The Piece I Left Behind

As we grow up, there are pieces of ourselves that we leave behind.  Some of these pieces just fall off as we leave childhood, but some are pieces that fade.  And as we go through life, with bills and jobs and responsibilities, those pieces become more and more faded.  Then we get married and have kids, and somehow those pieces that were such a necessary part of what made us, us are practically gone.

I love being married to Clif and I love being a mommy to Ainsley and Freddie.  These new pieces help define me now, and I'm perfectly happy with that.  But there are pieces that I miss, that I've pushed aside for later that recently seem to be begging to show themselves.  I'm not really sure why those little pieces have insisted on being noticed now, when I'm in the middle of three year old independence and infant mobility.  When I'm getting ready to leave my home and live under someone else's roof.  When I'm leaving a job where I'm so confident and positive of my ability, for one where I'm maybe not so sure of myself.  But we don't often choose these things.  We don't always get to follow the map we've laid out.  Sometimes those roads are drawn for us.

When I was younger, I was sure...absolutely positive, that somehow I'd be a writer.  I love to write and there was a time in my life when I wrote every day.  I filled diaries with my fears and joys and sadness and hopes.  I wrote stories about my past, about the future I dreamed of or feared.  I created characters from nightmares or people I'd meet in passing.  And then one day I stopped.  It wasn't a conscious decision, but it happens.  Life gets busy, and the dreams that we held as a child take a back seat to the reality in front of us.

You've probably noticed that I've taken a bit of a different approach to the blog.  It's been hard for me to do this because I know how much so many of you love the blog.  But it's something that I've decided I need to do.  That piece of me that I need to recapture, to bring back and color in the details.

I still plan on posting pictures of the kids and telling you all about what's happening in their lives.  However, I'm hoping to add to that a bit.  Make this blog a bit more of a platform for my writing.  Sometimes I'm going to fall flat on my face.  That's hard for me to accept, but failure is part of life I guess.  Other times, I hope I soar.  Either way, I want to know what you think of it, so comment.  Tell me you hate it, tell me you love it, tell me you're forwarding to your friends or tell me you're never reading it again.  I want to know.

I hope you'll keep reading.  I hope you can bare with me through this transition.  I'm going to try and write every day...but I also know that life can get in the way.  So I'll do my best.  And my subjects will still be my favorite people in this world, so at least that won't change.

Thanks for reading this blog for the past few years and thanks for allowing me the flexibility to spread my wings a bit.  We'll see how this goes...