I haven’t lost complete track of Richard Armitage but darn near. As some of you know, I started a business, and it’s taken almost everything out of me. It is working, but it’s like being pregnant, giving birth and then dealing with an infant. All things that take the stuffing out of someone in her childbearing years let alone someone like me who is long past that. Yep, that’s my concession that I’m not a spring chick.
The rest of my story is that I have one child I’m still homeschooling, take care of two houses (one’s mine, the other one’s a church house), and I got something dropped in my lap a few months ago which has me driving 1,500 miles a month. Unreal. I don’t even know how I’m doing all of this, but the good news is that it’s paying all of those horrendous medical bills. I do not want to go into my old age owing six figures, and thankfully, I won’t!
And thank God! my youngest child, who is in high school, is independent or there would be real trouble. She directs her days more or less. I oversee the subject matter she studies and do lecture on some subjects, but other than that, the child tells me what’s happening. Most of that is her reading constantly — about four books a week and titles such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Ethan Frome or A Member of the Wedding, and some popular fiction thrown in like Looking for Alaska, which she hated. She said, “I don’t get why everyone [read that as her peers] thinks John Green’s writing is so great. This is my third book by him, and the first two I kept thinking that maybe the next book would wow me. That hasn’t happened. Honestly, Mom, To Kill a Mockingbird is soooooo much better than anything John Green has written it’s not funny.” I replied, “You know what’s happened don’t you?” She looked at me, and I continued, “You’ve been spoiled by good writing.” From there we went onto a very productive discussion of what we both like to see in writing.
So where am I going with this? Lately, discussing writing has stirred up such a longing to write again. Not that the desire ever went away, but it’s more intense these days because time’s winged chariot is kicking my ass, and I want to say something before I’m completely crushed. When I feel this way, I become wistful about this place, because writing this blog freed me up to write other things which I needed to get out or self combust. And I still have so much I want to say. Not sure how I’m going to pull it off, but I need to finish something here.
Other than that, picture me something like this (below) as I go about my day. I’m almost constantly with people. I love people, think they’re fascinating, and I never want to be completely cut off from them. Yeah, you can feel that “but” coming. I’ve got to get in a dark room and coalesce my thoughts instead of forever reacting to others — or feeling like I am.
Candid photo snagged from RichardArmitageNet.com
RAFrenzy 