As a keen reader, senior English teacher, teacher librarian, and exam assessor for English, books have been a significant part of my life. As an adopted child, who was fortunate enough to also meet and become close to two of my birth siblings, I do understand the issues of women having to give up their child to assure a better life for them. As a mother to two children of my own, I can image the grief of not being able to keep my own child. During the second year of Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns, I reconnected with a good friend in Boulder Colorado and she was choosing a challenge to exercise outside for a minimum of an hour a day to keep up her fitness. She then encouraged me to accept the challenge of writing a sentence a day. We settled on a paragraph a day, but once the story took off, I starting writing so much more. I would not have been able to sustain this effort without the loving support and encouragement of my husband, Henry.
