After I had my daughter, my writing life jolted to an abrupt halt.
Before motherhood, I had built my identity around poetry. I earned an MFA, published widely, and read my work at festivals with jazz bands behind me. I taught poetry in universities and private schools, guiding students through line breaks and metaphor as if these were survival skills. Poetry was not a hobby; it was how I made meaning out of the world.
Then came the baby—a twenty-seven-hour labor, the blur of night feedings, the hormonal fog that made even simple thoughts slippery. What surprised me most was not the exhaustion, but the way it fractured my interior life. The long stretches of uninterrupted thinking that poetry required simply vanished. I would sit in the dark, tethered to a breast pump or rocking a crying newborn, and reach for language the way you reach for a light switch in an unfamiliar room. Nothing clicked on.
Without poems, a low anxiety began to hum beneath everything. If I wasn’t writing, who was I becoming? And if I was going to stay home with a baby, how would we afford it? I needed work that could bend around nap schedules and pediatrician appointments. Just as urgently, I needed to feel alive on the page again.
I arrived at ghostwriting the way many new parents arrive at major life decisions: through research, spreadsheets, and a hard look at what was possible, despite knowing that my twenty-one-year-old, poetry-obsessed self would have bristled at the idea.
At first, it felt like surrender. The work would carry someone else’s name, and my sentences would disappear into another voice. After years of straining toward literary recognition and chasing the fragile validation of publication, it seemed like stepping away from the spotlight I once hoped to stand in.
But collaboration offered something the literary world never had: steadiness.
Instead of waiting for inspiration to return, I began treating writing as work. I showed up daily, drafted on deadline, and learned to shape other people’s stories. There was relief in that shift. Rather than guarding creativity as something fragile and elusive, I used it. I built books. I strengthened arguments and narrative arcs. Writing lost some of its preciousness, but it gained power.
In the four years since my daughter was born, working collaboratively, I have published more, earned more, and built a more sustainable career than in the fifteen years I spent trying to prove myself alone.
Motherhood did not end my writing life. It stripped it down and expanded it. I am still a writer. I am also a ghostwriter, a book collaborator, and a co-founder of a community for writers pursuing traditional publication. I got here, not by clinging to the version of myself I was in my twenties, but by allowing collaboration to carry me forward.
