Here I sit in the Milwaukee airport, waiting for my flight back home to Kansas City. I’m exhausted, a little overwhelmed and still an MFA student. It’s the last label that surprises me a little.

Last Thursday I was ready to quit. I was ready to drop out of my graduate program. I had convinced myself I never wanted to write anything again. I didn’t want to be in Boston or New York or any of the places I have always dreamed of living and working in. I wanted to go home, forget about writing and pretend that the whole graduate school thing had never happened.

I don’t exactly remember how it started. I was in the midst of beginning my second semester in the Solstice MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College (I know, it’s a mouthful). It’s a low-residency program, meaning I only spend the first 10 days of each semester on campus in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The rest of the semester I work with my mentor via e-mail and the occasional phone call.

My trip to Boston had started out very well. I arrived two days before I was scheduled to be on campus with my Dad, ready to walk the Freedom Trail and catch a game at Fenway. I loved seeing so many historical places tucked in to a busy city and the game at Fenway was amazing.

I arrived on campus excited to be back. I found my friends and fellow classmates, Hannah and Kimberly right away. I instantly remembered how nice it was to be in a place where I felt like I truly belonged.

Then we got to meet one of my favorite authors, Grace Lin. Grace recently joined the faculty and is one of the main reasons I chose Pine Manor College. She was even better than I imagined. She even took the time to sit down with me for an hour talking about writing and our families. We bonded over being middle children and our love of cupcakes.

Everything was going so well. I was a writing maniac, growing more and more confident in my work. And then, out of nowhere, it hit me: the doubt.

It was a series of events that triggered it and although I don’t feel comfortable sharing them here I’ll just say that it really made me question my writing. I suddenly felt like I wasn’t a good writer. I wondered if I should just quit. I couldn’t find a reason to stay in the program. I hated it all.

And then like that, the sun came out. Hannah, Kimberly and I escaped from campus and went out to dinner. We talked about how we were feeling. We shared our doubts in our own writing. We questioned the program we were in. Then, we realized that we were exhausted and overwhelmed. It wasn’t really that anything was wrong with the program or our writing. We were just beginning to realize how personal writing really is. For one thing, you are creating art that is going to be misunderstood sometimes. You aren’t always going to get your way. Not everyone is going to love everything you create, but you can’t let others crush your dream. The thing is, I love to write. I want to write. I need to write.

I realize this was just the first of many times I will doubt myself. I know there will always be times when I will doubt my reasoning for being a writer.

Sometimes, I am going to feel trapped. But it’s comforting to know, I have people in my life who will always help me escape.

There are few things in this world that I hate, even though my mom always told me not to hate anything.

“You can dislike someone or something, but you should never hate,” she would say.

But I think even Mom can understand that I hate the Missouri Tigers. I’m a Jayhawk. I grew up a Jayhawk. I’m proud of the fact. If I was writing my bio, the fact that I’m a University of Kansas grad would make it in one of the first couple sentences.

And see, we Jayhawks, we hate the Missouri Tigers. And, it’s OK, because they hate us too. We don’t respect each other, but we respect the fact that we hate each other.

If you want a history lesson, this all goes back to the civil war, when the people fighting for Missouri set our town on fire.

And fast forward to today, and many Missouri people are proud of that. They’re proud that even though what the Jayhawkers in Lawrence represented – antislavery, a noble proposition – the pro-slavery folk in Missouri burned our town down. They even made a T-shirt a couple years back to celebrate the fact.

In my hometown of Kansas City, the KU grads and the MU grads coexist. When it’s not game day, we tolerate each other for the most part. I’ve even met a couple Tigers, my Uncle Ronnie’s nephews, who I like quite well.

But I could never consider an MU grad as one of my closest friends. It just wouldn’t work. And I could never, ever, ever, evaaaah consider an MU grad to be my significant other. I even addressed this in my farewell column for the University newspaper in college, a list of do’s and don’ts for my fellow graduates. 

I could be with a girl from another school, just not MU. I’ve never even given thought to what I would do if I caught the eye of a Mizzou grad, or vice versa – until last week.

I was out with my buddy Jake at a bar in downtown Kansas City. I was sitting at a table, relaxing and drinking a beer when a young lady came up behind me, put her arm around me and pressed up against my body.

“Well, hello,” I said, caught by surprise.

I started talking to the girl and her friend, not because I’m looking for a lady (I’m not), but because I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to be the ultimate wingman.

So I called Jake over and we all began a conversation.

As we were chitchatting, the friend noticed that Jake was wearing a Chicago shirt (he just moved back from Chicago), and she took this chance to talk trash on the Cubs, which I was totally OK with because I can’t stand the Cubs. Then she revealed that she was a Cardinals fan, which I was not OK with. I also don’t like the Cardinals, but it’s not a deal-breaker. One of my best friends is also a Cardinals fan and also a Jayhawk, so he totally redeems himself.

BUT these girls were not Jayhawks. They revealed that they were University of Missouri graduates. Obviously, this was not OK. I was not going to stand by and continue to let these girls try to hit on us. If there was a guide for wingmen, this would be the section where it’s addressed that there’s a time to be the anti-wingman.

So I did what I would like to think any KU grad would do in my position. I stood up, I put my arm around Jake, Jake put his arm around his friend Brian, another KU grad, and we sang the Alma Mater.

