About me:
While I currently live in Texas, originally I’m from a small town in Oklahoma. My parents were hippie-ish. Not in the, “We don’t bathe and our kids can do anything they want” kind of way. More in the, “We are children of the 60’s” kind of way, I’ll let you decipher what that means. Don’t get me wrong, I had amazing parents. Hard working. Loving. Young and beautiful. Strict but not mean. They were from good families and I had a ton of cousins and uncles and aunts around all the time. I’m basically related to most of the people in the town I’m from. I have a HUGE family. I was loved. I had a great childhood full of sunshine and playing outside and catching turtles and frogs and going on adventures looking for treasure. I grew up in the 80’s. It was a different time. Seatbelts were never used. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a bike helmet (that probably explains a lot). If I went outside in the summer, I knew better than to open that door again until I was called for dinner. God forbid we air condition the neighborhood. If you got thirsty, you drank from the hose. You had better be within earshot of a parent calling your name. If you see the street lights on and you aren’t close enough to your house to be touching the door knob, you better have a good reason. See… different times.
Millennials, this explanation was for you.
Gen X’ers, you get it.
My dad died when I was 7. He had a heart problem. He was only 31. That moment defined my life in ways that I’m still exploring to this day.
After my father died, our family went through quite a bit. I won’t go into all the details here, but I always used writing to get my feelings out. I learned a lot about myself that way. Writing is my way of reflecting on things in a quiet space where I can figure it all out without judgement. My pencil and paper have never passed judgement on me for my feelings or my outbursts. It’s the best therapy I’ve ever had.
As an adult, I became a mother at the ripe old age of 20 and again at 22. I have been married, divorced and remarried. I spent a good decade as a single mom working 2 or 3 jobs at a time and dealing with enough mom guilt to start my own religion. The amount of crazy that I deal with on a daily basis is mind boggling, but I deal. Usually, by getting it all out on paper. That’s different though, because it’s private. This is going to be new for me. I’m terrified.
The hardest part about writing for other people, is the fear that no one will care about what I have to say. I mean, I’m honestly a no body. I don’t have any education to speak of. I’m not an eloquent speaker. I’m just a some girl who has had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes so I don’t make the same ones again, one of the things I’ve learned is that there are a lot of ways to fail in life.
The only reason I can think of to explain why I feel compelled to write is because I think people need to feel like there is hope. Life is hard. Sometimes it can seem insurmountable. There are days when I feel like a bad ass warrior who can take on anything thrown at me. I also have days when the slightest inconvenience will make me feel like hiding under the blankets and never coming out. Holding onto hope is really the only option I have sometimes. Hope is what gets me out of bed every day. Hope for a better day. A better future. Hope to be a better mom, a better wife, a better daughter. Hope that there is a purpose that I was put on this planet to fulfill and while I might not know what that is yet, I could find out today! Hope is a gift in and of itself.
So while I can’t promise that you will always agree with me or even like me, I can promise you that I will do my best to impart hope to you through what I write in this blog.
In the words of Ernest Hemingway:
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
