career

If You Ever Had Enough


I found this on a yoga blog.

What I have now, probably for the first time ever in my life, is enough.

I am not complacent about it.

I recognize that relationships are active and therefore require tending. I know that nothing about the strata of society I occupy is immune to disaster.

But in societal terms I have come to recognize as my norm, what I have is plenty. There isn’t a single thing or experience I lack. My emotional well brims and is replenished continually.

Perhaps this is what has been nagging at me of late.

My conscious mind – conditioned as it has been by years of North America consumer driven life-style and middle-class faux career ambition – feels I am not working hard enough to be … what? I don’t know. My inner-self has been quite weepy about it in a pushed around little girl sort of way.

She knows we have enough. Time to acknowledge it and let a few things go.

I have dreams. Modest and unassuming. But they are not deal-breakers for me and really never were.

I have enough. It’s almost verboten to say that out loud as many people fear it invites the active mocking of the fates. That’s flatly ridiculous. Nothing is permanent and fate has nothing to do with that anyway.

If you ever had enough, could you recognize it?

A fair question.

Friday


I am too tired to properly update on the holiday. In fact, I hadn’t any real plans to post live again until June, but a lot is going on and this usually drives me to write.

First, I have a pen name. It came to me after much thought and back/forth right before we left for the mountains. It combines a distinctly family name, which is also my dad’s middle name, with my maiden name. I will unveil it when I have my author’s website completed and up, but I am pleased with it.

The idea for a pen name for my fiction writing self has been stirring around for a while in my mind, but a speaker at the writing conference I attended finally provided me with a tangible reason to write under more than one name. Branding. When I am Ann or anniegirl, people who read are sure of what they are getting, but my fiction is dark, twisted and not particularly mainstream in a chick lit or even a straight high-brow lit kind of way. Therefore, my alias will brand my fiction. Readers will know what they are getting.

Second, we arrived home to yet another job offer for Rob. The same job he has been offered twice before – the long term project that would have taken us to Houston is now beckoning from England.

“How many times does opportunity have to knock?” Rob asked.

And I agreed. I read Paulo Coelho’s Brida and The Alchemist over holiday (along with three other books – I was tearing up the pages) and the second book deals almost entirely with following the signs the universe will show those who make their wants, needs or desires known to it. Coelho wrote an interesting fable about listening, trusting and having faith in one’s personal legend.

I don’t know that this job is Rob’s personal legend, but I have felt for a while that it is a sign and a step towards it. But more on it as it develops.

Finally, illness stalks the family once again. Rob’s younger brother was in the ICU as of Sunday night. He is chronically ill and had taken a turn. He will not live to be an old man and probably not a middle-aged one either (he is sixteen years younger than Rob) and though it isn’t a surprise, and Rob and he are estranged, it is unsettling. And it is a reminder.

On my side of the family, Nephew1 is quite ill. Deteriorating lung disease (or syndrome – it’s hard to know because my youngest sister was conveying the information and she is not bright). The doctors had been treating his breathing difficulties as asthma for a while but it turns out incorrectly.

“They told me I could die, Grandma,” is what he told my mother.

We may be making a trip to Iowa this summer after all.

So Much I Want to Say


And yet I often can’t find the words, or even more often the will, to write about it. I feel stymied because I am required to be in the moment rather than record it physically.  So much of what I want to say and write about comes to me when it isn’t polite to whip out my notebook (which is always with me) and begin to write it down. 

For example, at grief group last Saturday I was struck again at how politically incorrect I am in my own observance and practice where mourning is concerned. I simply can’t sit and nod and pretend that I don’t know what I know or haven’t lived what I have lived. Well, I suppose I could. And should. I have been told often enough over the course of my life that I am not like other people to know that my way is the road seldom taken.

But I wanted to pull out pen and paper and pour my life onto it as I listened to what the others were saying. I am beginning to feel hampered by my obligations to courtesy and people in general.

Which brings me to the blog. Many of my gentle readers remind me that they will survive if I take a break, but they don’t realize that the blog is a creation in itself I am tied to by more than just the fact that they read it. It would be as possible to not breathe as it would be to just quit. Even if I were to do so for a short time. Until I finish a book – which I plan to do by summer – this blog is the most polished and substantial piece of writing I have ever produced and is enormously important to me as an artist. Perhaps it will not always be so, but for now, it is. 

A dear friend who knows me from back in the heyday’s of high school and university reconnected with me via Facebook recently. She reads the blog and mentioned that she loves my pieces on family and myself. I feel that I am straying a bit from that in the interest of privacy. Mine. Rob’s. The girls’. I wonder if I am being disingenuous by not sharing the struggles we have had along our journey to couple and family as much as I share the highlights and joy? Perhaps I take for granted that some who read here simply for that story-line realize that struggle co-exists with happiness and the re-establishment of normal life? Life is not a sit-com or a rom-com. Although life is so much more grounded in contentment that it has ever been in my entire life, work, patience and perserverance have been involved as well as sacrifice, trust, faith and a positive outlook.

And this brings me to the future. I have been mapping out the coming months. I don’t think my calendar has ever been this full. Suzy’s 10-10-10 interview on The Today Show reminded me that I have been avoiding doing some serious planning as well. I cannot continue to coast along. I need a day job to go along with the writing and I know I cannot go back to teaching pre-teens and teens. I haven’t the patience for them or the system that cocoons them. University beckons and beefing up my own degrees probably cannot be avoided. 

God, I don’t want to go back to school. I am not a good student. Mostly because I am a very good teacher and I don’t run into them often at the advanced levels. 

Rob thinks I should go for a doctorate. English? There is no MFA program nearby and the only distance one ( U of Victoria) takes about twice as long as an onsite program. I can fill in with a B.A. program through the local college. It’s a degree in writing alone but I would only do it if I could talk them into giving me credit for the required courses – most of which are English courses I could teach and so prefer not to take.

But what are my values? How do I want to live? What’s important? A good tenning is in order.

Which brings me back around to writing. Jenny, the Bloggess, recently wrote a post on quitting her day job to write because she felt she simply couldn’t go on bursting at the seams and shortchanging her family and her job in the process. Writing was consuming her and pouring out onto napkins and post-it’s and pulling her attention inward too much because there wasn’t enough time in the day. Time in the day, of course, is no guarantee. Being the SAHM is far more consuming than I thought it would be, but that is mainly because as a working mom, I ignored the house stuff, the cooking stuff and most things domestic.

There are decades worth of writing to catch up on, but I need to work a few more things out before I am really ready to throw down and do this.