I received a present in my inbox this afternoon. L.J. Anderson, the wonderful designer behind the covers for my Daughters of the People Series, sent me the preliminary print cover for Say Yes, which will be released hopefully in the first half of next year. Isn't it gorgeous? Makes me want to go to the beach, which is exactly what took me down the road toward writing Say Yes in the first place.
SY has presented challenges from the first. It wasn't a story I'd planned to write and I absolutely didn't have time for it in my writing schedule. And then there are the characters themselves. Sera Noland is a single mom to an illegitimate child. She's twenty-nine years old and her life is nearly perfect, as far as she's concerned. While on vacation in the Outer Banks, she meets twenty-two-year-old Levi Ewart. Or rather, he keeps running into her, often deliberately, and coaxes her into taking a chance on him.
Writing about Sera has been a little hard for me. I'm a single mom and my son is also illegitimate. Parts of Sera's life and her experiences were definitely based on things that have happened to me as well as my own thoughts and feelings about being a mom and a writer. Mostly though, she's her own person (as much as fictional characters can be). She's kinder than I ever thought about being and a heckuva lot more polite, and she has way more backbone than I do.
Still, I definitely relate to her and it's sometimes hard for me to write her as objectively as I do other characters. There's one scene in about the mid-point of the book where Sera and Levi are having what he refers to as an "adjustment" over his jealousy of her past relationship with someone he knows. Sera reacts with a monologue:
...her mind whirled and raged with all the things she’d left unsaid. They burst out in a heated flood...
“You don’t trust me. No, you don’t,” she said when he glanced sharply at her. “You don’t trust me to know what I want and to stick by you. Let me tell you something, Mr. Big Shot. I’m not a quitter, either. You think it’s easy being a single mom? Well, it’s not. You have to do it all on your own and you constantly worry that you’ll screw up big time, but you keep chugging along because he’s your kid and he depends on you. And then you walk into the grocery store and people stare and whisper, but you hold your head up anyway because, dammit, he’s yours and you love him.”
“Sera, don’t.”
She choked down the tears clogging her throat and rushed on. “And you meet men, sure you do, but they’re not really interested in taking on a ready-made family, now are they?...
And that pretty much sums up the heart of every single mom's feelings about her child and the problems she encounters with dating; not just mine, but other single mothers I know. It also encompasses the attitude I've gleaned from men, particularly in older generations. There's an unstated, barely disguised bias in our society against single mothers, regardless of the situation that led to that state in the first place.
In my case and in Sera's, the father chose to leave the relationship prior to his child's birth, but that was just the last choice in a long line of many. Mothers in these situations are rarely helpless victims; they have a choice from the moment they enter the relationship to the moment they give birth. They can choose to accept responsibility for their actions or not, and they can choose to keep their child or not, but ultimately, the child has no say in what happens to him. This is something I've wrestled with since my son was a baby, knowing that he's the one who will be hurt because I placed my trust in the wrong person. It's a really bitter pill to swallow precisely because, no matter what, you want to give your child the very best, yet you've failed right from the start to give him something so vitally important: A father who will love him enough to stick by him.
That is exactly the crux of Sera's problems with Levi. She's so very, very afraid to trust another man after making the colossal mistake of choosing the wrong one in the first place, not only for herself, but because she doesn't want her son, Petey, to be hurt again. What mother would? Fortunately for Sera, Levi is a better man than Petey's father. It all works out in the end (it's a romance, after all, not real life), but not before she, Petey, and Levi weather their share of knocks and bumps.