Good morning!
I know, I know, it's been a while and in fact, a very long time! However, good things come to those who wait and when I say this, I am quite making the reference to myself.
I must say, I've learned quite a bit during this past year since I've last posted. I've even started a new company! Once you know a little more about my story, you'll understand why this was no easy feat for me. Oh yes, I hear your questions now;
No, I hadn't plan on starting a publishing company. I simply wanted to get a message out to parents who were limited in their parenting to never give up, but instead to learn that consistency is the key! And to be a speaking voice at times for children through a special series of books. I've always felt a need to "save the children." In my opinion, the best way to get this message out was in printed form, stories for children, but really for adults because they are told through the eyes of children.
The message in my book I Guess My Mom Is Pretty Special is told through the eyes of a child. It's a very important message to pass on to children and their parents. The message in this book was very important to me that it became a mission of some sort.
The message is quite simple really, children are easy forgivers and always excepting, as long as you do your best to be consistant in your love in activities with them, no matter how limited, they will always respond.
For me however, misunderstanding how my "lemon" (my sickness) at the time could ever be turned into lemonade was so overwhelming that I so missed the above message from my children. And they were sending it from the very beginning of my illness.
Once I got the correct message, I knew that I had to put it into writing and dedicate the story to my three sons. Let me tell you little about myself first.
I had always been a self starter. Always accomplishing what I set out to do, very energetic and sociable. As a sophomore in college, many of my professors would say that I wrote at graduate level. I had always been pretty precocious as a child, and emotionally advanced for my age.
While in college my major at the time was psychology. You see, it was my plan to save the world, well, at least the children in it anyway. By the beginning of, I'd say, my Jr. year, I ended up with an illness that left me with the inability to function physically or cognitively.
I had such cognitive blocks due to my illness that I'd forget where I was at any given time or what I was upposed to be doing there. I would forget my thoughts in mid sentence.
People would be speaking to me and I'd certainly feel like they were speaking Russian. Always feeling like the words that were coming out of their mouths were flying around my head. Even with simple things like having a stomach ache and forgeting why I went into the bathroom simply because I stopped on the way in to pick up something off of the bathroom floor. There were many other things as well, the key however, was that for me, this was completely out of character.
I soon became bedridden for about 7 months, couldn't walk by myself, could barely do anything. I had gone from being an energetic ever ready bunny to what seemed like almost a big eggplant.
Anyway, as I watched my children and husband go on with life without me. Well, at the time I felt like it was without me anyway. It seemed as though I was on a parked train and the one on the track beside my train was moving with my family and friends on it. I felt like all I could do was watch, as they appeared to go back and forth. The thing that I had failed to observe from the very beginning though, was that no one had really left me at all. The support that I had was quite stupendous, to say the least.
My children would come into my room everyday to talk, interact and to show me things from school, etc.
They would never knew until they came into my room how much interaction there would be, but, it seemed they were more hopeful than me and taught me a very valuable lesson about how children view their parents when there is consistency.
This is how the idea for the book, "I Guess My Mom Is Pretty Special" came about. Which brings me back to what happened. So once my book was complete, all I had to do was to find a publisher, right? Wrong!
I quickly learned that not everyone was always honest, or even professional enough at times to quite get the job done. This I had experienced on several occasions, one company twice and then a third experience with a different entity.
I discovered that I had more inner strengh than what was obvious during this trying time.
Thank goodness that my need to have this emotional journey come full circle, was greater than my need to quit. After all, it was only because of my three sons that I was able to embrace the mantra of "Turning lemons Into Lemonade" when it came to my limited parenting because of my illness anyway.
They were an incredible source of unrelenting acceptance and forgiveness during the initial stage of my illness. Therefore, since this book was dedicated to them, I really had no other choice but to move forward.
What was apparently stuck in my subconscious during the entire process of all of this finally became clearer to me. "Hey, I was supposed to complete this work on my own all along." I just couldn't read the map to my journey correctly. As soon as I read the map correctly, my destination was changed. I took all of those lemons and turned them into, TLL Publishing, LLC.
Are you reading your map correctly, or turning your lemons into lemonade? I will talk more that in my next blog....
Have a wonderful day!
Ann
