Today, as I sit at my corner desk looking out at the Vancouver rain, I struggle with the words for my latest blog post. It’s been five years now. A big anniversary. My blog is five years old. That’s years younger than my children, but it’s also years longer than I imagined I’d be writing a blog. 

When I first started, it wasn’t even my idea. I was teaching memoir writing for moms and one of my tech-savvy students suggested I needed a website and a blog. When she saw the skepticism…

If you made a resolution to start writing in 2012 – about yourself, your kids, your journey as a mother – SheWrites is offering a special online writing class that will connect you with an inspiring group of women and get you writing.

In September, SheWrites started the first-ever Writing for Moms class where a group of 10 women from across North America got together online to share their stories and learn to become better writers. It was quite an awesome experience. The diversity of…

This story is part of a series on Writing and Permission that was commissioned by Cori Howard, the instructor of the SheWrites online class, Writing for Moms. The topic evolved in one of her online forums in which women started to discuss how hard it was to give themselves permission to write and to be writers. These are the stories they came up with. 

by Sue Urie

I’ve got about twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes of uninterrupted minutes to write. My five-year-old boy is behind…

Things I’ve learned from my community blog: what it’s like to be a blind mother, to adopt a child from an overseas orphanage, to struggle with fertility, to divorce with a child in your belly, to face the wrath of a teenager with bipolar disorder, to watch your child die, to live on after your husband dies in a plane crash, to lose your job and more seriously, to lose yourself. And that is just the short list.

I was first introduced to these life stories by the students in my online…