Getting on with daily life as a mum and student, with the added inconvenience of needing a wheelchair to navigate said life, I have had to become a ‘small wins’ celebrator. Small wins come in many forms. They can range from finding the right pair of knickers for my daughter in the morning, avoiding a pre-school melt down (or at least one of them) to managing to remember where you need to drop each child off to various after school activities AND remembering to pick them all up again! Both in my world are worthy of a little internal celebration.

My fabulous shit show of a life is a free flowing fountain of fables ripe for the picking.

One of the big wins that comes from a life of epic disasters and small wins, is that as a student of creative writing, I am never, ever short of writing material. I have a whole back catalogue of life events that fit anywhere between the genres of dark horror and dramatic comedy. I draw on those occasionally, however some of the more traumatic stories often take a lot longer to process and get right (along with several boxes of tissues, a lot of throwing people out of my room and an unhealthy amount of support from my loyal cockapoo Cadi). So these lighter moments of daily family life that generally end with us all still alive and mostly speaking to each other are much more enjoyable to work with.

I am frequently told that the best way to become a writer is to write, and I write, a LOT. Our small bungalow is overrun with books, reading books of course but so many notebooks full of my scribbles. Little moments that have made me giggle, or cry or get a bit mad (okay, completely lose my shit). But each of those scribbles is potentially a short story, or a blog post just waiting for me to get my backside in gear and write it. 

Moments like………when I fell out of my chair in a large chain coffee shop, backwards, taking the table and its contents with me. The look of horror on people’s faces, running to help as I lay there laughing at my own stupidity only made me laugh harder. Fortunately no hot drinks were involved but my Dad was the subject of a few dirty looks as he returned with a tray of drinks and cake rolling his eyes in disbelief at the sight of me laying flat on my back with the table hovering in the air attached to my wheelchair laughing so hard he couldn’t help me! Soon enough everyone was laughing, even the manager who was hovering nervously with the accident book.

Or………..The pride I felt when my daughter, who suffers terribly with social anxiety, absolutely smashed her first rugby training session. And, how we all giggled as she wandered around for the first few minutes like a dog wearing shoes (find the videos on you tube they are the funniest thing ever!) in her new rugby boots that must have felt incredibly strange at first. She came off the field to us all beaming at her with pride, and taking the mick out of her for wobbling around on the nobbly boots.

My fabulous shit show of a life is a free flowing fountain of fables ripe for the picking. As I go through the process of learning to write it’s amazing how sometimes stepping back to observe my own life as a narrator, rather than living it as a character can offer a great perspective. Writing about my life has taught me a lot about myself. About how I used to take myself and others far too seriously. How humour can cut through the most difficult of subjects without always distracting from the horror. And how the small details of life going on around you are often lost during the editing process, but, observing them, keeping them, makes me as a person, and my writing, a whole lot richer.