A new chapter

Recently, after a lot of questioning and nagging from friends, family and my therapist, I have decided what I am going to do after my youngest graduates. It’s always interesting how people love to tell you what they think you should be doing or that they are more concerned about your plans than you are yourself.

Even when my youngest graduates, she is still going to need me. She struggles with a lot of executive functioning, but she has improved. I assume she is going to need help to make it through her college program and to figure out a job situation. She does not drive yet, so she will still need to be driven around.

Everyone just assumes I will have absolutely nothing to do after graduation day. This is a fundamentally flawed assumption. I have not even talked about the emotional regulation that she still struggles with. I need to be available in case she needs me. And I am okay with that.

I did not sign on to be a parent until they reached the age of majority. I wanted to be a parent, which means they will forever be my children no matter how old they get.

There are some things I have always wanted to do. There’s of course traveling the world, but you have to have funds to do that. I have spent a lot of time soul searching to remember what I may have ever wanted to do before money had such a control of my life.

I wanted to write. Originally, I wanted to be a news journalist. To be sent on location to report world news was my dream job. Somewhere along the way I grew up and saw people hurting all around me. I went through various phases of trying to find a role that worked for me. I wanted to be a dietitian, a social worker, a special education teacher and then a counselor. They all looked like possibilities until the year I graduated: 2008. The economic downturn that put my entire college graduating class in financial limbo for years. Nobody was hiring and the people that were wanted people with master’s degrees to work for nothing. I ended up working as an office assistant with dreams of eventually working myself up to what I actually wanted to be doing: helping people.

While at college, I took a theater class where we had to write a play about our lives and perform it for our big end of term project. What I always took for my theater professor was feeling bad for me because I chose the strained relationship between my mother and me. It was hard to share that pain, but ultimately therapeutic. He continued to meet with me after the term was over. We would go out for hot chocolates, since I do not do coffee. He would always try and convince me to write my story. I never really believed anyone would care.

I also happened to take creative writing as another elective while at college. It was a short story class, which I did excel at. Most students struggle with writing too much and that has never been a problem for me. I tend to not be flowery or over complicate things like most college students. Page requirements were hard for me because I just did not need that much space to complete the task. Anyway, my English professor liked my writing. He told me I should take more writing classes because he thought I could do something with it.

Now here we are today, my therapist keeps telling me I should share my adoption story. It has been quite a wild ride and it is not over yet. I have shared my story with many professionals, as you always have to give the background during the initial meetings. It is a story I know well. I have tried to write it many times, but I always get interrupted. With my youngest becoming more capable, I think I may finally have the opportunity to do it.

I am going to write our story. I have been outlining how I am going to go about it because it is complicated, but I think I have found a format I like that will make it easier for outsiders to understand, especially those that have never gone through the various systems that we have. That is my plan. We will see how it goes.