I became intrigued with the blogging world about three years ago and began to follow several.  By e-reader or email, these blogs faithfully showed up.  For awhile.

Then some tapered off so I’d need to remind myself what it was I liked about them in the first place.

And then the day came when I’d open my email and ask “who are you and why are you in my in-box”?

I “unfollowed” several of those blogs… because I didn’t really have the time.  But it made me feel bad.  No one likes to be unfollowed.

The blogs I do enjoy and stick with share these qualities… they post on a regular schedule and they do one or more of the following: teach, encourage, inspire, entertain, make me laugh.  I look forward to those posts like my Dad used to enjoy his morning paper.

That’s the kind of blogger I wanted to be when I started this in March of 2011.

But I ended up being the unreliable, slightly depressed kind… who lost her way.

By the summer of 2011, it was clear my life was changing.  And that October, Doug and I moved here to care for his mother who suffers from dementia.

I never wanted to write about that.

I’ve watched her for almost two years, sink into what must be a living hell.  And I let that darkness and confusion fall on me.

Heck, I let it wrap me up in a cocoon.  And I had just about decided to stop any type of writing….

Because every time I sit at this keyboard, and my fingers stop while I think… like right now, actually… I hear a voice that says …

Just quit

You do not have to do this

YOU ARE A LOOSER… you have nothing to say that anyone cares about

Give up.  You make life harder than it has to be…

It was really easy to type those words because I hear them all the time.

But here’s the thing… they are a big, fat lie.

I do have something to say… about 44 years with the same crazy guy, on being a mom, a grandma, a daughter, an employee, a so-so cook, a traveler, a superb killer of mice, a lover of flora and fauna who sucks at gardening.  I have perspective on those things. I have perspective on feeling 18 on the inside, with knees that remind I’m 64 every time I walk down stairs… or run, like the night I stepped on a bat.

I also have perspective on my faith which holds all this crazy life together… and about my Heavenly Father who has blessed me more than I deserve, who sees the end of the road and just wants me to trust.

What I do not have perspective on is living with dementia, her pain and suffering, our pain and suffering and my irritating habit of trying to understand everything.  It’s all too big and in my face.  So I have to let it go… at least in this space.  I’ve filled four journals with pain and confusion, and that’s where it’s going to stay.

So that means when I do have a terrible big, ugly, bad day… I can write about it in my journal, close the pages and hurry outside so I can suck at gardening some more… or write about California poppies that grow in Oregon… or about eating pancakes with my father-in-law.

Since deadlines seem to work for me… and I like to check things off my calendar… I plan to post twice a week.  I want to be a blogger that readers can count on.  All 10 of you… 🙂

And I plan to have the rough draft of my Alaska book (you know, the one I talk about but no one has ever seen??)  done by December 31^st of this year.  Because I need to be ready…..

It turns out my husband is finally going to retire later this fall.  He’s a really old guy so this is a good thing.  And he says when he retires we’re going to get in the truck and go (obviously with some pre-planning due to our living situation).  He doesn’t know where we’re going (which doesn’t surprise anyone who knows him).  But based on the distant past when he picked me up for coffee and four hours later we arrived in Lake Tahoe… we could end up anywhere.

So I’ll plan to take the lap top and book edit on the go.  I’ll be ready.