Inner Reflections

I don’t care for looking in mirrors.  Not only the literal ones, where a reflection of your outer self looks back, but the inner one as well.  You know that one where you see inside yourself.  The one only YOU can view?

The A-Z blog was not an easy time for me.  It unsettled the plan that I had put into place at the end of last fall.  The one where I was going to get back to my writing.  It took months to prepare.  I chronicled the time in my very first blog post.  And things began well.  I was writing 1 – 2 blogs a week, following the writers websites that I had searched out and decided on and was developing a working balance of writing and reading back into my daily life. 

Then I decided to plunge in and do the A-Z challenge.  And I challenged myself to the theme of connecting my childhood to my present life with one word from the alphabet as we traveled A-Z.  By that time, I knew the time commitment to preparing and posting a blog and felt I could manage the 26 posts.  I was not prepared however for the “collateral” time.  Unbelievably, I didn’t think about the time involved in reading other’s blogs, in becoming followers of writers that I really enjoyed.  In the time it would take to post comments that reflected the writer’s time and energy they’d invested back to them.  In the amount of time I would spend thinking about what they wrote, comparing their writing to mine and others.  In a word, it was overwhelming.    

I stopped reading.  I stopped following the posts of the writing blogs that I had so carefully researched.  And I lost my focus.  But I wrote.  A lot.  I shared. A lot.  And I learned.  A lot. 

It’s taken a good week into May just to draw a deep breath.  And of course, take a long look into that inner mirror.  It reflected my posts that hit some familiarly fond memories, highlighted a few surprising ones, dusted off a few sad times and exposed a few skeletons.  One reflected the deepest nerve I have.

And there, amidst all the reflections, shone the prism of my mother.  In a word, it was overwhelming.  To see, after the month of posts how much influence she had in forming me, in shaping the wife, the lover, the mother, the daughter, the friend and the person I am…well, it’s unsettling. 

Make no mistake; I loved my mother, sometimes to distraction.  I am quite proud and grateful to carry many of her traits and qualities.  She was a fine, loving, grace-filled woman.  She was also human with human failings.  And there are parts of me, both good and bad, that up to the month of April of my 49^th year, I thought were my own doing that I feel her hand in now as well.  No big revelation there, we are all shaped by our parents, our upbringing, teachers, mentors and friends.  I’m just surprised by how much “real estate” I feel of me is her doing at this point.

So I have a plan.  May is my time to step back and regroup.  I’ll revisit and catch up on the three primary blogs I followed before the challenge.  Then I’ll sort through the blogs I found in April.  I can’t read and post on all of them on a regular basis and still write.  I need to relocate the fragile balance I’d begun to develop in the New Year between reading, blogging, writing, working and living my day to day life.

And, there’s the little matter of going back to the mirror to explore this new facet of my relationship with my mother.  Three years gone now, and I’m still learning from her.  I know she wasn’t big on analyzing relationships like I am.  That is one facet of me that I know I own outright.  It’s a good place to start.