I was an imaginative child and can totally relate to Ralphie in A Christmas Story. I was constantly writing short stories for friends, with them as the main character, and relished making a friend happy by making them as they wanted to be… in their story.
When I was in seventh grade my English teacher Mrs. Jane Russel, who taught English in the Williford Arkansas high school I attended encouraged me to write.
“You have talent Sheri; you just need to develop it.” Was what I heard most often from her. Punctuation is still the bane of my life, and all I can say is thank God for editors!
In high school I began having severe nosebleeds and dropped out of school in the middle of tenth grade after my nose began gushing without warning all over my science book and open book test paper.
I later completed my GED thinking I was done with education. I journeyed out west to attend special meetings at a church in Tucson Arizona where I met the love of my life, Robert. We married in December of 1979, and within four months I found out to my delight we were going to be parents. Our son Sean was born, and nearly three years later another son Brian arrived on the scene. And nearly three years after Brian our little redheaded daughter Kimberly came protesting into the world via emergency C-section.
During these years, I began thinking about the storyline of a book I wanted to write. I had no idea how to go about getting started, and that was the days before home computers and laptops. So, one day, I pulled out a pad of paper and began to write about a young lady called Victory, whose given name was Victoria. I love history and our family is quite frankly a bunch of history nerds. So, this was to be a story built around the American Revolution.
It didn’t take very long for me to make a disheartening discovery. In spite of all the desire to write a story, I lacked the education and resources to bring it about. So, I tucked Victory, all five pages of her, into a large manila envelope and there she lived dormant for nearly forty years.
Life went on, we moved to Northeast Tennessee in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Here we added our fourth child to our family. A daughter, named Kristen.
Tragedy struck our happy little family, and my darling beloved husband Robert was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor in May of 2000. He passed away June of 2001.
I had a brief second marriage that ended in divorce. Thinking to help my youngest, who was only five years old when her daddy passed away. She was distraught and begging me for a daddy. I thought, this was something I could do for her. But it was a disaster on every level. My second husband was emotionally abusive and after six years, ended the marriage.
In August of 2009 as a high school dropout and forty-nine years old I went back to school. And was almost always by far the oldest in my classes. My goal was to be an occupational therapist assistant. I wound up deciding to complete my bachelor’s degree and apply for the OT program offered at a small local Christian college. I didn’t make the program and armed with a bachelor’s degree with a concentration on public health I entered the work force, and less than a year later I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The cancer was diagnosed very early, but I went through a bi- lateral mastectomy. I had opted for reconstruction and after one of the surgeries developed pulmonary embolisms. In the months following, I attempted to return to work only to find I had huge chunks of memory that were gone. Simply not there at all. I couldn’t retain information, couldn’t remember how to transfer a call at work, or remember the many rules that governed how we handled calls, and procedures at work. It was scary, and eventually I was diagnosed with PTSD. PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was a diagnosis that shocked me to my core. After all, only soldiers who had experienced war were who suffered from that; or so I thought.
Through analysis, it was discovered that the PTSD had its beginnings in the abuse of my childhood. Events surrounding my husband’s illness and death added to it, an emotionally abusive second marriage threw fuel on the fire. The breast cancer and pulmonary embolisms were the final straw for my brain and certain things just shut down.
I am including this in my story, not to garner sympathy, or to make myself a victim. But to give testimony to the grace of God and that a life lived even imperfectly can be raised up and given a purpose. It has been during the most difficult trying times of my life that God has made himself so real to me. Showed me that even during the storm, I dwelled under the protection of His mighty wings, and that I belonged to Him.
God has given me many gifts in my lifetime; first, the gift of life, the gift of salvation, the presence of the Holy Spirit given to lead me and guide me when at times I felt I was groping through life alone. The gift of my darling husband Robert who was my world for the time I had with him. God has given me four wonderful children, and through them seven grandchildren who light up my life.
If I have any talent as a writer, it is also a gift and was given by God. My greatest desire is that someone is blessed, encouraged, lifted up as they read my stories. I trust that God willing, Maggie’s Mountain Song will be the first of many stories that God has for me to write, and maybe someday, Victory will emerge from that big envelope.
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