SEASONS | Nonfiction by Laurel Hightower

It’s mid-winter in Kentucky and the ground is frozen solid, the trees bare and gray. It’s twenty degrees outside, so for this rare holiday weekend we’re hunkered down and making use of the black marble fireplace, my pitbull curled up under multiple blankets, occasionally knocking my laptop out of her way or adding her input with a muzzle on the keyboard. Last week it reached the sixties, next week is forecast in the forties—massive swings in range that keep my congestion working overtime. I’m a full-time working divorced mom, though, so “sick” is for other people.

Finding time to write this past year has been a struggle in ways that are all too reminiscent of my son’s first high-needs, exhausting years. Before I gave birth, time was on my side—I favored mornings, when my mind was sharpest and the house was quiet and lit only by the soft lamps I chose. Other times I worked for hours in the evening, chasing grand concepts in long, sweeping horror novels heavily peppered with romance.

The first draft of one book I wrote during those years was over 200,000 words, the vast majority of which were extraneous, but I had such fun writing it. I took my time with the characters and their relationships, the whys and hows of scaring the hell out of them. Back then, epic doorstoppers were my preferred format of entertainment, as well. I read voraciously, plowing at speed through the tomes of my favorite authors, always hungry for more. My then-husband worked third shift and on Saturdays slept well into the morning, but my day began at 5:00 a.m., when he’d come to bed and snore in my ear, driving me out to where things were quiet.

Looking back, I miss those days of self-paced productivity, the freedom to escape fully into the heads and lives of my characters. After I became a mother, my writing time was defined by ten- or fifteen-minute naps with my baby in my lap, my arms stretched carefully over him in his light blue sleep sack, my fingers quiet on the keys. The myth that babies sleep all the time is the greatest lie ever told, and mine slept less than most, his tender esophagus plagued by reflux. I was essentially a solo parent, except for the four hours per day of relief that my son’s father provided grudgingly (and not always consistently).

I was delirious most of the time. I couldn’t tell you what I wrote in those brief, stolen sessions at the keyboard when my son was a baby. I can only say they were vital in reclaiming some small part of myself, and they remained so, increasing in importance even as my son’s sleep schedule became more fixed, his independence ever growing. Equally growing was my sense of unease, of injustice, of knowing things weren’t fair, the labor unevenly divided. I still feel a flush of rage when I recall nights like the one when I spent over an hour coaxing the baby to nap only for his father to wake him because he simply had to shout at his computer.

As my son dropped naps and teethed, went to bed later and slept in, my schedule continued to be in constant flux. Nap writing became night writing, and night writing became stolen lunch hours. In the joyful irony of the universe, I published my first book the year my son was born, which also meant that when my writing time was tightest, the demands on it increased. Thankfully, my boss noticed my stress over a short turn-around for edits on one project and told me to work on it at my desk, only setting them aside when I received an urgent work request. Somehow, in early 2020, I managed to churn out my first short story and a novella, Crossroads, that remains my best seller to this day. 

When lockdown hit and the daycares closed in March of that year, I managed to sprain my ankle horrifically. It swelled to the size of a cantaloupe, and I couldn’t put weight on it for weeks. I was supposed to care for a two-year-old and work a full-time paralegal job from home, all while unable to walk. Those days are hazy, a fog of frantic working and caring for my son in the midst of a global pandemic, while being the only one in my household who ventured into public places like grocery stores.

And yet, somehow in the midst of all that chaos, still I wrote. Not because someone demanded it of me, but because I needed it more than ever. Those stolen moments, words pounded out in exhaustion, were my lifeline, the outlet I needed so I didn’t collapse under the weight of expectation. In late 2021, I spun out a tale of cryptids and independence in three and a half weeks, a sort of fever dream that became my third book, Below. The main character, Addie, is on a solo drive through the mountains of West Virginia, attempting to reclaim her independence after her divorce from an overbearing husband.

Looking back, I treasured the extra time with my son, embracing the double-edged sword of working from home for a full fifteen months until my office reopened and I had no choice but to send him back to daycare. Yet with the benefit of hindsight and clarity, there’s a recurrent theme in my creative work from that time: escape, empowerment, and awakenings that may or may not go horribly awry, since horror is of course my preferred genre.

I wrote a few scenes that were so prescient of my own eventual escape from a marriage that no longer served my purposes that when I reread them now I’m awestruck. Then comes the quick and sobering realization that instead of evidence of eerie psychic powers, those scenes were a case of my subconscious desperately sending a message my waking mind wasn’t ready to hear. It took time and incremental steps as I fought against the idea of breaking up my family, of voluntarily missing half my son’s life when I’d fought so hard to bring him into this world. Eventually my nervous system made the choice for me. My body was beginning to shut down, losing the ability to eat, sleep, or function above the bare minimum.

Still, I wrote. Stories of dawning realizations, of strength in the face of supernatural monsters that were so much easier to face than my reality. When my divorce was finalized in January 2025, I owed two novellas to publishers—one I was two-thirds of the way through writing, and the other I hadn’t even started. With some much-appreciated grace from my editors, I managed to get both in under the wire, though I barely remember writing them. By then I’d also gone back to work full-time so I could afford to move out, and I’d made myself a promise that my son would never suffer for my deadlines. I drew a line in the sand: I wouldn’t write when I had him, so I once again I had to learn a new writing routine for the weeknights when he is with his father and the thirty-six hours I get every other weekend.

Yet as much as I stressed those early-divorce deadlines, as the year marched on, I found a way. I made it work by flipping the damn laptop open and getting the hell to it, promising myself I could quit after a hundred words. That hundred would became 200 words, then 500. Every time, my hands would hold tight to the outlet of words until I was left gasping on the other side of the work, as if I’d been drowning in a tempest and had only barely managed to find my way through.

Now it’s another January, and life looks different. I miss my son every second he isn’t with me, but I’m proud of how well he’s adjusted, of the way we communicate and are rebuilding our lives together. Writing is slowly coming back to a place in my full consciousness, where story ideas can creep in without looming deadlines. It’s small steps so far, and I’m still struggling with timing and balance. But what I do know now, after so many years of a constant pirouetting, of dancing first to one rhythm, then the next, is that I goddamn well can.

For better or for worse, I know now that this is what I do. I write. There is peace in that, and a quiet confidence, at last, that I don’t need to know the ending of my story, or how the hell I’ll get there. What I do know is that by opening my laptop, I’ll keep stepping into the next season of my writing life, greeting it with open arms.

And you know what? So will you.

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