Getting REAL

I particularly enjoy reading the stories, real or fictional, of women who shed their daily lives to wander off to other places and in the process discover themselves.  I enjoy these stories and I hate them.  The jealous part of me becomes positively green-eyed when I see how conveniently all these women are either writers, able to rely on some great book deal, or newly divorced with a rich settlement that allows them to chuck life as they know it and head off on great adventures to find themselves and in the process find not only inner peace but the love of their lives as well.  Sure, I think, it’s easy for them.  They don’t have children, or their children are grown, or conveniently living with their father or some other relative, and they, the children, certainly aren’t disabled.  I ache to be like these women, to throw away all the mundane realities of life as I know it and go questing – Charlemagne in search of the Holy Grail.  But I’m not and in all good conscience, I can’t. 

My life is about as real as they come.  I work to pay the bills, struggle with the economies of the moment, jettison all but the most necessary to stay financially afloat, feel stressed and strained by the demands on my time and energies that come part and parcel with having an adult child who despite her age is fully dependent.  My daughter’s care requires a stamina and strength I don’t believe I was born with but somehow I managed to mine.  Though I long to see the world, my quest, of necessity (and integrity) has been an inward one.  I couldn’t explore the outer so I held a glass to the inner.  What a world I did discover.