Time Flies

Time flies when you're having fun. It also flies when you are too busy, not paying attention, or having too many senior moments. I can scarcely believe I haven't written a post since last April. Ironically, I think about writing posts almost daily. Whenever things happen that I want to comment on, I begin composing a post in my head. I often think about them while I'm driving and when I'm trying to fall asleep. Why don't they get from my head to my blog? That is a question I can't answer.

To a certain extent, I have been in writing avoidance for a while. That began a couple of years ago when I realized I couldn't continue working on my memoir until some big issues related to it got resolved. Since the memoir is about raising Victoria, I needed to finish getting her raised, or at least getting her to a recognizable transition point, before I could understand the ending of the memoir. Since Victoria came home from her two-year sojourn away from us - first at boarding school and then in the Job Corps - she has gotten her own apartment and started attending community college. That feels like a natural place to stop a book about raising a child.

How I wish I was actually done raising her. Even with her own apartment and car, she is so much less competent than most young adults that it frightens me. But that is a different book than the one I started several years ago about the circumstances that led Michael and me to adopt a three-year-old when our other kids were nearly grown and the unanticipated problems of raising a child with mental illness that followed.

Bringing this back to my blog, I have been writing adverse for some time and I feel as if that block is lifting. I can look at my writing studio and think about clearing my desk off without my eyes glazing over and a bout of situational amnesia occurring. I have actually signed up for a writing workshop in February that includes a session on poetry and a session on memoir. And here I am, writing a new post for my blog.

Nothing fancy, just getting my hands back into it. I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share right now. Earlier tonight, I attended a yoga class. It is my third week back in yoga after almost a year's hiatus. Could yoga and writing have something to do with each other? Yoga is good exercise for my body, but it causes me some angst. I had an incredibly flexible body in my younger years, the kind that allows one to tuck one's leg behind one's neck on the rare occasions one wants to do that. Does it surprise you to hear that I have significantly less flexibility now than I used to have? Probably not. So why does it surprise me?

I have an edge over most people in my age-group when it comes to the losses of aging. When I first became ill with lupus, 22 years ago, and for many years after that, I had very limited mobility. I thought of it as premature aging when it happened. In my early 40s, I needed assistance to walk, first a cane, then a walker, then an electric scooter. Although I am thankfully not that handicapped at the moment - I am knocking loudly on wood as I write this - I am usually more content to live with the gentler losses of mobility and flexibility that normal aging brings than are some of my friends. I have lived with a lot worse than being creaky and far-sighted!

Before my wandering thoughts become completely lost, I must stop writing. I feel pleased to have done this work tonight and hopeful that I will be able to keep it up at a considerably more regular rate in future.

Ciao!