When 90s Poetry Meets Modern-Day Art

The box finally arrived from Blurb this week, and holding the finished, hardcover edition of Growing Up Twice: Yesterday’s Ink, Today’s Colors has been nothing short of surreal. Seeing my childhood poetry—rescued from a dusty basement shoebox—bound beautifully alongside my children’s vibrant illustrations is a feeling I am really enjoying.

When I first wrote these poems, starting around age ten, life looked very different. It was an era of simpler toys—like the funny clay boy I wrote about—and beautifully empty afternoons. There were no smartphones pinging, no endless streams of digital content, and far fewer distractions. We had the luxury of boredom, which inevitably became the breeding ground for imagination.

Today, as parents, it often feels like we are caught in a current of wanting to do everything for our kids. We curate their experiences, schedule their activities, and worry endlessly about giving them the best possible tools to succeed. We live vicariously through their milestones, hoping to give them the magic we remember from our own youth. But in putting this book together, I learned a reassuring truth: while the tools and the times have changed, human creativity hasn't missed a beat.

Handing my old, nostalgic verses over to my nine-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter was a leap of faith. But armed with paint, paper, and their own brilliant perspectives, they breathed completely new life into my words. They proved that the raw, imaginative spark we all have as children doesn't depend on the era we grow up in.

Through this shared art project, I truly got to experience growing up twice. I reconnected with the girl who wrote about the kingdom of the sky, and I got to watch my own children translate her world into color. It is a beautiful reminder that we don't always need to orchestrate perfect moments for our kids. Sometimes, we just need to hand them a piece of our past, a story or a sketch, and watch them build a bridge between generations.