Yesterday, at church in the ladies room, I ran into an old teacher. Not just any old teacher, but the first teacher who ever told me I was a good writer.

Nearly forty years later, I felt like a little girl for a moment in that ladies room standing there with my teacher. A hungry little girl. A little girl who needed approval in the worst way.

“I hear you’re a published author now,” said this teacher, and my throat grew tight. Two books doing fine on Amazon hasn’t changed the way I feel inside. Like I’m not really an author at all. Like Paula Scott is someone else.

Someone brighter than me.

Someone better than me.

Someone I don’t really know, and am just impersonating.

“Do you know I wrote my first book in your classroom,” I told my teacher, and she smiled all big, and looked as hopeful and vulnerable as I felt in that moment.

“Oh, that makes me so happy!” Then her voice softened and the smile eased off of her face. “I retired last year,” she admitted, as if I might hold this against her. “My mom got sick, and passed away recently.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said because I know how much death hurts. I’ve walked through enough of my own loss in the past several years, and needing her approval fell away, but not far enough away.

“How do I find your books?” she asked.

“They’re on Amazon. I write under the pen name Paula Scott.”

“That’s wonderful. I’ll have to look them up. What was that first book about that you wrote in my class?”

“A puppy without a tail,” and for a moment I remembered exactly why I’d written that story. Because I felt like an outsider at a new school. Because I was a redhead with freckles who needed braces. Because I was the new kid in this fifth grade teacher’s classroom, and fitting in was really hard for me that year.

Especially, since on the first day of school, a boy asked me if I was a virgin.

“No,” I said, my cheeks melting. I thought the boy was talking about being a saint like the Virgin Mary. I was Catholic and knew I was miles away from sainthood. When you’re Catholic, you know you’re a sinner down to your bones, you just don’t do much about it. Unless you go to confession. I did my best to avoid confession in the fifth grade.

In that ladies room, I told my old teacher this story of the virgin I wasn’t, but really was, and we both laughed.

Sometimes it’s easier to laugh than cry.

On Saturday night, twelve hours before running into my teacher, I turned in my third book to the editor I work with, and my nerves are shot. This book isn’t a historical romance. It’s a modern tale of two mothers who go through heartbreak before they find healing. It’s a story near and dear to my heart for a number of reasons. Reasons I won’t go into today. Let’s just say I did some soul-baring in this book, but tried to hide this soul-baring in fiction, and I’m afraid my editor won’t like it.

I’m afraid you won’t like it.

And that might mean you don’t like me.

That meeting in the bathroom with my old teacher was grace for me. Grace I desperately needed yesterday. I didn’t know she was at my church. And I didn’t know in the fifth grade that she was a believer. I didn’t know even then that God was watching over me. Guiding me. Putting people in my life who would walk me through the hard places.

That fifth grade year was one of the hardest places of my childhood.

My new school was big. At least it seemed big coming from a small country school where there was only one boy and four girls besides myself in my fourth grade class the year before. I’d had the same teacher for three years at that little country school and everyone liked me. The principal visited once a week, but didn’t have to. Problems were so rare there in that two room schoolhouse in the rolling Sierra Nevada foothills where the grass grew knee high and turned brown in the summertime when we weren’t at school.

How I missed my little country school. I was like a puppy without a tail at my new school. I didn’t look like the other puppies with tails there. I didn’t fit in. And I felt so alone that fifth grade year.

So I wrote about it.

And I’ve been writing about things that make me feel alone ever since.

Running into that old teacher made a difference in my life yesterday. I needed to hear my teacher say, “You’re a good writer.”

The little freckle-faced fifth-grader in me stood up when my teacher said that in the bathroom.

She stood up.

And I stood up.

And remembered why I writes stories after all.

So I don’t feel alone.

And neither, I hope, do you.