Life. Not Fiction. was the brain child of mine when I wanted to be writing fiction, but instead, could not get my artistic arms around anything besides my life. After writing my novel, and a bunch of children's book manuscripts, my writing dreams are temporarily on hold while I deal with the medical drama of having a child with Aspergers and high anxiety.
Life right now is like being on a hamster wheel with no hope for vacation. No hope for a break. No hope for 5 minutes of normalcy. Instead, life is trying to stay sane while being told my son wants me dead, or yet more, the various ways he wants to kill me. Life is trying to keep it together for my daughters so they can have some normalcy in this upside down life we lead. Life is shielding the cat from a kicking, from licking my own emotional wounds that are deepening while everyone seems to live a life and enjoy it. Life in the purest of terms sucks. Life is a long string of obscenities, of broken dreams, of being on the road less traveled. Life is being the mother of "that" child.
As bleak as all that sounds, life is not without a rich net of bright moments.Shining moments. Moments that are memorable. Moments that make the hell almost worth it.
Robert Frost famously wrote:
Two roads diverged and I-,
I took the one less traveled by
and that has made all the difference.
The obligatory reading of "The Road Not Taken" has always stuck with me. In many ways it became almost a mantra. In my 20s, I didn't want to look back on life and wonder, "What if?" I wanted to travel. I wanted to live. And boy did I. Circumvent the globe. Check. Eat street food from hard to pronounce cities in lesser heard of countries. Check. Live out loud. Check.
But now fast forward to today: three kids later... I seem to be limping through life. Not quite living it. But rather experiencing the minutiae without living the life part. Life seems to be a fiction. Though in reality it is Life. Not Fiction.
