Why Not?

I've been reading Patricia Harmon's book, "The Blue Cotton Gown". Although our lives are a good deal different, after reading a few pages of her book, I began to think...she sounds a lot like me. What do I see as the parallels? Here are a few of them:

She struggles with self-medication. For her, it's her bedtime sleep inducing "medicine" that she wisely insists her husband lock in the bathroom cabinet
to discourage her from over-use. For me, it's food...except that there's no way my husband (or anyone else) could keep me from overeating...that's something
only I can do, I struggle with it daily, and right now, I'm far from winning the
battle.

She writes. She writes when she's sad, when she's insecure, when she's remembering. She writes because the stories and thoughts just won't leave her alone until she gets them out of her head onto paper...or a computer drive. She's been known to roll out of bed in the middle of the night to write. Ditto.

She's passionate, both physically and emotionally. At 50-plus, she's still in love with her husband, and she unabashedly writes about some of the most private parts of their relationship. She's not graphic; but as happy as I am with my own husband and our sex life, I can't imagine having a conversation with even my closest friend and talking about it the way she writes about hers in her book. I wonder how her husband feels about that? I wonder, now that the book is published and pretty widely read, when she walks past her office staff in the morning, does she wonder if they blushed or winced a little when they read the book, about being given a peek into the private relationship of their boss (her physician husband) and coworker? Does she wish she had not been so "honest" with the details of their relationship?

She worries about her children, even though they are grown or nearly grown. She wonders if she should have made some different parenting decisions. Don't we all?

She loves photography. A lot of women I know who are involved in childbearing and womens' issues are interested in photography. I'm just beginning to dabble in it. I wonder if it's our way of trying to interpret the intense joy and yes, even heartbreak of it all? Me, I started out wanting to decorate the walls of my house with something that said "me"...that expressed who I am, what I feel...but I don't find much in most places I've looked...so now I'm trying to make my own "art".

She is tactile. She talks about the feel of water against bare skin while she skinny dips with her husband, the smoothness of cool hardwood floors on bare feet, the warmth of her husbands body beside her in bed, the softness of an old quilt.

On the surface, she has everything one can imagine she might want or need, but strip away that surface for a moment...the house, the cottage on the lake, the three children being educated at private colleges, her successful career and that of her husband, and you see that they are living perilously close to the edge; and she worries about it constantly. I'm living that.

The obvious...she's a nurse (albeit with a more advanced degree than I have at this point), and she both loves and is weighed down by it.

I'm enjoying this book...and I'm seeing so many parallels in her life with my own. I have no delusions that someone would want to read about my own dysfunctional and unremarkable life, but I love to write, and I've always dreamed about having a book published someday. Right now, I'd be thrilled to get just one article published somewhere, and that is on my "short term" goal list; but long term (not too long, I hope), I'd love to get a book published. I have no idea how I'm ever going to get that to happen. I have a lot of ideas. I'm sure there will be a lot of disappointments and misadventures along the way, but what the hell? It's never going to happen if I don't make some sort of even half-effort.

So I decided to start another blog.

I already write about my experiences as an L&D nurse who straddles the philosophical fence between the obstetrical/hospital and midwifery/home (or birth center) options (although the latter option is increasingly less available and more under attack then the former) for a woman (Musings of an OB RN in Transition); so I decided I should write about my home life as well. I write a little about it in my first blog, but as that has (slowly) evolved, I feel as if writing about my home life there would distract from the major topic I deal with...working with childbearing women now, my thoughts on the many aspects of the topic, and where I want to go, on a professional level with it. Of course there is going to be some overlap...despite the old adage that we must keep our professional and personal lives compartmented, that's not always possible...or even appropriate. What we choose as our profession has a lot to do with who we are as a person...the same person we are in our "private" life; and the changes in our private life can have a huge impact on our professional life; but I digress...

I wanted to write about my personal life because, frankly, even though it's probably a bigger part of who I am than my professional life, I don't pay enough attention to it. My health shows it; my family relationships show it. I need a better balance (who doesn't?). I figure if I'm paying more attention to it through writing, then that attention might just influence my behavior.

I wanted to write abut my personal life because it is as big an influence on my professional life as my professional life is on my personal life; sometimes they compliment each other, and sometimes they compete fiercely. Sometimes the impact one has on the other is positive, and sometimes it is anything but; but always, they intertwine, even when I don't want them to.

I wanted to write about my personal life because writing about it helps me to sort out, remember, define my thoughts on it the way my writing about my professional life does about it. It's a release, one that I desperately need.

I initially thought I'd keep this "journal" privately, in a folder on my computer. Then I though..."What the hell"...if someday, somehow, I manage to get published, it's a good bet that what I write about will be as much a mix of the professional and personal as Ms. Harmon's; so anything that I write now isn't going to be private then; plus, if anyone comes across one of my blogs, and cares to make a comment, I'm interested in their point of view on either one.

So, once again,

Welcome to my world.....