My Journey
Life is such a strange journey. So much of it seems cut and dried. We go to school, make the best grades we can. We choose a career and at some point, if we’re lucky, we fall in love and get married.
We go to work. For most of us, that entails a job outside the home, but for others the work is at home. As a full-time wife, mother, and caregiver, I understand that working at home can be the biggest job ever. There aren’t any vacations, very little time off, and, on the caregiver front, most likely no retirement.
I look back on my life and, for me, the 1980’s are always referred to as ‘the dark years’. I won’t go into a lot of detail except to say that I was stressed, seriously sleep deprived, and in danger of going under emotionally. Writing saved my sanity.
Back in the ‘dark years’ when my older son was struggling with a life-threatening medical condition, when my youngest son wasn’t sleeping more than two hours at a time and screaming every time we left the house, when sleep deprivation was slowly sucking me into a morass of exhaustion and depression–I wrote.
I didn’t realize writing was a life line. I thought of it as escapism. I needed to be somewhere else. Someplace I could control. I wanted, for just a little while, to be somebody else in situations as far removed from my every day life as I could get. So–I wrote.
I started to take online classes, mail order courses, and weekend college classes. As my personal life calmed down, I discovered workshops and conferences. At some point, I woke up to the realization that ‘ I ‘ could have a life outside of wife, family and home. I mattered. I was important, not just to others because that was never an issue, but to me. I remembered how to take care of ‘me’.
This journey didn’t happen overnight. It has taken years for me to get to this moment in time.
I didn’t realize, back in the ‘dark years’, that I would get to a point where I would feel compelled to share my work. I never dreamed that I would be driven by a muse gone wild, to create and share my stories.
But it happened. My journey has led me to a hilltop in life where I can stand and survey all that is behind me and see my path clearly laid out before me. It’s not a straight path. It’s not even a level road, but it winds and wanders through a beautiful, wild landscape. It holds mystery for me and wonders yet to explore.
I love this journey I’m on. I see no final destination. Just a path that pulls me forward. I hope I never get to a point in life when I sit down because the journey is too enticing.
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