Q and A with Lynn from the Outer Banks, North Carolina
“When you’re struggling to say above water, it’s important to fill yourself with positive information.”
Q: What are you passionate about?
A: I’ve always been passionate about children, and empowering women and kind of why they got into the situations they got into. My background is psychology and education. Currently, I left owning two businesses; they were two child care centers that I created a model for because it just got to be too difficult to manage my health and run the two businesses effectively.
Both centers transferred to their new owners in May 2024, but since September 2023, I have been writing novels. Currently, I’m working on completing the edits for a trilogy called Partner in Dreams. Once the edits are done, I will be looking for an agent at that point. I’ve always been creative and needed an outlet for it, and writing has always been something I had done…poems, screenplay ideas, novels, but this is a little bit different in September 2023. I can’t even describe it…some sort of download of an idea, and I wrote everything down almost in narrative as a first draft so I would be able to get everything out in time before I forgot it.
So, I had three books almost written in the span of two months. Now that I have more time, I’ve been going back and completing the edits that I received when I had a developmental review of the books. Aside from that trilogy, I also have 10 other works in progress. Some are almost complete; others not so complete. That was to be my plan B; although, I’m completely open to whatever or organically comes to me. I have a website, www.happyendingauthors.com. I’ve been fascinated with happy endings and happily ever after, although life doesn’t always hand that to us. When you’re struggling to say above water, it’s important to fill yourself with positive information.
Q: What were your younger years like?
A: I grew up rather poor in a fairly large city in Pennsylvania, the third largest city to be exact. I didn’t feel like we were poor until I realized that all of my clothing was hand-me-downs from other people in the neighborhood who were grown up, so things were not “in trend,” and that is when I noticed I was different.
That aside, I’ve always been driven to get to college I was the first and only one in my family until I had children that went to college. Education was very important to me. I remember my mom saying, “Why don’t you take typing in case the education thing doesn’t work out?” And I was like, “What?!” It fueled me to go where I wanted to, and I paid for everything pretty much by myself. I worked in the summer full-time and saved money for the school year. Once I got to year three, my parents did help me with some apartment expenses, thank goodness! But I lived with four other girls and it was an adventure. I do, however, think that not listening to others and how they wanted to take me away from where I wanted to be was a definite help. There are things, however, I wish I would have known because my family didn’t have a lot of money, so planning for retirement was just not something they did.
Q: What is something valuable you’d like others to know?
A: The only thing I guess that I would want other people to take away from my story is it’s all up to you. If you want it, you have to learn to be resourceful and figure it out, don’t listen to what other people are saying to you; listen to the voice inside. I can tell you countless stories of people saying that can’t be done, you shouldn’t do that, that’s not going to work, etc. If you feel like it is, you have to find a way to do it.
When my husband and I split up, I was only working a few hours, teaching at local community college, and really not making enough money to stand on my own two feet with three kids. At that point, my youngest might have been in fourth grade, my son who’s the middle child was in fifth grade, and my oldest was in seventh grade. That started the decade of horribleness; it’s the only way to put it. There’s plenty of times you feel like you hit a brick wall or it hit you, and you cry, you get frustrated, you meditate, you pray, and then you wake up the next day, and you feel better.
If it wasn’t for my ability to try to keep my head above water and figure things out and visualize where I wanted to go all at the same time, I probably would have driven off a cliff. Well, I know I would have driven off a cliff. Every morning, I would talk myself out of killing myself. Usually, the last thing that would get me out of bed was I have three kids and my ex-husband would forget to feed them and not go to their games, and I just decided I got to get up. The other thing I’d like you to take away is no matter where you are in life, put money away for retirement, even if it’s a little bit in a Roth IRA because the earlier you do it with the compounded interest, the better chance you have it taken care of yourself when you’re older and you won’t have to hustle like I do still.
Q: What does feminism mean to you?
A: Feminism started when I was very, very young, and it was just the push for us to have equal rights; that’s all we wanted was to be equal. To have equal access to opportunities and possibilities and pay equity just like men. When I was young, I couldn’t get a credit card without my husband’s signature, and that pissed me off more than anything. In the very beginning, when I was really young, there was no safe abortions or clinics where we could go when you didn’t have a lot of money for health care and OBGYN type. Thankfully, that changed as I got older, and planned Parenthood was my first clinic going there to make sure I had birth control and that I was safe when I made the decision to have sex.
I think social justice in all of its forms is important because no one voice is any more important than another. When I got out of college and I took a treatment counselor position at a women’s prison after my internship with the detention home, I found that I was getting paid the same as a man in my job. It was a set pay, no matter who you were. I felt good about that, but most every other position I have taken, with the exception of adjunct teaching, men always got paid more or they got the opportunities quicker to move up, so it’s always been my lifelong goal to do things on my own.
In 2020, finally, I purchased my own dream house without anybody else’s signature, and the keys were handed to me, and I can’t tell you how great I felt. I bought my own house; it was almost new, on water, at the beach. Exactly everything I had visualized had finally come to fruition, almost eight years later. And here I am now, with three houses on the beach; one is a long-term rental house, and the other one is an Airbnb three blocks from the beach. None of which I needed anyone’s signature or help or money! I did it my way.
Thanks for reading!
Contact me:
The Woman Wednesday Blog 