Over the weekend, I quietly finished the second draft of my novel and moved on to the third.

This should be a cause for celebration. After all, this was more “huge structural rewrite” than it was an “edit” In a lot of ways, it was far more challenging than finishing the first draft (which took me two years.)

But — I didn’t even tell my husband that I’d finished. I just went back to the beginning and started editing again. No fanfare. No celebration. Not even a break. I literally just scrolled to the top of the manuscript and started again.

Why?

Because I was ashamed that it took me so long in the first place.

When I started planning my edits in February of last year, I was slated to finish them by June. In March, I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant and my world turned upside down. My priorities shifted as I felt totally unprepared to be a mother. Baby books, registry planning, and nesting took over my days and my nights.

He was born late one night in December. My recovery was immensely difficult. I cried every day for at least two weeks.

But I adjusted. Over the twelve weeks that I spent at home with him, I became his mother. I love the new role, my little dude, and all the time-stealing joy that he brings. By the time I felt I was really getting a handle on it, it was time to go back to work.

Two weeks into my return, I was working from home thanks to COVID. Now, have you ever had to work from home while taking care of an infant? It. Sucks. Babies crying during Zoom calls, nursing between meetings, falling short in every metric of self-worth imaginable. I don’t think I’ve ever been more stressed and felt like such a failure.

Then, when I started to really get a handle on it all, a social uprising starts. Much of my free time I dedicated to learning about how to be anti-racist. That in itself is hard, exhausting work — but it is so, so important.

I don’t know if you’re keeping score…but basically it’s LIFE: 5,692 and JAMI: -2

But you know what? Through it all, even if it wasn’t as frequent as I’d like, I kept coming back to the page. It looks different now than it did a year ago — I’m editing on my phone while I nurse, or opening my laptop for a few minutes in bed before sleeping a few hours. I’ve got a tab up in between all of my work tabs.

And I kept going.

I finished.

That’s worth celebrating.

Now the first three chapters are off to some Beta readers and I’m working through some smaller changes — and I’m already through four chapters,

So tonight, I’m going to celebrate. Once that baby’s asleep, and the house is kind of clean, I’ll pop open the fancy goes I bought myself and I’ll kick back in front of the fire pit.

And I’ll also edit on my phone a little bit as I do so. Because every little bit helps — and now that I’ve made those changes, I feel like I’ve really found my voice. I’m enjoying this edit — which is a lot more than I can say for the last one.