The Alma Mater is a special song for me. During orientation before my freshman year, all of the freshmen-to-be and their parents gathered in the Union. At the end of the orientation, they had us stand up and taught us the Alma Mater. As we sang, I looked over at my mom and she was crying.

The song reminded her of her days at KU, and right then I knew how much that song meant. Every time I would sing that song, it would make me proud to be a KU student. And now, just like my mom, I’m proud to be a KU alum. And while it doesn’t bring tears, it usually brings goosebumps.

And for the ladies from Mizzou, that song evokes a whole different feeling. They hate that song and they especially hate what follows: the Rock Chalk chant.

So when we started singing the other night, the MU girls immediately got up, walked away and flipped us off.

Typical Tigers.

I went home this weekend. Home, home. As in, hometown home. I’ve been officially away for six years now, although I make it back two or three times per year to visit family. Each time I’m back, I spend at least half an hour driving aimlessly, checking to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. There’s really no feeling like that, as far as I’ve found. It’s a little like being struck with a light case of temporary amnesia: You see all the pieces of the puzzle and certain things stand out as meaningful, but minor details have been changed just enough that you wonder whether it’s always been this way and your memory is mistaken, or if it’s been changed.

I have an unofficial checklist of areas I pay special attention to: friends’ houses, my high school, the park down the street from the house where I spent my entire childhood. For the most part, it all tends to look familiar but not unchanged. There’s a Walgreen’s where the fire department used to stand. The First National Bank is now City Hall. They’ve leveled my best friend’s home and put up a strip mall. OK, that one didn’t actually happen, but so much as a color change can feel that way.

Up until my latest visit, my own neighborhood had remained mostly untouched. Only a handful of families remain from the time I lived there, but the houses had been left almost exactly as I remembered them. This time, though, my own house was in the midst of a major overhaul, and I could hardly stand to look.

The tree in the front yard is gone. The one I helped plant when I was about 6 years old. My dad and uncles spent an entire weekend removing a dead sycamore before we planted this new maple in the same spot. There are pictures of me in a lime green Nike windbreaker, standing up to my neck in the hole where the sycamore had once lived. And now the new residents have taken out the tree I remember putting in. That’s just the beginning.

The cement driveway my grandpa put down in the mid-90s was freshly mutilated, most of it still sitting in a trailer on the street. As I drove through the neighborhood, I thought about putting the car in park, grabbing a chunk of it, and driving off like nothing had happened.

With the driveway went the basketball goal, the one that was there when my family moved in and outdated before I was even able to dribble a ball. It was tall and white, with a wooden backboard and a rim set permanently at 10 feet. The goal was inflexible, uncool and probably the reason I suck at basketball. What kid can learn to properly shoot hoops on a rim of that height? Still, I hated to see it gone.

The last thing I noticed before I had to drive away was the front door. It stood wide open, and I could see the family inside working away at what looked like a renovation. It was the family who bought the house when we moved out, and I’m sure they’ve changed more than I’d care to imagine in the past six years. But there was something about this particular time, the fact that I could actually see into their home, that really shook me. In just a couple of years, it will have been a decade since my family moved out and they will have never known or cared what the house looks like in my memory. That’s an awful feeling. I drove off wishing I had taken more pictures before we left, so I could verify that the house I remember and the house I love was the way I remember it to have been. Bitter? I guess. Homesick? Oh yeah.

This baby is a kicker. You know that picture where you can see the outlines of a foot through the mum’s belly? I used to think it was Photoshopped, but with this child, I think it’s totally possible.

Sometimes the kicks are so hard they wake me up at night, as if she already knew that as a second child she’ll need to be more insistent with her calls for attention.

Every day, her kicks remind me of the time left until she’s here and of the things that still need to be done. They make me reflect on what kind of mother I want and will be able to be (not the same thing at all) for my soon-to-be two children.

You see, it’s harder with the second child. In my first pregnancy, I was blessedly certain that I would do things differently than my parents, that I would not have the relationship issues all the other young parents have, etc etc. Then my son was born, and I soon realised that it’s not that simple. You cannot unlearn the rules that you’ve internalised your whole life just like that, especially not when you’re exhausted, sleep-deprived and full of self-doubts to boot. So with the first child, I realised that yes, I want to do things differently, I want to find my own way and be as authentic a mother as possible, but more often than not, resorting to tested rules felt much more comfortable than taking that unwalked path. Making up your own rules on the way can be a daunting task when you are responsible for a new life.

So I struggled. I still am struggling. However, what I’ve realised through time, practice and many exchanges with friends, one of them a recent enlightening chat with my friend Jen Lee, is that if I want to live authentically, I need to do it 24/7. It’s a decision for life; I cannot be an authentic mother without becoming an authentic worker, wife and person in general. It’s simply impossible. Which means the decision for authenticity becomes even more daunting, because it will affect all of my life. That’s where the doubts come in: Who will I become if I commit to this? Will my friends and family still like me? Or will I become unbearable? Will I even be able to make “good” decisions?

But two years into motherhood, I know deep down that I can only be a “good” mother to my very own standards if and when I am myself, if and when I work at accepting who I am in both my imperfection and uniqueness, if and when I am trusting in the things I know, deep down, and the abilities I have. There really is not much choice.

My little baby girl is literally kicking in the direction of a life lived by the credo of unapologetic authenticity.

Until she’s here, I’ll be watching my belly, waiting for that foot to show, and gathering my strength to be me. For her.