Five Minute Friday: Real

{ I saw this on Erin's blog & loved this idea--the Gypsy Mama's five-minute-friday, writing unedited, un picked over, unprimped up, just whats on your heart. so here it is, in all its unedited glory...}

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ok, a post in which i am real.

i think as a creative type people assume we are bleeding all over the page every chance we get. and yes...i write for fun quite a bit. i blog and journal and poetry and fiction it up all the time. but the writing i do in my journal is a lot different from what i do in my poetry or even on my blog.

its hard to turn off the instinct to revise. to turn that phrase, to make people see you a certain way.

this semester one of my assignments for my comp students was to write on how media affects you, and many of them choose to write about facebook--how people can so easily put on a persona like a new coat, can tell only the happy things.

at the same time, is it really a place for rants and pity parties? hmmm.

anyway, what is going on with me, for real, this very day:

i'm drinking a homemade frappachino and plotting my attack on the spare room ( its sort of a shed like hobby room, off the sunroom and leading out to the backyard). i'm going to make it into a man-room for bryan. he sure as heck deserves it--whenever people ask me how i made it this first semester of teaching, with a little baby, with five classes, i tell them that i am blessed to be married to a truly amazing husband.

who moved states away for me. who pours his life into ministry, at church and at home. who took the humble job of watching our babygirl the days that i teach. who believes in me entirely.

sometimes when i feel discouraged about my writing--like i'm spinning my wheels, like i'm kidding myself thinking it will ever go anywhere--i think about how i have these people in my life that believe in me so much. So much! my parents think i could be poet laureate tomorrow. if i called and said, "hey mom, i'm poet laureate" she would not be surprised, seriously. and my husband! who thinks i'm the next sylvia plath (minus the sadness).

still, sometimes its easy to get discouraged. i write and write and write, will it ever come to anything? but there's so much pleasure in the writing itself. i really do love to write. i think its what i was made for; i knew it, i knew it young.

i'm thankful for where God has us right now. sometimes, i'll admit, i have moments of panic; i think maybe i've done wrong to go back to work, to not stay at home like i thought i was supposed to.

but then i see how happy my baby girl is, staying with her daddy the three days a week. and i think about how i have this job i don't remotely deserve , a job i wasn't even trying to get, that was handed to me. how could that be anything but God?

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pardon the rambly-ness--my mind doesn't go in a straight line