Today Will Be the Day

Today will be the day that I ask him to go to counseling with me.

Today I should tell him how much working out our marital hardships means to me.

Today I will be honest with me and with him on why I withdraw from his touch.

Today I’ll make the effort to show him I care.

Today the therapist will meet with us and begin to develop a deep connection with us. We will grow comfortable talking with her about every painful aspect of our relationship in a calm and secure place.

Today we will concentrate on us, not our jobs and grown children. It will be worth everything.

Today I will tell him I love him.

Today we will start anew. Our relationship’s Band-Aid will be removed and the rugged scab of hurtful mistakes of the past will shrink and crumble away revealing the smoothness of healing.

Today has come and gone, and I leave a white rose at your grave. The stings of regret are lessened only by the flow of my guilty tears as I gather myself to drive home to an empty house and empty bed.

(this example of poetry is why I’m not a poet)

 

She grew up the daughter of an Air Force officer, moving every two to four years. She struggled through elementary and secondary schools with painful shyness, comprehension problems, and a strong dislike of academic work. Reading was a painful chore, and reading for fun didn’t really exist in her early years.   But she was able to write despite these obstacles. Her imagination was huge with no limitations, and she wrote what fermented in her active mind.

Her first short story, “Mr. Happy” sprouted in second grade. Within those five or so pages, she illustrated and wrote everyday adventures of a red circle with arms and legs and a smiley face—Mr. Happy. In high school, she began to write voraciously, scrawling down sagas of families and friends through a trilogy set in the Civil War era, to friends shipwrecked on the usual deserted island.

When she graduated from high school after much turmoil in keeping an interest in what she was supposed to be learning, she had no future plans to go to college or work. Being a late bloomer in physical development and mature matters of life after high school, she only had an interest in writing, playing, and hopefully marrying one day. Small ambitions, one would say in this day and age. Nonetheless, her parents gave her the sobering truth that she could not live out the dream she wanted most of all—to be an author. They explained the difficulty in getting anything published and minimal pay that wasn’t enough to support oneself. So, after a failed year in community college, one year off working at a record store, reality struck, and she decided to go to business college because she had taken typing in high school and did well at it. Business college was vital because it taught her discipline in work and the seven English classes helped teach her what she didn’t learn and/or ignored throughout elementary and secondary schools, even though she wrote correctly!   She graduated from the business college in a year and five months and went job searching. She ended up in a great position as a word processor at an employee benefits consulting company for the next three years.

In that time, she joined a writer’s guild and wrote her first novel. Soon, she learned her word processing position was being phased out, and she moved south where her parents had relocated recently. It was down in Louisiana where she found her future husband (an Air Force civil engineer), married, and moved to Ohio, where she had her first son. Her second son followed three and a half years later.

Between marriage in 1997 and 2014, she wasn’t able to write anything. Not until after two years of homeschooling her sons in 2013 to 2015, did it pique her interest through the history, literature, and science courses her younger son was taking that she decided to go back to school. Initially, psychology was her major, but stumbling upon the list of different degrees that included English Creative Writing in the university’s website, she changed her major to English Creative Writing, which she had no idea existed until then. The passion she once felt for writing was rekindled, and she began writing again in September 2014. She is still attending the university as an online part-time student and is set to graduate in the fall of 2018. She has written one novel, five short stories, and two plays. They are all still in the revising phase.

In the words of Golden Girl, Sophia Petrillo, the woman in the story above is yours truly.  But, of course, you knew that.  Today, I am writing and unfolding my dream I have had the majority of my life. I am thankful to my husband’s working that I am able to have this opportunity to go back to school and write again. I couldn’t do this without him. The revising of my current novel I started in January 2015 continues, but will finish up in the next few months.   My two plays are going to be read aloud by actors at a local theater for my benefit to hear what I’ve written and see how it flows, so I can decide if or what I might want to revise. This reading is set for December 7, 2017. I am very excited about this. Also, one of my short stories has been entered in a contest through my university’s English Department, which will be published in their journal if my story is chosen first, second, or third place. As I continue through my university courses and keep writing, in the next several months, I hope that some of my works will be published out there for all to read and hopefully enjoy.