Tickling the edges of my...

(heh, made you look!)

I am on summer break between university semesters for 21 hours and 54 minutes longer. In the previous months of summer I've engaged in various activities to entertain, embarrass, madden, frustrate, and then completely bore my husband, two children, and Copper the dog. But in between activities I managed time to read. For mind-drugging pleasure, not for my education (aah, sweet bliss!)

The three most recent reads have been memoirs of one sort or another, the first of which was Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Julie Powell happened into a dream career with a desperate attempt to assign meaning to her life with a deranged project (cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child) and a blog to chronicle it. Shortly after that hilarious romp-through-the-pages, I dived into Atul Gawande's Complications. While not a memoir per se, Complications is narrative nonfiction, especially on the state of medicine today, at its best. I was mesmerized by his prose, and paused throughout not only to marvel over his words but also to put myself in his position (and to pray over my own future in medicine.) Gawande got his literary start writing for online publications, such as Slate, while he was a resident. The final book in my personal summer reading club was totally dee-licious brain candy -- Such a Pretty Fat by Jen Lancaster -- which is (you guessed it) accompanied by her own amazingly popular blog, jennsylvania.com.

As I was devouring this literary buffet, I could feel something growling underneath the surface, a temptation of a thought tickling the edges of my conscious mind:

Start a blog.

Why, you say?

I'm glad you asked.

Among the other exhilerating events of my summer, I turned 37 in July (moan!) I have two bouncy not-so-baby boys -- Nathan, 11, and Luke, 9 -- a wonderfully goofy, geeky, and altogether good husband -- Wes, also 37 -- a mortgage, and a dog in the backyard. I also had -- until a few years ago -- an identity crisis. I started my college career in music education, and took a break from it 18 years ago; when I realized I was still on break, I was in a graphics design career, surburbia, and motherhood. I had sowed the seeds of my youth into my family and a string of jobs that were taking me further away from where I thought my life would go. It's quite exhausting, looking for yourself while chasing a toddler and changing a baby's diaper before going to work. Somehow, the search for who you are gets subordinated to everyone else's needs: your husband's, your childrens', your boss's. Exhaustion and self-neglect inevitably led me to burn-out.

When Luke started kindergarten I finally stopped the hamster wheel and got off. Where to go now? Exploring! When Luke started first grade, I became a(n unsuccessful) personal trainer. When Luke started second grade, I went back to school.

I love music. I am passionate about the arts. My fitness fetish led to a fascination with human health and anatomy. And I've discovered another obsession -- medicine.

Nathan started junior high school (gulp!) and Luke started fourth grade yesterday, and I start my sixth semester at Texas State University as a premed student studying biology...tomorrow.

I consider myself many things. I am a mom of two very active boys. I am a fulltime student. I am a manic wife to a mid-level manager who, while not a workoholic, is a self-confessed adrenaline-junkie who is not satisfied unless challenged and is an oh-by-the-way-premed student, also. In his spare time (you can stop laughing now.) I consider myself creative. I consider myself fun. I think I'm reasonably funny (although others may not get the punchline.) And most of the time I can at least appear to have my sh*t together. But one thing I don't consider myself to be is original. I'm betting there are others that might enjoy reading about my journey because they're on a similar one, or want to be.

A casual survey of cars in my subdivision has turned up many university parking permits. Some of these cars hold carseats, toys, week-old french fries, and sour sippy cups that have rolled under the seat. I realized that many in my generation -- maybe not a majority, but many -- have opened their eyes recently to find that their break from college took them a decade or so down their life's path, and they have found themselves, two houses, a career or two, and babies later -- still on that break. Many have found that their original degree and career was not all that and a bag of chips, and have decided to change their lives by going back to school, kids in tow. The small population I've studied (or, at least, their cars) here in smalltown Texas is proof of that.

So I'm not the only one. Huh.