Fourteen years, more than 2200 posts, and umpteen-thousand words ago, this blog started off as something quite different from the form it takes today. When it all began, I was a stay-at-home mom running a business from home, helping manage a small farm, and the blog was how I shared my family news and photos with far-flung friends and family. Over the years it morphed into something like a journal of accomplishments, mine and the children's, and finally into a writer's blog. My intent was always to stay in touch with connections I couldn't see in person. The reality has been greater than I could ever have imagined.
A decade ago I was newly divorced (it was all over but the paperwork on this day ten years ago). I had no job, no income, four small children, and a place to stay because of my wonderful and eternally patient father. I had no degree. Despite having run a successful small business for a decade at that point, potential employers only saw 'no education' and 'self-employed means lying about skills and/or can't take orders' (yes, I was told that last to my face, as I was lucky enough to interview with people who knew me from the previous business). I had been writing, a little, and had finished one or two very short stories. I had published nothing.
Ten years later:
I have a STEM Degree, earned in 4.5 years while working 2 or 3 jobs (some years more than others). I achieved a childhood dream of obtaining a job title: Scientist. I am working in my field and making more money than I dreamed possible a decade ago. I am supporting my children as they blossom into adults. They are thriving and healing from the scars this last decade left them with. They are wonderful productive contributors to the human race and I am endlessly proud of all of them.
I am remarried to my First Reader. We knew one another a decade ago, in passing. We were, if anything, acquaintances. But that flowered cautiously into friendship, and more, and deepened into a partnership beyond my wildest dreams of support and caring.
I have eight novels in print, a couple dozen short stories and novellas, and more coming soon. I write for Mad Genius Club as a writer, hoping that other writers can gain insights from my mistakes (so they can avoid them and make their own!). I just started a weekly prompt challenge for 2020, with more than a dozen participants. More Odds than Ends has spent a year supporting one another in the writers and artists group I started. I am humbled often by knowing that it hasn't been that long since I started on this path, but yet people come to me asking questions.
It was not an easy road. There have been many potholes and breakdowns and days spent wondering if it was all worth the effort.
It was. It is. I'm looking forward to what the next decade brings. Heartache, I'm sure of that. It will not be alone. There will be joys and raptures as well, things I cannot begin to imagine. I know that is the certainty of the future: that I cannot predict what is coming. I know this because I can look back and see where I was, and know that I couldn't possibly have dreamed of where I am sitting today, typing quietly at my writer's desk, my First Reader at his desk next to me, engrossed in a game. The younger kids are playing in the living room. The Ginja Ninja is at her house, although she will be over for family dinner tonight. The Eldest comes for a flying visit this weekend. They will be even more scattered in ten years.
And I will be a new person. Again. Just as I am now, compared to the Cedar of Jan. 2010. This is the way of it all.