Don't worry, this is not going to be another insomniac "I can't sleep" whiny blog post.
(But for the record, I do have insomnia and I can't sleep)
You know what? I miss my blog. I HATE the reason for having 1290 days of Kicking Cancer's Ass posts, but I love that I have had this diary....like my own little captive audience, for so long. Every once in a while, kind of like Facebook's "On This Day" memory pop up, I will go back and read a random post that I'd written. You know what? Sometimes I'm freaking brilliant. I impress myself and think, "Did I really write that?"
Some of it, especially from the beginning, is very difficult to read. Those were dark, dark days of fear and exhaustion, emotions and sickness. Some of it is inspiring, like maybe my words and my experiences can help someone who finds themselves in my shoes. Some of it is funny, some of it is an obnoxious rant against the injustices of my society..... but all of it is heartfelt. All of it is me.
It makes me sad to go back and see that I went from daily posts in 2013 and 2014, to about half that number last year. Now I sometimes go weeks without taking the time to open my heart and mind here, and I need to fix that. It makes me realize that I don't give me enough of my time. I know there are women who live much, much busier lives than mine: women with full time jobs, women with demanding careers, women who volunteer everywhere, women with half a dozen kids. I'm just a wife and mom, working a part-time job, with two kids who are involved in a respectably low number of activities, who volunteers with only one organization. And yet I seem to have zero time for anything. Well, I have a little more time now that Hubby and I finished binge-watching all seven seasons of Sons of Anarchy. But still...
I have a teenager in high school who is learning to drive, who plays the trombone and whose hobby is model railroading. The first and the last both take up much of Hubby's free (non-softball) time (I may be a better driver but he's a better driving teacher! And he has more patience for model trains.) I have a middle school girl who has a more active social life than I ever had, and whose extracurricular activity (softball) takes up most of her and all of my free time. (Hubby's an excellent coach, but I'm better at handling all of the off-the-field behind-the-scenes things that it takes to run a softball league and keep K's softball team organized.) When I'm not playing taxi or working on my computer, I try to indulge in my renewed love of reading.
The point I'm trying to make is that it's so easy to take yourself for granted. Am I the best mother in the world? Nope. Am I the best wife in the world? Not even close. Am I the best friend in the world? I wish, but not always. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't keep trying, daily, to be the best ME there is. And part of that is to focus on myself. I don't know.... I guess I look at my blog posts as a way of telling myself "this is important", that my thoughts and feelings are worthy of being expressed, and read, even if only by me.
To acquire wisdom is to love oneself; people who cherish understanding will prosper.
Proverbs 19:8
I'm only 44 years old. I hope I still have decades left of life to live, and I don't want to get so caught up in everyday life that I forget to make every day matter. There are things that happen, things that get said, things that I do - little things, big things, it doesn't matter - that are worth sharing, so that I can go back in a month or a year, and read about them. Like the post from two years ago where I wrote this:
When I woke K up this morning to get ready for our road trip, she smiled and said she was mad at me because I woke her up from a good dream. When I asked her what she was dreaming about, she said, "I was just about to buy a unicorn."
That's my girl.
That's my girl.
We should all be able to dream about buying a unicorn.
I love those last two words: Stay strong. It's not saying everything has to be perfect. Life will never be perfect, but through it all, you can stay strong. It's easy to zone in on what's going wrong, because sometimes something going wrong can feel majorly wrong. My blog is the perfect example. I started it back in 2011..... way before I knew I had cancer. And yet it took a cancer diagnosis for me to start writing regularly. Why? Because I had a lot of things going wrong to talk about. But interspersed with the things going wrong posts are the other posts.... ones about feeling happy, or grateful, or amused, or blessed. Posts about feeling grateful to be alive.
I have a lot of reasons to smile, and I have some very special people in my life who make me laugh.
Lucky, lucky me.
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