A New Beginning

August 2, 2010

Here we are, the beginning of another new month, more than half-way through another year. Where does the time go? What should I have accomplished so far? When I look back on my life, I have

• Raised three children as a single parent, following their sporting and band lives every day and weekend for years; celebrating their achievements and milestones with joy.

• Bought, sold, and built houses, moved my family, and moved my mother in with me.

• Attended church almost every Sunday. I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of Sundays I have not been in church over the past 15 years.

• Sung songs, written song arrangements, shared my voice and my musical talents with others.

• Worked a full-time job for 32 years, sometimes good, sometimes not so good; sometimes proud of my efforts to do the job, sometimes falling short of the mark, but isn’t that the way it is with a job that you do day in and day out forever?

• Lost and gained and gained again and gained more pounds than I wish I had to account for.

• Made friends, which seems to be feeling more positive these days than ever before. Now I feel I am not keeping myself so much to myself to protect my inner self from destruction, so I am beginning to look outside myself and see what the people around me are doing and what they need from me to be a better friend.

• Writing. I have written for a long time, lots and lots of days, months, and years. There have been dry spells when I simply didn’t think I had it in me to rise early before anyone else in the house just to sit down and meander through my thoughts and feelings on the page. Giving up my anger and frustrations to a private listener who would never tell my secrets or laugh at my convoluted ways of thinking about life, my family, my job, myself. I know now, that the times when I did that were the best times for me emotionally. I was able to spill out all of the germs, so to speak, to keep myself on an even keel.

Many times I have felt that I was overextending my reach day after day, but then the days came and went, my children grew up healthy, more or less, and are happy and reasonably well adjusted adults that I actually like being with. I feel like I had very little to do with that happening, but I know that to be untrue. I know that living with me, learning about Jesus with me, watching my work ethic unfold before them, seeing how I related to my mother, and how I dealt with the ups and downs that life sent my way, had an effect on their growing maturity. I worried about them as they grew up more than I care to admit, and I am happy to say, I still worry about them because that is part of my roll as their mother. Thus it has been and ever will be.

Now I have open space before me to fill, and I am seeing opportunities to be and do something new. Maybe not entirely new, just a new filter over the old to change the shade of the color of my days. You know, like adding white to red to get pink, or yellow to green to get blue. Now I look through the windows of the sunroom that I have always wanted to have on a house, and lose my thoughts in and among the forest of trees that protect the back of my home from the rest of the world. I look up at the sky and marvel as the clouds pass by, changing from wisps of cotton to dark and foreboding moments when the lightning flashes and the thunder shakes the rafters, and then the sky clears and I see that behind all of the clouds, the sun was still shining, still there, always faithful and true, waiting for the time when I could appreciate its glory to the fullest.

Now I look to the next days, weeks, months, years, with the freedom to reinvent myself once again. And to do that, I am challenging my creative side with as many possible opportunities to write – words, music, poetry, stories, characters, books, letters, get-well cards, journals, dreams – whatever way I can to share my experiences and grow from them as I do.

And so, here begins my blog – Handful of Pansies. I hope you enjoy it.