A Womans Blog

I call the year I turned 30, the year of awakening. Something about turning 30 and becoming pregnant with my third child ‘birthed’ a realization that my entire life up to that point had mostly been lived with the purpose of pleasing others. Every decision I made, every turn in the road I had taken, for the most part, had either been chosen within the framework of what would make others pleased with me or what was the ‘safest’ choice, the one less prone for risks or errors.I realized it wasn’t the way I wanted to live the rest of my life.

In fact, if my teenage self could see how I had behaved after high school she would have been surprised. I was the bohemian, artsy girl in class; the girl who wore bell-bottoms when no one else did and expressed herself with jaded, dark poetry and quite talented sketches, considering I had never taken art at that point. 

But somewhere in the twists and turns of life, I had gotten married, gotten pregnant and gotten married again and realized I had lost myself in the process. I lost myself somewhere in my college years. I never realized my dream of an art degree at NYU. I had not yet written the many books I had planned.

Basically, I had stopped living creatively. I had stopped being true to the spirit of who I was and had started worrying more about how I appeared to others. And like all moms and most wives, I had stopped caring for myself and had focused solely on the existence and care of others.

I had accomplished quite a bit in those years between 18 and 30. I earned my Masters, owned my own business and even taught for a short while at a local college. I volunteered in the projects of Texarkana, hoping to be an inspiration to a child who might otherwise have none.

But along the way, I had stopped being the girl who lived for expression, who became misty-eyed in a museum while looking at a Van Gogh, who wrote poetry and composed music. I had stopped being the ‘full’ me.

Since turning 30, I have attempted to live my life differently. It hasn’t been an overnight 180 degree turnaround. But I have attempted to live life in a fuller, more abundant way. Before the awakening, I was a programmer. I was a good programmer. I also owned a business with my husband where we designed websites and created Internet marketing plans. (More about this experience later.) I even started a grassroots club in the good ol’ Bible Belt of America working to accomplish change in things that I truly cared about, such as health care and education.

But with recent life changes (a major move cross-country to Silicon Valley and the birth of my third child), I realized it was time, risk or no risk, to start living the way  I always dreamed of living – the life of a writer.

Through all the phases of my life, and there have been many, the one consistency has been my desire to write. So, I’m breaking out the pencils and going to work. I hope you find something here that will bring you back and my writing will be worthy of your intentions. 

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