Monroe, Michigan
Congratulations, Nancy!
Nancy’s Bio:
Nancy started writing as soon as she could pick up a crayon, doing poetry books and a "newspaper" for the neighborhood. She was an English major at Ohio State, where she also got a law degree. She practiced law for about 25 years, then worked as executive director of a Michigan nonprofit. She also worked as the single mom of two girls, Katherine and Jenna. Now that she's retired from 80-hour workweeks, she's writing again, and her daughters, as well as her husband, Tim, are her constant cheerleaders. She also sells out-of-print books online, and she writes articles for Internet content providers. In the past few years, she and Tim have traveled to Japan, Greece, Turkey and South America. Her cats, Bart and Charlie, wish that she would travel less and play with them more.
Visit her website at: http://www.nancyhira.com/
The Price of a Room
My first grown-up space was a basement apartment shared with my new husband. The floor was red and black linoleum, and I was constantly scrubbing it to get rid of the heel marks. I learned to make roast chicken and minestrone soup there, and my husband’s fraternity brothers came over often to drink kegs of beer, usually ending the evening by vomiting copiously in the tiny bathroom. I had no room because that’s the nature of cheap basement apartments. I did my writing at our Formica table, banging away on my IBM Selectric while my husband watched football games and told me to keep the noise down.
My second space was a two-story colonial on the Detroit River. I had two beautiful daughters while living there. I also finally succumbed to my twin demons of anxiety and depression, and in the process, I lost myself. Over the next few years, I lived in a series of white rooms, trying to get back to my sane self and my writing. Mothering my daughters while fighting my emotional battles took all of my energy. Writing was put on hiatus while I struggled to regain some sense of self worth. This proved to be a slow and painful path, requiring more work than writing ever had.
When the worst of the crisis was past, I was living with my daughters in a little frame house in Pine Lake, Michigan. The house had been provided by my now ex-husband. There I practiced law and held a series of city and county positions to keep the girls and me in shoes and pizza. Work was always demanding, but so was being a single mother. My younger daughter was born profoundly deaf, so we all learned the basics of American Sign Language. Together, the three of us endured the rigors of high school and scouted for colleges. I remember having very little space and even less time. But I also remember having pride in what I was doing. I was beginning to feel whole.
How do you know when you’ve finally grown up? I’m now 65, I live in a sprawling house on a river with my second husband, and this is what I know: growing up is not so much a matter of years passed or honors attained. It has much more to do with facing your demons, whether they live under your bed or in your temporal lobes, and fighting them until they back off and give you room to find your true self underneath. The writer Morris West said, "One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing." For some of us, courting the darkness is not really necessary—it’s waiting for us on the front stoop when we get home from work.
I have reached a plateau of peace in my life, at this attenuated stage. I have made two writing spaces for myself, one on each floor of our pleasantly creaky old home. These places are full of my books and research work. The serenity that has filled me has also given me back my need to write, and that’s what I’m endeavoring to do, while I have ability and time. My daughters and my husband give me love and encouragement. We laugh together about the joys of Prozac and the dysfunctionality of families. But we know that we are bound together by our passage through the fire. Without this forging, I would never have been able to seek out my rooms. The changes in my life have moved me to write again and to recreate my home, for the first time since I was twenty. And without my home and my rooms, I would never have found the interior calm to put the past aside and write.
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