I have been wanting to write a book for a while now.  A friend of mine who lives in Scotland, she was once my son’s first grade teacher, has been encouraging me for almost a year now to start it.  I have been procrastinating.  Part of me is slightly afraid that it will be awful.  I think that is a normal fear.  The other part of me is hesitant to start because I do not want to cause anyone in my family pain, especially my mother.

My childhood was not great, but it was not the worst one ever.  My mother and I did not get a long for the majority of my teen and adult life.  When I say not get along, let me go further and say that there were times that we could not even be in the same room with each other, because we would end up doing or saying something not nice to the other one.  One of the things that has come out of my depression treatment is that my mother and I have healed our relationship.  She has changed so much in the last few years.  In fact I have not seen many adults her age change as much as she has and of course I have changed during my treatment.  We have a good relationship now.  A friendship that neither one of us ever thought we would have with one another.

That good relationship, and friendship mean the world to me, and I do not want to do anything to damage them.  However, my journey through depression began when I was a child, part of it due to some of the things that went on during that part of my life.  At the same time though, those childhood events would not be the main part of the book.  I would try and write about them in such a way that I can show how those events shaped my brain into being more susceptible to depression and anxiety, starting in my teen years.

One way I thought about handling that was to include a forward to my book, with an explanation about why I am writing it, and to let anyone who reads it know what the focus of the book will be.  I know that most forwards are written after the book is completed, but I wanted to write something now.  An intention for the book.  Something I can look at everyday to remind me what the focus is for the book.  I can see that at some point I may want to turn the intention into the forward or at least include it in it.

I wanted to share that intention with ya’ll.  That way you can give me some feed back about it.

In this book you will go on a journey with me.  It will be a difficult journey, fraught with shattered dreams, sad dark days, tears, and death.  It is a journey filled with hope and healing.  It is a journey through my life.

Painful relationships are a part of this journey.  One of the most painful relationships is with my mother. For too many years, she and I were not healthy together.  We caused each other a great deal of pain.  For me some of that pain began as a child.  After many long years, she and I both came to a place in our lives where we wanted to heal things between us and we did.

There will be times when this journey will follow some difficult pathways with regards to my mother.  I will have hard feelings about her, and it will not show either one of us in a good light.  What you need to keep in mind when we are on those pathways is that whatever feelings and thoughts I had then, I no longer have.  My mother is not the same person that I knew when I was a child and a young adult.  She is a beautiful, kind, generous loving person.  She gives all the credit of her transformation to God.

What I want you to remember most of all is that I did not include you on this journey for the sole purpose of recounting all the bad things in my life.  I included you so that you could see that there is hope in everything and in every life.  It does not matter how long someone might live in darkness, there is always hope.  A hope that can lead us to the light.