went back to college, full-time this time. What else was I going to do with my life? I made straight As as an English major. I took twice the required number of course hours to earn my Minor in Writing. And before that, I had written these words and plotted out this novel.

(I have a three-ring binder of more pages of this novel I started, and I have the floppy disks– remember those?– a complicated outline, lots of research, and more notes.)

In my creative writing courses in college as a mother of four, I knew I desperately needed to get divorced so I could live. I had read dozens of novels not only by Danielle Steel as preparation for the novel I started before going back to school, but I was discouraged from writing “crap,” because I was capable of “something good.”

I’m sorry I was so open to suggestion. (Instead, I became a lawyer.)

Commercial fiction is not, by definition, crap. This novel would not have been crap.

The suggestion that I should not write what I wanted to write, should not write what would have made me happy to write, should not write like the novels I studied on my own, is something I see now as an unjust hindrance to my natural life as writer much the same way another incident affected me.

When I was in sixth grade, eleven years old, my older brother and another boy in my grade read my diary aloud at school. This was my brother’s fault. He found it and took it to school. When I sobbed to my mother, she said, “Let this be a lesson. Never write down anything that you wouldn’t want the whole world to read.” (Indeed, I understand this in exactly the opposite way at 57 than I did at 11 because I am hopeful, but those words cast a chilling effect on me for decades.)

Yes, it was my fault. When I was 11, I wrote down that I loved Andy Gibb and I was taller than him but I loved him anyway. If I wrote anything else that meant something to me, I don’t remember it. But I do remember that. And I remember the pain and humiliation. And the laughter.

I have kept journals here and there since then, but it has not been a longstanding practice for me. Is it any wonder? (And why does that make me feel like a loser?)

Flash forward to ten years ago at the Key West Literary Seminar (when I was 47), long after I’d forgotten that I had actually started writing that first novel and had floppies and a three-ring binder dedicated to “Work in Progress,” I came up with an idea for another novel, one influenced by my experience practicing law. (I went to law school at the University of Florida after I graduated from Rollins College with my English and Writing degrees.) I had the protagonist and her assistant sketched out in my notebook during one panel discussion. I conceived of a story arc for them that would go beyond one novel. I have been “working” on the novel since then– ten years now. I have a lot figured out. I’ve written parts of it. It is a heavy story.

Last year at the Kauai Writers Conference, I sat in the audience and took notes when the novelists there, all women, all with multiple New York Times bestsellers, gave away what I thought until then were unknowable secrets, and upon hearing them, I knew that I didn’t need to know how to write the story I conceived in Key West ten years before, I only needed to be able to try to write it.

That was last year.

If I had conceived a baby, I’d have given birth to my fifth child by now, but there is still no legal thriller written by me, not even enough of a manuscript to claim I’d gotten to second base. I will be back in Kauai soon, not having a finished the manuscript as I believed I would last year when I was so stoked. I’m not even close.

The story, the one I thought up ten years ago in Key West, is emotionally draining, and it seems to have no end. I don’t have that kind of emotional endurance to spare at the moment. One day I may be able to write it. It may take another ten years. It may never happen. I’m not going to get hung up on it anymore.

In the intervening time between now and maybe never, I mean to write the story I can write, the story I can bring energy to, the story that brings me joy, the one I conceived in my twenties. (I may not have a uterus or ovaries anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give birth metaphorically!)

For a long time now, my new/current/forever husband has made me realize how big love can be and how much laughter our lives can hold. (He also leaves gutted Splenda packets on the kitchen counter, ignoring the small blue and white china bowl I placed there for him to toss them into.) I want to write about that kind of relationship dynamic– the one with big love and hope and laughter– with some ugliness thrown in, natch, but not between those two.

And I still have dreams. Not just the dream of my husband using that china bowl, but the dream of stretching myself toward new things that feed me. Even if they were conceived twenty-nine years ago. Especially if they were conceived twenty-nine years ago.

“Everything is gestation, and then bringing forth.” -Rainer Maria Rilke