I Moved!

Took me long enough, right? And this blog space has served me well over the years - but coming back after such a long break makes it feel like just the right time to take a fresh step in the next direction. Just before I stopped posting here, I had lost an aunt to cancer and my grandmother to Alzheimer's. Those were hard changes to process to begin with, but then ...

In the early part of February 2019, my girls and I moved. We had been living in a large family house that was just getting too cramped for everyone to comfortably exist together, so the girls and I set out and started over in a little townhouse about ten minutes from where we'd been living. It was a much-needed change, but it was still chaotic and incredibly stressful; a lot was changing all at once.

Then in May, my mother died. My mental health, which had been getting increasingly fragile, finally got to be too much to handle. My PTSD symptoms got worse, my desire and ability to write and create plummeted, and overwhelm kept me in a constant state of "just getting by." I got my kids fed every night, got to bed every night, got them up and fed every morning, dropped them off at school. Picked them up, checked their grades.

All the while, I struggled to cope as each milestone without my mother passed. The first birthday - the day she died. The first mother's day - that first weekend. The first Fourth of July, the first ... everything. I got back together with my high school sweetheart, got settled in my own groove in my place with the girls, took a road trip, got engaged - and she wasn't there for me to share any of that with.

But it has been a year now. And she'd kick my ass if she knew how much I had thought about quitting writing altogether, letting go of my dreams and my passion for creating stories.

So I waited, and I let my heart rest, and I let my spirit heal. I found a church that feels like home, I reconnected with some family I'd been missing, and I grew more in these last months than I ever would have expected.

And that was when my laptop started calling to me again. It was when ideas started crowding my mind, slowly weaving themselves into plot twists and characters and stories ...

So here I am. Inching my way back into writing.

And it all starts with this.