Prompt- Photo
Where does childhood happiness begin? Is it learned, or are you born with it? If you are born with it, and it is wounded, can it repair?
This conundrum brought me to researching kids, the happy ones, because I was well versed in the unhappy ones. This curiosity evolved into how I survive. I write a children’s book series - If It Were Me. The series came from a puzzling question and one big problem, where do you, research kids? I found out that going to a park without your own child is alarming to other parents, schools are impossible to get into, and I was not approved to be a big sister. Then the idea of hospitals. I see stories there. If I am somewhere and my mind is not engaged, I will gander at who is around me and build their story. It’s a reflex I can’t stop. My mind cannot bear to be still. While accompanying a friend to the ER after he fainted mid-sentence, I was sitting next to a young boy whose dad had gone outside to answer a phone call. Which is the polite thing to do in a waiting room, is what I told the boy. His name was Ryland, and I told him, that sounded like a famous baseball player. He immediately corrected me that it was a name of a physicist. I have no idea what a physicist does, but I told him that Dr. Ryland did sound like a better fit. Ryland’s dad came back, and they were ushered away. That two-minute conversation sparked the If It Were Me Children’s Series. The series was trudging along, and I was surviving off this hobby till a famous actor tweeted a photo of her son reading the book. The sales went crazy, and now I make more than I could ever need.
The power of a photo.
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