After being away for three months, I am trying to find my life again. What parts should I keep? Do I want to keep? What parts should be updated?

One thing that I am trying to keep is my promise to write. I had pledged to write one essay a week for the year. It started so well. Every Saturday, boom. I had a deadline. I had the motivation. I had a special writing spot where I could hunker down and ideas just popped up each week drawing words out of me. When I was still writing after the first month, I was excited. I was sure my writing would start to improve. It would capture my thoughts. By the end of the year, I would have a literary portrait of myself. I was confident and sure of my resolve.

Then I left the country.

I thought the solitude of living alone would be conducive for writing. I thought the nights alone would give me the time to play with language, to illuminate my deepest thoughts. I didn’t realize that my hunkering spot was so important so I set out to find a new one. The kitchen table seemed ideal since that is where I work at home. But no, even though it glowed in the morning sun, and glimmered in the setting sun, there always seemed to be other things to do. I tried to work in the bedroom, but there was no desk. Eventually, I hauled a kitchen chair into the room and used the bed as a desk. That was minimally successful. I did get ideas popping onto the paper, but they never developed past the first few lines. Maybe it was more than a hunkering place that I was missing. Maybe I lost the essence of myself, my American self. Now I was back in the land of my childhood. I could walk the beach, visit with family, or hold my grandbaby. I could go walking with friends from high school. People knew me, but they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. Oh, I know their names and their histories, but I never had the luxury of walking with them through their lives. At least, thirty years of American life had intervened. Yet we were family. We were friends. While small details of my life were unknown, our friendships started up as though no time had passed. So then I thought I would find my other self. Still there was no writing.

Then my mom went to hospital.

The solitude was gone. The long nights alone gave way to exhausting evenings sitting in a ward watching and waiting. There was plenty of time to think, but the thinking was about childhood. My mother wanted things to be her way. She wanted me to be her child. She wanted to be my mother. My siblings spent more time together than they had ever done. I am fourteen years older than my youngest sister. When I left home at 18, I devoured a new world. I started my own family. Most of my siblings were left in the old world where they grew up and started their own families. But now we were together, we hae one mission. We need to stand by our mother. My high school friends also stepped in, giving me respite, giving me advice and walks in the dark. I found my old life there and it grew and developed. I spent hours thinking about what to write, about my life, about my mother, about what to write.

Then I came home.

After being away for three months, I am trying to find my life again. Maybe I did find my life. Maybe my life is the sum of its parts. I may leave portions behind, but they are still there. They can delight or haunt me, they can support me or devastate. Writing will surely help to sort this out.