YESTERDAYS (A-Z April Blog Challenge)

There’s a certain safety to “yesterdays”.  See, I’m a worrier and a pessimist by nature; and yes, a bit of a control freak as well.  So, “todays”…well they are something that I always feel the need to be on top of.  In control of.  It’s often hard for me to keep up to the speed of today – to stay abreast of the minute to minute happenings.  And today, well that rolls easily into the “tomorrows” with the constant  worry of what’s to come, what choices will have to be made or the stumbling blocks that lay yet unseen.    

Yesterdays are done.  They are out of my control.  They are someplace I go to give my heart, my mind, my thoughts and emotions the luxury of time to absorb.  Without a doubt, I spend way too much time in my yesterdays. 

I made it a personal mission to visit some point of my “yesterdays” with each blog post for the A-Z challenge.  Each post needed to carry some thread from my younger years my present.  And overall I’m satisfied with the outcome.  I can see the finish line and am confident that April 30^th will end with a completed challenge. 

The plan I had for completing the posts flew out the window from Day 1.  Each letter seemed to take on a mind of its own until I came up with just the right ONE WORD to write. Many, many drafts were tossed because I felt I wasn’t being honest to the mission I gave myself.  Yes, I could write about a topic, and hey, I’m a writer, I could weave a tale or two and work something in.  But that wasn’t what I needed.  Part of the mission, was to see if I could write about myself. Honestly.  My history.  My yesterdays.  And I did.

And in full disclosure, was View-Master a big sharing of myself?  Hardly.  It was a fun and light piece.  At the other end of the spectrum, writing Once … well that was like cutting into my soul.  The rest fell somewhere in-between.    

The final part of my mission was to gauge my comfort level in sharing my writing.  It took a lot for me to reach out before the challenge started and invite people in an email explaining what I was going to do. I like to write, but it’s very hard for me to get past the self-deprecating editor on my shoulder, much less throw my writing out there in front of moving traffic.  But I did.  And some completely ignored it.  And some visited every now and then.  Some were faithful and supportive.  And then some went above and beyond.  They commented.  They followed my blog.  They wrote funny or upbeat remarks.  They wrote remarks that were incredibly insightful, kind and empathetic.  The support and encouragement from the GBE2: Blog On group has been humbling.

Many of the yesterdays I visited surprised me.  There were things that held much greater significance than I ever realized.  And possibly the greatest surprise was the prevalence of the presence of my mom.  Never before this month have I felt so shaped by her hands as I do now. It’s both a pleasant and not an altogether comfortable feeling, but certainly one to mull over as I visit more of my yesterdays.