10 Things To Tell You...

10 things to tell you:

I grew up in the house just beside the house that I live in now. I experience the same seasons, the same smells, the same neighbors, the same humid summers, the same snowy winters…my road home has never changed in 39 years.

Someone who has influenced me is my mom. I thought long and hard about this prompt, and I can think of many people, people that I know in real life, and people that I have never met, and people that I love more than life itself…but the very top of all of those lists is always my mom. My mom is who I have always wanted to be when I grow up-she excels at everything she does (and if she doesn’t excel at it, she just doesn’t do it), she always buys the perfect gift for every situation, she knows who she is and she stands firm in her beliefs. Making her proud has been my job since the day that my birth interrupted her Christmas in 1978.

A thing that changed my worldview was my divorce (we knew we would get there). My divorce changed the way that I viewed my own personal little world, and what my future looked like, and just literally everything that I hold dear to my heart got turned upside down and flipped inside it-it’s still there, it’s just different. But it also allowed this shift inside of me, a way of looking at other people, and seeing the world through a kinder lens, through a more tolerant lens. Basically, happiness became something that I truly wish for every person, however that appears to them, in whatever form. And of course, I learned that sometimes the ending that seems the most painful can lead to the most beautiful beginning.

I am strangely good at organizing a bookshelf. Creating a spreadsheet. Cleaning a closet.

I have mixed feelings about most things. Nothing in my world is black and white, and sometimes that makes for wonderful dialogue, and sometimes that makes for frustration. And while there are days where I wish there wasn't quite so much gray in my thinking, I also know that it's simply the way that God made me.

A defining moment of my life was becoming a mom. All I wanted to do, ever, in my whole life, was to become Betsy’s mom. It’s all I ever talked about. The day that they handed her to me, and I looked into her big blue eyes-it was like winning the lottery times 1000.

A recent discovery I can’t stop talking about is my ability to make playlists on YouTube. Because you type the song in and there it is. We live in the future. (And yes, I'm well aware that I'm late to the party. And that the party is on Spotify.)

Right now I’m struggling with not creating a 5 year plan. I have a general outline for life in the next few years, dictated mostly by my children’s ages and interests. But for my own goals, my own direction, my own dreams…I have no idea. I’ve never not had a plan. Even the past 3 years of riding those waves of grief, they had an end goal. But just now, I don’t really have any idea of what exactly I want life to look like. It’s scary.

My magical reset button is reading about Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Or Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. Or (sigh) Joe Garbarini.

In 3 months, will you ask me about...okay, I understand the point of this prompt is to hold me accountable. But see that whole "what am I struggling with" question? I'm none too sure what to ask me about. Ask me about life and routines and not being able to control the future? Maybe in 3 months I'll have a really pithy answer to all of that.


*Taken from Laura Tremaine's 10 Things To Tell You challenge