How Dare I

Symphony number 5 in C minor by Beethoven is playing and mostly because I cannot figure out how to change it out of iTunes. I am NOT a techie, but I managed to marry one. As I listen to the crescendo I am pressured to sit here and write something unique, daring, different, better.

Trying to cut through the noise of all the other writing pieces is hard. So who am I to be doing this? I guess no one. I don’t work for a major university, do not craft much, am not a foodie and only enjoy domesticities when I like to play pretend in my head. So here’s the thing. How dare I? Who am I and how dare I have the guts or audacity to write about my own life. The thing is, I think in writing, and always have. Oprah (or possibly someone else) once said that you are the thing you end up thinking about first thing in the morning. That makes me a writer, then a mom.

So. Weird, awful beautiful things kept happening to me, to the point where sometimes I feel like I have lives several different lives at the age of 43. I grew up with New York Irish grandparents on my mother’s side of me, and Idaho farmers on my father’s side. As you might imagine, it was not a compatible marriage. Explosive humor mixed with quiet humility often doesn’t go together. Too much miscommunication. There’s something here, but not totally sure what it is. Maybe in another article.

My parents divorced when I was about 14 or so, and decided to live only about a mile apart from one another in a very small town in Northern California. When my sister was 16, she was killed in a car accident and I had to end my study abroad program in Ireland to come home and grieve with family. I finished up my senior year at UC Davis graduating with a degree in English. I went back to the teaching program, became a middle school English teacher in Northern California. I got married mid twenties, got the house, the husband, the child, the divorce (he had been cheating), moved back with my parents for a short while, then moved back out and decided to teach High School English at a low income school. During this time of being a single parent (full time) and working taught me things about myself I didn’t even know. I did decide to date (and was judged for it) and 7 years after my divorce married an amazing man. We moved, and after 18 years of teaching I at once decided to be a stay at home mom so I could spend more time with my family and also to help my father die of cancer. I have a dream house in my hometown, travel quite a bit, and still have so many stories from my past I truly don’t always understand. I feel at once somehow a master of teaching, of grief, of caregiving, of self reliance, of learning how to love again after trauma, of packing and moving, and of fierce loyalty to my family and finally myself. There are too many messages going on. I don’t know if any of this will be interesting, but I owe it to myself to not care if I should or not. And that’s all that matters, really.