Reality Check

When I had the idea to do this blog I said to myself, “I’m going to write a story a day about My Mam for the entire year.”

Well, I kind of blew that one, didn’t I?

I had to take several days off from the VIVENDA JUANA blog because of my job and because I had a leg injury that had me in so much pain that everything became impossible, including focusing on writing. But most of all I had to take some days off because it turns out that doing a deep dive into the past, re-living and re-capturing moments about the life of someone that you love more than you love yourself, putting it all out there for people to see, to scrutinize, to ignore… well, it’s exhausting. It’s painful. It’s exhilerating. It’s maddening. It is every feeling you might think you are going to have in life, all rolled up into every single day of your life.

My friend wrote a memoir. It covered some sixty years of their life. When the book was published, when it came out, when they did their book tour, they become inconsolably depressed and took to drinking. Dredging up the past and living there for a few years took a real toll on them, and they had to fight hard to come back from that.

I’m just doing a blog about my Mother. I shouldn’t have to face down that much emotional backlash. And now that I’ve had a week off to meditate and consider all the factors, I think I’m ready to go again. After all, it’s Me Mother. Her story is worth telling. Her story is worth knowing. Her story is worth documenting.

And I’m the man to do it.