Stories of Reinvention: Laura Ingalls Wilder

The timing to do something is never perfect.

There is always work that needs to be done, family that needs to be cared for, household chores that need to be tended to, and any number of other things that keep us from doing what we really want. 

At 15, Laura Ingalls accepted a teaching position at a one-room De Smet, South Dakota schoolhouse. In addition to teaching, she attended high school and worked as a dressmaker, helping her family make ends meet. At 18, she married Almanzo Wilder and became Laura Ingalls Wilder. She stopped teaching to tend to the home they were building and the new babies on the way. 

A year after they were married, they welcomed a daughter, Rose, and then three years later, they were excited to welcome a newborn son. Tragically, their son would pass within a month of this birth, and not long after that, Almanzo contracted diphtheria and was partially paralyzed. To top it all off, their home burned down around this time, too. After four years of moving from place to place, they finally settled on a farmstead in Missouri.

It is easy to see how quickly life can happen. How we can move from one tragedy to another, and, in Laura's case, literally be putting out the fires in our life. It is easy to say, "I'll get to that when I have a little more time," or "When things slow down, I'll start." Of course, the tragedy is that things never slow down, and thus, so many never start. 

The same was true for Laura Ingalls Wilder. By this point, her daughter was grown and working for the San Francisco Bulletin, and she was encouraging her mother to write about her childhood, so Laura did just that. She wrote and wrote and finally, ten years later, presented her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, to publishers where every single one categorically rejected her. Discouraged but not yet beaten, she spent several years re-working her writing, changing the title and the narration to the third person.

At the age of 64, Little House in the Big Woods was published. Laura would spend the next ten years completing the Little House series by writing Little House on the Prarie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie,and These Happy Golden Years.

Laura Ingalls Wilder is not the only author of children's books. There have been many before and many after. If she had stopped writing when the publishers had said no, other children's books would have been written, but wouldn't the world be a little less colorful had the Little House books not existed?

Some people will recognize that the timing to do something won't be perfect, and they will start anyway, and others will recognize that the timing won't be perfect, and they will give up.

The world doesn't need you to pursue your dreams. In fact, it often seems that the world is actively conspiring against you to ensure you don't achieve your dreams. But it is never too late to move ahead, to put in the work, and to be who you wanted to be.