I Have an Advisor for Everything

I’m in my mother-of-the-groom era, and I’m loving it. But plenty of it caught me off guard, and that’s where my friends who are mothers of already-married sons have been so useful.

I call or text them often.

“This situation came up. What would you do in my shoes?”

“How do I pick a dress that honors the bride’s color palette without looking like death warmed over?

“What would you do differently?”

My son has been with his now-fiancée for six years, so I always hoped this role would eventually be mine. But I was still surprised by how much I didn’t know until I was in it.

I think about this the same way with women with a story to tell. They think about it, jot notes in journals, set New Year’s resolutions, and maybe even start writing. Then something hits them—a diagnosis, a loss, a transition. I have to write this story, but I’m not sure how, and they feel stuck because they don’t have someone to call.

By midlife, most of us have built exactly this kind of team for everything else. A financial advisor. A skincare person. Someone we call for styling advice. The friend who’s the queen of party planning. A workout buddy who keeps us honest. (The Life Council: Ten Friends Every Woman Needs gets at this directly: the idea that you build the right people around you on purpose.) We know we don’t know everything, so we’ve collected a roster of the people who do.

But when it comes to writing, we think we’re supposed to already know how. High school English and a college composition class, if we took one, do not prepare you for everything we need to communicate in our lives (including a wedding toast!). Forty years of writing in nearly every format there is, and I can tell you those only cover the basics. You were never supposed to already know how to build a book people will read.

That’s where a book coach comes in. The advisor and strategic thought partner who’s already done this and knows the building blocks and how to sort the story from the book. It’s okay to get a coach for this. If you’ve already decided that this story matters, and you finally have the room for it, that’s when you bring in the coach to help you find direction and momentum.

I got a humorous text from a client last week that said, “I need you like plants need water and fish need the sea…Where have you been hiding?”

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This originally published on Substack.