When I was four or five years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer.
This presented a small problem.
I couldn’t write.
At least, not very well.
I was full of stories, but I lacked the necessary skill to get them onto paper. Fortunately, my mother had beautiful handwriting. She had taught in a one-room schoolhouse and wrote with the kind of flowing script that seemed elegant to me even then.
One day, I asked her if she would write down my stories while I dictated them.
To my delight, she agreed.
I also wanted her to use her special writing paper. It seemed important to me that these stories be recorded properly. Looking back, I smile at the seriousness of it all. I was barely old enough to tie my shoes, yet I already had opinions about paper quality.
So, I would begin.
I would launch into whatever adventure was occupying my imagination that day. There were heroes, mysteries, unlikely events, and plot twists that probably made very little sense.
My mother patiently wrote it all down.
Well, most of it.
Like many first editors, she occasionally took liberties. She corrected my grammar. She improved my wording. She may even have rescued the occasional sentence from complete disaster.
At the time, I wasn’t entirely convinced these changes were necessary.
Some things never change.
When the story was complete, I would ask her to read it back to me.
And she would.
With great emphasis.
She didn’t simply read the words. She performed them.
The exciting parts became more exciting. The dramatic parts became more dramatic. The funny parts became funnier. My stories came alive in her voice.
I loved it.
What mattered most was not the handwriting, or the special paper, or even the story itself. It was that she listened as though it counted.
My mother was doing far more than recording a child’s imagination.
She was honouring it.
That may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t.
Children are always handing us pieces of themselves — a story, a drawing, a question, an idea that may wander in every direction at once. It is easy, in the busyness of adult life, to miss the importance of the moment.
But every now and then, an adult does something remarkable.
They listen.
Not politely.
Not distractedly.
They truly listen.
When that happens, a child receives a powerful message:
Your thoughts are worth hearing.
Your imagination is worth following.
Your creations are worth keeping.
I don’t know if my mother realized she was giving me that message. I suspect she simply thought she was helping her son tell stories.
Yet those moments stayed with me.
Years later, I found myself working in radio, where storytelling became part of my profession. Later still, I began writing columns and books. The desire to tell stories never left.
Sometimes I wonder if it began long before I ever learned how to write.
I can still see her there, pen in hand, turning my small ramblings into something that looked official on the page.
She may have thought she was simply helping me write my first story.
In truth, she was helping me hear my own voice for the first time. And once a child hears it — once someone they love has treated it as worthy of attention — it is not easily silenced. A few minutes at a kitchen table may seem like a small kindness. But sometimes, that is all it takes to show a child that their words belong in the world.