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.