The word “blog” makes me giggle. I just like saying it. Blog. I want to write, always have. Apparently in today’s world that means I want to blog. So here I go, a-bloggin’.
When I was in first grade, I wrote my first story. It was called, “A Trip to the Store,” the most clever title of any story ever. The young girl in the story was asked by her mother to trudge to the store for a gallon of milk. This was easy for me to imagine because I grew up in a town of around 1,000 folks and trudged plenty of times to the store for staples like milk. In this story, the girl was kidnapped by a random stranger. Said stranger took the girl to the basement of a home. Luckily, the idiot kidnapper made the mistake of leaving the brilliant child unsupervised. Keeping her composure, she found some scissors, easily reached them, snipped the rope, called her mother (on a rotary phone), and gave her mother the exact address, as it was printed right there on the phone. The girl was rescued and the story ended with the clever quip, “And all this for a gallon of milk.”
After I read that story to my six- and seven-year-old peers I decided I was clever and hilarious and would someday write a “real” book.
Fast forward 28ish years to September 2018. My husband, three kids and I had lived in rural South Dakota (that may be redundant) for one year at that point. I was a second grade teacher in my twelfth year teaching elementary. After completing a Level 1 Life Coach training that prompted big discussions and decisions, I found myself on sabbatical. What to do?
Well, I did what I feel like any mother who was home alone for more than a 45–minute stretch for the first time in her life would do would do: planned a Thanksgiving trip to Disney World (we promised our two year-old daughter we could go when she was ten, so now it was time to deliver), cleaned and organized several closets, napped (seemed like my body needed to catch up on about a decade’s worth of sleep), Yoga-ed (that should be a verb, if it is not already), drank coffee and ate donuts, and watched all ten seasons of Friends.
Boom. Sabbatical. Mic-drop.
After the holidays I attended a pretty intense leadership training. I had never experienced anything like it. I processed about that experience for weeks after I returned home; my husband was an extremely gracious active listener. At one point he asked me, “Well what do you want to do now?” to which I replied, “Write a book.”
That was nothing new. I often said I wanted to write a book after any given conversation about any given topic. The difference was, for all the times I said that before there was never any set goal or timeline on the horizon. It was always just a thing, something in the far–off future. Suddenly it was time. For real.
So the question was, “Are you finally going to do it?”
I would like to answer that question, and I will, but to be honest this blog has taken me a flippin’ long time to write and I am tired. Also, the laundry is (forever) calling. Blog you later.
