I would love to say I’ve been absent from blogging because I’ve been hunkered down in front of the computer writing my little heart out. Alas, that has not been the case. Some yes, but not a lot. But I’ve finally realized that I can’t keep my writing self separate from any other part of me. I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a friend. I am a writer with a dayjob in tech that has nothing to do with writing. I am an animal lover, a gardener, and a constant work-in-progress. I shouldn’t try to separate them. So I won’t.

Life is hard lately. I’m broken in a few places. Some of the breaks will heal with time when I have a chance to rest and some of them never will. I need to grieve the changes that make me sad and celebrate those that bring me joy. But some days it’s hard to find the joy as much as I would like to. I stopped posting for a while first because I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even put sentences together and second because, well, I was trying to figure out how to post about writing when I wasn’t writing and how not be depressing when I did it.

Since Christmas, life has been doing the out-of-control roller coaster sort of thing. Not the fun kind. There was some tough loving that needed doing and I did it but the process broke my heart into tiny pieces. I’m doing a lot of health battles of my own – some I can work on (years of not taking care of myself as well as I should catching up with me as I approach 50) and some are just the toss of the dice that I have to accept and adapt to. That’s tough for me. And the hardest of them all (because it is never going to go away,) is that my son’s muscular dystrophy has accelerated and he has been dealing with some additional serious health problems which may or may not be related to his disease. He’s struggling to cope with the overwhelmingness of his life and I’m struggling as I was him try to cope.

And yet.

And yet, there are words. There ARE words that swirl around in the fog of my brain. There are characters waiting patiently (and some not so patiently) in the corners, waiting for me to call to them once more. There are stories waiting to be told. Stories only I can tell. 

And I will.