Full-Time Writer, Overtime Mom

Barbara Curtis, 60, has 12 children ages 8 to 38. She's a professional writer who has published nine books, a Montessori-trained teacher and author of the blog "Mommy Life." Curtis, who is moving soon from Waterford to Bluemont, spoke with loudounextra.com staff writer Rachael Dickson about her writing career, how her political views have changed and how she became the mother of four boys with Down syndrome.

Q How did you come to live in Loudoun County?

AWe settled in Loudoun in 2002. . . . I think Virginia was really ingrained in me because my high school years were spent growing up here. I moved to California in 1972 as a radical hippie. And I lived in California for 30 years. Northern California is physically very beautiful, but I really missed the family traditional spirit, because by then I had changed and begun to appreciate that more than I did when I was younger.

How and why did you start writing?

I was 46 years old when I started on a career path to professional writing. . . . I was home-schooling my kids. We were having babies every year and a half, and people were asking, "Well, how can you handle having all these kids and toddlers and home-schooling all these different levels?" I realized that there were things that I knew as a Montessori teacher that were very helpful to me as a mom, and I wanted to share those with other mothers. I started having workshops where I lived, and then I decided I wanted to write a book about it. I went to a Christian writers' conference, and that's where I learned how to be a professional writer.

. . . All of my books have something to do with parenting except one book, "Reaching the Left from the Right: Talking About Controversial Issues with People That Don't Think Like You." That's because I was a radical hippie, leftist, hate-America stereotype, and I changed. I'm very concerned with how polarized things are -- how people get misrepresented. I feel especially sad about the way that conservatives are misrepresented by the media and in people's thinking.

I think about abortion as a representative issue. I had an abortion before I became a Christian. It was like going to the dentist for me, because I didn't grow up with any idea that my life was special or sacred. How in the world would I think that a baby's life was special or sacred? Sometimes people don't understand that when you grow up without any kind of spiritual foundation, you have a lot different view of the world. This was my effort to explain things from my experience and philosophy.

You write a lot about your political and moral viewpoints and how they have changed over the years. Can you tell us more about that transformation?

My father left when I was 6 years old and threw my mother in a complete tailspin. Divorce was unusual back then. I grew up with foster homes, an alcoholic, negligent mom with multiple relationships with men, and poverty.

For me, the way out, I instinctively realized, was through education. I went to O'Connell High School [in Arlington County]. . . . I credit them with really, seriously saving my life.

During my young adulthood, there were two things weaving themselves through. One was this desire to be very positive . . . but the second one was the self-destruction that came from the alcoholism and drugs that I took to kind of escape from the stuff I was dealing with from my past.