Two years ago, two important things happened to me: my father died, and I wrote a novel.  I say the novel “happened to me” because I don’t know who that disciplined girl was, putting all of her energy into writing, writing, writing every day, with a two-year-old and a four-year-old clamoring for her attention, floors needing mopping, potties needing training, and mourning to get on with.  I set a goal to write at least a thousand words a day, and here’s the strange thing about it: I followed it.  And a few months later, my husband was ready with a camera to document the two words every writer dreams of.  Not I’m published - that has yet to happen -- but those sweet words of finality: The End.

I’d always dreamed of being a writer, influenced in fifth grade by Judy Blume, who’d captured so well the drama inherent in every adolescent’s experience, with characters I’d come to love and to detest with equal vehemence.  I could still conjure the deep betrayal I felt when I’d learned that Nancy Wheeler had lied about her period, as well as the deep jealousy I’d felt on Margaret’s behalf when Nancy had announced, “I got it!”  Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret had the power to transport me even after I’d worn out my “borrowed” copy from the library with multiple readings, being too shame-faced by the subject matter to ever return it.

I decided I would be a novelist when I grew up and that, I figured, would be that.  I’d jotted a few things down on paper through the years, but I never felt as if the growing up part had materialized, so I felt no pressing need to actually accomplish anything that resembled a goal toward that reality.  I majored in English in college, but moved from creative writing toward academic writing, too afraid of failure to throw my hat in the ring with the artsy kids.  But then my father died, and just like that - with no shield to my ever encroaching death -- I was a grown-up.  And I had an idea for a book.  Boom.

I went to bed with my husband a few weeks after the funeral, trying to move forward, not knowing how.  At two o’clock in the morning, I had the entire book in my head.  I crept down the stairs to write what would become the first chapter. I’d started projects before, that’s really the easy part.  What was different this time was the follow through.  I had never done anything like that before, valued my time or my writing enough to keep at it, day after day.  After I wrote a hundred pages of the story, I told my husband what I was doing.  To his credit, he hid any reservations he might have held about what I could accomplish, took the kids, and encouraged me to finish it. 

Another hundred pages later, I started to mention to people that I was writing something.  There was no turning back, not after I’d come out with it.  The book’s narrator closely resembled me, and by no small coincidence, had lost her father on her thirty-third birthday also.  The things I couldn’t face head on were digestible through the filter of my protagonist.  I couldn’t say out loud that my father was dead, but I could write it.  When I finished it, I thought, when this sells, I can call myself a writer!  That would soften the blow, I figured.  I wanted to make something positive of such a sad, soul shaking time.

The advice that I’d inferred from everything I read about publishing on the internet was to write second novel.  Forget the first, start the second.   Except, a year later, there weren’t really any more ideas, and no second novel had shown up on my laptop.  And when I looked in the mirror one night late in the spring, I noticed twenty pounds of new flesh hanging over my sweatpants.  It was the culmination of my grief, coupled with the fact that elusive words come easier if one’s mouth is filled with Haagen Dazs and/or pita chips.  And so I set another goal: weight loss.  And the really strange thing that happened?  I achieved that too.

I joined a Zumba class at my local gym, the only exercise I’ve EVER enjoyed, because it’s dancing, and the music is loud, and the people were friendly to me, and because there was free babysitting and if I was sweating and dancing and burning calories I could forget, for an hour at a time, that the inbox of my e-mail was growing fatter every day with rejection, upon rejection, ad infinitum.

Because here’s the truth: Who cares if you’re unpublished if you’re skinny? Right?

I stopped eating carbs, and my husband bought me Wii Fit for Mother’s Day at my insistence.  The compulsion I once felt to write now transferred over to my body.  I felt an obligation to the animated scale on the Wii fit screen.  If I missed a day, he would turn accusingly to me and say something to tune of, “Oooh, too busy to work out yesterday, Jaime?” I couldn’t bear the implications of that message.  His doubt about the dedication toward my goal of transformation crept into my psyche.  Too push it out, I didn’t miss a day.  

Cut to New Year’s Eve 2011 - I’m a size four, unpublished, and unfulfilled, because it turns out being published matters to me, and because without the frantic energy that had consumed me to reach these goals, I can feel the weight of my father’s death and the depth of it terrifies me.

So I decide I need to refocus.  If I could accomplish these insurmountable goals that would have been incomprehensible to the un-fatherless woman I was two years ago, what would this year bring?  A cure for cancer?  A tidy home?  What?

I made a promise to myself.  I would publish.  Something.

A blog seemed like a place to start, to stretch my writer’s legs and to rediscover my voice.  I was inspired to check out Open Salon after watching Julie and Julia.  My Blogger blog had two followers - my best friend Rachel, somehow, twice.  I wrote a few blogs, received some really sweet comments, the first from Gabby Abby.   I became obsessed with hitting the refresh button on my e-mail browser and having mini-orgasms when the words Open Salon appeared in my in-box, signaling a new comment.  It inspired more posts, more comments, a trickle of ratings, and on Saint Patrick’s Day, after I’d written a post about Obama and nuclear energy that was ripped to shreds by people with real knowledge and answered an Open Call by the editor to contribute to a series called Other People’s Trash, I received the recognition of two Editor’s Picks and was featured on the cover.  My firsts.  On the same day.

(Cue real orgasm.)

I wore a green shirt that day (in honor of the holiday) and every time I put up a new post, I pulled that shirt from the dryer and put it on.  Because it was my lucky shirt, and the cause of my great, good luck.  

The shirt turned out not to be a sure thing, and in my vanity and over-inflated ego, I started resending out queries to agents who I assumed would be clamoring for my book.  I felt validated. 

 I felt like a writer. 

But a strange thing happened: agents continued to reject me.  They weren’t privy to my newfound confidence, and if they were, it didn’t matter to them.  My words haven’t found a home, and the pounds so meticulously shed a year ago, are starting to creep back on.  The scale hasn’t moved much, but I know that I’m softer than I was this time last year, mushy in the middle.  I’ve lost the momentum that has pushed me so far, and when I ran into my old Zumba instructor in Baskin Robbins last week, I realized how long it had been since I’d danced.  

The mirror doesn’t show much difference, but I can see it.  I feel it.  There are times when I feel like a writer, and the comments so generously made by people I hold a ridiculous amount of respect for reflects that I could be.  Sometimes, I need to pick up the pants on the floor and look at the size on the label to remind myself of who I’d worked to become, even if I don’t feel like her.  I can see clearly my problem - that I value myself based on my reflections: on the scale, by the number of comments, by the unpublished novel in my desk drawer.

So I’m setting a new goal: to believe that I am who I wish I was, and in doing so, to become her, the woman my father would have been proud of, not because she was thin or had professional accolades, but because she saw what he did: a lovable human being.

And if someone publishes my novel, that’ll be pretty great too.