My Imaginary Family

I found myself one Saturday afternoon bored out of my mind. Often when I'm bored, I start finding things to organize. It is a hobby (or obsession, depending on who you ask) of mine. So I started rummaging through my closet. I found a stack of journals that were completely filled with my own jagged-edged handwriting. I love journaling. I find my mind opens up the most when I am alone with a journal, a cup of coffee, and a good pen. The fun in writing your thoughts down is reading them years down the road. It is usually quite interesting and sometimes comical to see what you were thinking, dreaming and talking about a year or even five years ago. So naturally I started flipping through theis stack of journals. Most of my entries were from high school and early college. They were all about boys, depression and skipping class because I was out late - again. There was one journal that seemed out of place. First of all, it was a notebook someone in junior high would probably pick out - purple and sparkly. Secondly, it was not filled with journal entries. It was filled, instead with a family tree - a made-up family tree to be exact.

In one moment, I was transported back to when I was 12 and my grandmother had come to visit us. Being an only child and living 3 states away from my extended family, I always desired to have a big family. My grandmother loves genealogy and she was showing me all about family trees. I became so interested, that, with her help, I wrote down my own future family tree. I decided how many children I would have, what their names would be and when they would be born. I didn't stop there, though. I also decided who my children's children would be. I even had a year-by-year outline of ages, births, school grades, and marriages. I was completely enthralled with my own detailed account of my fake, future family.

On that boring Saturday afternoon, I uncovered an idea for a novel. It was all there! As I was reading through my lists of names and dates, characters started jumping off the page. The youngest grandchild was an only child and she, like myself, would ask for a baby sister for Christmas and not get one because her mother, Sara, would not be able to have any more children. I noticed that my oldest daughter, Megan, marries much later than her younger sister. I imagined that she was the smarter of the two sisters. Megan would go off to college before she settled down. However, she would always be a little jealous of her younger sister, Natalie, who had always been the pretty one. Natalie marries right out of school and starts having children right away. I imagined she married into money and always regretted not going to college like her older sister.

And there you have it. Because of a 12-year-old's desire to have a big family, a 25-year-old discovered an idea. And now, hopefully, a 31-year-old will be able to take that idea and make it come to life.