Monday, December 04, 2006

Hitting bottom can be a blessing

Life has a way of dumping stuff on you all at once, and my life was no different than anyone else’s.  I was going along, minding my own business, with a career, a husband, a home, and two kids when I realized I was exhausted.  Suddenly my time wasn’t my own and I had Big Responsibilities.  I’d been able to juggle with one baby, but having the second one so soon afterwards changed my outlook on life. It rapidly became apparent that I was stuck on an endless treadmill of changing diapers, scrubbing the kitchen floor, making baby food, and wrestling mountains of laundry down the stairs.   I needed help. 

 

Lucky for me, things were changing at my church, and we got in a dynamic priest who took the time to see me as a person.  Since we lived so far away from family, my church had become my home away from home.  I’d always been drawn to music, and the music this new priest brought to us opened my eyes to the world within and the world beyond.  I put one kid in preschool and dragged the infant with me to guitar lessons.  You have to understand that I had never had a music lesson in my life, but I always loved music.  I learned to play guitar, and through music began to experience the joys of self-expression for the first time in my adult life.

 

That was 24 years ago.  Since then, I’ve hauled my guitar to church and played and sang.  Out of this rewarding experience came the courage to try another form of self-expression, creative writing, another long-buried passion of mine. There was a learning curve as I learned how to write fiction, but along the way I made some great friends and learned more about who I was.  Writing challenged me to define what I stood for, what my themes were, and what I wanted out of life.

 

Maybe other people get this intuitively, but for me, it was a journey.  And, the road is still unfolding in front of me.

 

Until next week, Maggie Toussaint

 

Maggie Toussaint

Coming soon:  House of Lies

www.maggietoussaint.com ;http://mavensofthepen.blogspot.com/

 

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