Ellipse of Time

February 21

This could be the most I've written thus far in my adult life. Yay for me. EIGHT entries since January. I sense an uptick in hand cramps. At this rate I won't feel so entirely guilty over the stack of diaries I've collected that have four pages written in them with the remaining pages poised for entries that never happen.

I am wrestling with my younger self. I've always wanted to be an author (and by always I mean from when I was a kid into college). You know how it starts. It starts with a love for books, a love that turns into that wonderful childish hubris that goes "hey I can do this!" Like most kids, I was average. Or maybe unbeknownst to me, I was a little below average. With my Mom being a non native English speaker, I may have had a subtle disadvantage to the language (like how I thought the word was “brefass” but it was actually “breakfast”). I'd wager I made up for that gap in the sheer amount of books I devoured, but who knows, there’s probably a learning curve in there. I digress, back to my flash bulb ambition. I wrote silly books in middle school; protagonists with names like Desdemona, Ophelia, and if I wanted someone more down to earth, Felicity. My heroine would tackle, with such aplomb, tragic car accidents that left her blind, a tragic disease that left her mute where she was forced to learn ASL, or sleeping beauty sickness (mononucleosis) where she tragically slept her youth away. At some point I asked (and received) a thesaurus for a birthday. I was so happy to be able to write not only tragic stories, but also stories that were appalling, dismal, and disturbing (I grew up watching soap operas, drama rocked me to sleep as a baby).   High school hit and while my ability to read and comprehend was on track for Advanced English (which happened to be in a spare closet because there were so few kids that qualified and there were no more classrooms) my writing skills were still just fair. 

I was (still am) a sensitive person. While my adult self is weathered to failure, my tender bud of a young adult was not. The delicate ego couldn’t handle B’s and C’s on creative writing papers. It was seeds of doubt on what could have been the budding career of a writer. This was the same in college. I swiftly changed majors from English with a minor in Creative Writing, to a minor in Technical writing (because losing the imaginative part would really help me get my writing career on track), to SPANISH. Yes, I changed languages all together. I became distracted by adulthood, working three jobs to pay for the college degree I’m not using, and got swept into the current of responsibility.

Flash forward almost twenty years, and here I am, once again devouring books, only with children who also devour them and we tell each other our own stories on long car rides. Maybe I should try and be an author. 

March 1

NINE. Habits are formed one day at time. I’m old fashion, I like a pen and paper to a keyboard, although I have fond memories of hammering out short stories on the many thrift store typewriters my parents bought me in my youth. It’s like I’m reforming the muscles in my hand, one sloppy letter after another. It has always boggled my mind that hundreds of years ago, books were written by hand, and copied by hand. They had to have hands that could crack walnuts. 

Time is one of those things we think we never have enough of until it’s truly monopolized. I remember lamenting on not having enough time to sit and write, but the truth was, I didn’t have the discipline. This was PRE social media where you can interact with anyone at any time, PRE stream TV when your entire video entertainment is thrumming through the air waiting to flow through your internet, and for me it was PRE kids. Funny thing, once you have to start disciplining other people, you tend to discipline yourself as well. As they grew my adult self grew with them, forging a more refined me, more sturdy to time. Now they are half way through their childhood and I am halfway through my life and it has me seeing the parallels that life draws; their childhoods to mine, my parents to myself, my grandparents to all of us. Some of the lines are so easy to see; like my love for reading and my kids love for reading, my grandparents massive garden, and my smaller, yet some how not as manageable garden.  Some are harder to see, some I can only see the contrast, almost a base on which I need to build myself.  How did my parents work such boring, low paying, devastating jobs with a promise of safe retirement that has yet to come to fruition? Please don’t let that be a parallel. How did my grandparents raise five kids when I struggle with two? How did my mom let one comment of “Women don’t belong in the office” dash her ambitions of being an accountant?  Or my Dad’s dreams of being an architect sacrificed to raise kids because working at a local factory was more practical than going to college? I’m almost forty and I don’t even know what my dream job would be, or maybe I’m too practical, knowing the time and hours it would take to make any dream worth having happen. 

March 5

TEN. Sigh. I’m tired. There is a chronic, I’m stuck on the treadmill of life fatigue that I’m really feeling today. No room for ruminating. Just get through the day. Survival. 

March 19

ELEVEN. Fatigue hangs around. Kids ask a lot of questions. So do husbands, and moms and dads. Don’t forget work. Their questions are the real taxing kind, requiring so much of your mental budget for the day. What’s left is easy dinners and early bedtimes. Do you know how long it takes to form a habit? On average it takes 66 days for a habit to be formed, and about the same time for it to be broken. Good news, I’m still in the window before I completely break this very fragile new habit of writing. PRO tip: write about something interesting. HA. Pro, I’m no pro. AHEM, NOVICE tip: just keep it together. 

Sometimes I’ll joke around with the kids and ask them what I should be when I grow up and they get all exasperated and huffy like I should have already figured that out, isn’t that why they call us “grown ups” ? I kindly point out that we are always growing up. Our bodies grow first, but our minds and souls are always growing up. How can I still feel like myself twenty years ago and also feel so different. I am so happy, confident and secure in myself and my life as long as I keep my blinders on. A quick peek into the lane next to me shows person after person my age gearing up for their midlife crisis. Severe weight loss? Check. Divorce? Check. Drugs/alcohol problems? Check (this is one especially in the mom groups. If you have a bottle of “mommy’s juice down before the day’s over, you most likely have a problem). Pick up a “side hustle” to show yourself you can do it, but in reality you're desperately trying to pay off your $10,000 credit card debt before your spouse finds out? Check. Woah. I shouldn’t have peeked, everyone is crashing around me. How do I not crash? I take an internal evaluation. I am content with my life. I love my husband and my kids are pretty cool. I have dogs, cats, chickens. My job is very jobby. This is great, this is good, right?  There is a little voice in the back of my mind and it says this is not growth, this is staying stagnant. This could be the beginning of that. That anxiety is slowly starting to warm my belly, you know, the hot feeling you get before you puke.

March 28

TWELVE. Well the anxiety is still there. I thought if maybe I got the ideas out on paper, I’d feel better, but only marginally so. I need to take some risks. With risk comes life. With risk comes failure, and of course sometimes success. I bet statistically there is way more failure than success though, but is it a thing. Like, failing on a small scale is enough risk for us to feel alive but not such big risks that we lose our marriage, home, job, or relationships. Yes, this feels good in my head. I NEED to take risks, to try something new, to learn more, and most likely in tandem, I need failure. I learned how to play chess a few years ago. In the first year I played once a week and won twice. Do that math. On occasion I was frustrated, but overall I really enjoyed the process. What drove me to start journaling again. An echo of a memory, a faint feeling of pen on paper. The smell of a new journal, the crack the binding makes when you sit down to write for the first time. Or is the rush to hear my voice and thoughts in one place. The way I giggle at myself when I think I’m clever, or how I cringe when I’m suddenly being vulnerable. In here, I have found my new risk, the start of a new failure. Let’s see how many times I have to fail to succeed. The start of authoring a book is in authoring my life.