Ch- ch- ch- cha- changes

I am a word lover. My first journal was started when I was a mere 6-year-old lass and my early journal entries went something like this: "Went to school. Came home. Ate." I even have my first kiss documented. First grade, Jon Mattox. If and when my memory starts going, I am blessed that I can always crack open a journal and find myself in it again.

I don't remember why I decided to start keeping a diary. I think, perhaps, someone gave one to me and I ran with it. I had unlocked the mysteries of reading the year before, hunched over a book about bedtime in a darkened kindergarten classroom, and in that instant a lifelong love affair with words was begun. Reading, writing, spelling: if it had a letter in it, you can be sure that I was on it.

My diaries were my soulmates and if I filled up one and didn't have time to get to the store for a new one, I'd start suffering withdrawal. They were my closest confidants, my way to make sense of the world, my very soul in word format. When, as a young teen, I found out that my little sister had been reading my journals, I felt violated in a way that even sexual assault couldn't touch. All the angst of growing up, of finding myself (and losing myself and finding myself again), can be found in the pages of those journals. In fact, I still don't know what I want to happen to them when I die. To know that who I am, in the complete, unabridged format, may be exposed to anyone is a sobering thought.

Somewhere along the way, I lost my words. I got a job, fell in love, got married, and the time that was just my own - mine and my journal's - somehow got pushed aside. I attempted to journal many times, but somehow I had lost that intimacy with them. For some reason, I couldn't put my soul into words anymore. In some ways, I think that I was afraid to have a document attesting to any of the tumult or darkness going on in my head. I couldn't even face it myself, at times.

But in the past couple of years, as I've found myself faced with the trials and tribulations of raising 3 rambunctious, often inhumanly challenging children mostly on my own and doing a complete internal remodel (no, this is NOT a mid-life crisis... I won't be mid-life for another good 5 years or so, thank you), my need for the solace of words has reared its head again and I find myself retreating to the comfort of writing when I need to cope, make sense (or fun) of the world, or just myself. Sometimes it happens in the form of (often bad) poetry, and sometimes it happens like this... a blog.

And as I move through this year, I don't want to lose the lessons I learn from it and all of the changes that are hovering over the horizon for me. For some reason, for me, if it is written, it IS. Life is a series of beginnings and endings, often overlapping, and my life is no exception. Like a caterpillar in metamorphosis, this is my ending, and it is my beginning.

Should be interesting.