Organizing my files has caused the detritus of my life to come tumbling–with an anti-Google diatribe addition

I put my adoption/Google rant on the sidebar. Now it’s gone to a Courting page
I don’t know why I was picked up by a Wall Street Journal blog on balancing being a mother with a career. I have never been a mother.

Being a single parent, of either sex, has to be the hardest job in the world. Unless you have the most incredible support network that never fails.

Little Luce is going to be a Senior in high school in the fall, and it’s harder for Lucia than ever. Little Luce is a great almost woman. Her Mom just wants to make sure she gets the best college education she can, at a school not in New York City.

Their bond is strong. It’s time not to sever it, but to expand both of their worlds. In a couple of weeks they’re going to the condo in North Myrtle, and I’m demanding pictures of Lucia asleep in the bedroom. They live in a one bedroom and when Lucia and George first separated she gave Little Luce the bedroom.

Given my closest friend’s situation, it’s hard for me to complain about my life, but I do it so well….

Last night at dinner I felt, once again, Little Luce, has two moms as I told her stories about her childhood. But Lucia deserves solo credit for raising an incredible girl. Many years she used all her vacation days for Little Luce. I don’t think I could ever be that selfless. Not that Lucia is perfect….

Seven years ago I decided that I wanted to give my lifetime dream a real chance. I had no idea how to go about so I took some courses. When I was offered a job as a reporter five years ago, my teacher then stopped speaking to me as she thought I was selling out by working for an alt paper rather than going the lit journal route.

Maybe it was, but i was able to use skills I had become expert in during my three prior careers. They all entailed interviewing and assessing individuals, and researching and critiquing in many subjects.

Because I didn’t have the worlds greatest imagination, was the opposite of assertive (when it comes to things for me), and didn’t think the world was clamoring for a book or magazine articles by me, I thought this was a good way to break in to publishing–given my advanced age.

“Offered” was the key word. Somebody believed in me. That we have both believed in each other and have driven each other crazy since our late teens was, truthfully, comforting. While it was comforting, it was also awkward for basically the same reason. If those two sentences appear as if written in code, they almost are.

I couldn’t advance any further than I did. That said I wrote a damn good cover story for any reporter, including one in her first year.

I didn’t look for other reporting jobs because i really didn’t want to be a reporter. I would say it gave me the confidence needed to pursue other venues but I began a blog, and vowed to complete complicated dental work in two years, some months. My long time readers know more about teeth than anybody wants to know.

I was so goal oriented I completed the dental work in 21 months. My amazing healing ability had more than a little to do with that as did my true want to get this over with.

And, duh, I’m obsessive. I have to complete what I begin–hence staying in social work school after I knew it was the wrong career for me. I wish I had gone to school for something I really love such as sociology or urban anthropology. I purposely didn’t say writing.

I have come to the conclusion that one can really learn to write from doing. So I wrote in this blog. Wrote chapters for books, edited them, revised them, edited, and threw out. Hence the 1783 posts–two thirds in draft, the endless word documents, and my gmail capacity being up to 26% because sometimes I write in gmail. If I know I’m going away, I save to an external modem and write in gmail as a back up. I have to have something saved to the Internet to feel secure. Possibly falsely, but…..

The story I’m now telling comes easily to me at times. At other times, there’s a huge concrete wall between me and the material.

Actually, just when I need to rev up, I have hit the wall. Hence my apartment is incredibly organized, I’m planning my move, and accept three out of five invitations.

In a few weeks I’m going to do something I would have laid bets just a few months ago I never would do. Have dinner with three girls–always to me, I went to Jr/Sr High with. Then we’re having drinks with at the pre-reunion of the class ahead of ours.

I was so intent on being miserable, I never gave the girls in my class a chance. Two of the girls were in almost every class with me from Seventh through Twelfth Grades. Our school rotated teachers not students. The other girl, I just knew, because our community was so small everybody knew each other. Almost. There are a few people in our yearbook I don’t remember at all. I might have stood out more than other girls as I had the hippie thing going before it was fashionable in our Long Island community.

Or maybe, my parents asserted less control over my clothes and life. In the end, of course, this gave them more control as I listened to them, very occasionally because I liked and respected them. Though my father did attempt to run my life I never let him.

My Friday Flashback will be on Thursday. It’s a letter my father wrote, but never gave to me, on my 16th birthday.

Reconnecting with people who knew me, even if slightly, in those pivotal growing up years has caused me to reexamine my life. Fortunately I had already written much of a first draft about Senior year, can bring up the feelings at will, and the story takes place outside our community.

Even more fortunately the only people I bad mouth are me, doctors and teachers. I’m not about to change this book, and I want it to reflect my truth.

My parents come off as much more permissive than they were. When my mother called Shelby’s Mom, she had no idea Shelby’s mom would lie for me.

It’s hard for me to remain mired in the past. I have developed a big want and need to make new great memories and to just do.

When I wrote that i was busy, I meant assimilating recent events, writing, organizing my apartment in preparation to sell it, and a few other things necessary to making a living and/or career.

I have spent so much time prepping that I forgot there are more steps. No I didn’t forget but began to feel entitled. Something only pop princesses should ever feel.

This road I’m traveling is a hard one. It feels good to have people from all junctions of my life aboard.

I do believe that we can make our own destiny. Yet obsessive as I am, I feel that I might give up before I have even really begun to try.

Sometimes I stare at the same piece of paper for hours, and play games with the words. I have never had such organized files, dressers, closet, and kitchen. Had I known that the secret to organizing myself was to become close to the end of a first draft, I would have done this years ago. I have come close to the ends of first drafts; they weren’t organized. I wasn’t ready to be organized.

I only look like an organized person and have an organized apartment. Inside I’m still as disorganized as ever.

I saved my final grad school evaluation. Nowhere does it say that I’m disorganized, quite the contrary actually. The person it presents couldn’t have Aspergers; my only “four” out of “five” was relating, and caring, too much. To do that job effectively you have to almost create a Plexiglas wall between you and the residents, and I could only do that with one schizophrenic who drove me crazy, but less crazy than she drove the rest of the staff. Yes, I was staff as well as a student. The Newt cuts had taken affect.

I’m still assimilating the realization I was right all along and my problems are borne out of spatial relations. The knowledge made me feel empowered immediately but I kept waiting to be prove wrong.

Instead I have taken charge of my life in ways I could only dream of before. I don’t think that this time next year I will say “I was wrong, it is___”

So much is going on in my head, it’s hard to feel the passion needed to complete a book about the teenage me. I think I recognize that this is one of the times I have to both be gentle to me, and to just do it.

While I don’t belong in a mommy and work blog and apologize to anybody who has come here looking for one, I do belong in a person, work, and shaking up your life one.