The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

This weekend, I saw my brother-in-law, a regular reader of The BetsyG-Spot, and he asked why I was slacking and where my posts were. Good question. It was with some trepidation that I finally looked at my stats today and saw the sad result of not having posted anything for a few weeks. Slacking indeed.

To tell you the truth, apart from lacking romantic inspiration (see my last several posts), I haven’t had a break from working/writing in a long time. I did have a fabulous vacation to Italy in April, but it wasn’t down time, and I am desperate for it. Nothing is feeding my creative soul, and I have been working to carve out my non-work days for at least a little relaxation and reflection. I don’t seem to be able to do it all at any one time. By that I mean, I like to read, I like to write, I like to learn, and I like to create. But it seems when I do one, it is to exclusion of something else. For the past six months, I have been spending most of my time (when I am not goofing off) in writing-related activities and learning Italian. I hadn’t been reading at all. But in the past few weeks, I have allowed myself to spend my non-work hours doing something other than writing, and I am reading again at my usual pace of about a book a week. Of course, my Italian is also dropping off.

If only I didn’t have that pesky responsibility: work. I frequently envision a much simpler life in which I am not working for anyone else but am spending my time as I believe I was meant to: reading, learning, creating, and writing. If I didn’t have kids, that would be a reality, because I could dump the house that takes too much to keep up, take the proceeds, live mortgage-free somewhere much cheaper, and perhaps take on a job that didn’t require the brain resources my current job does to pay the rest of the bills. Not that I’ve thought this through more than a thousand times.

In any case, I am taking time off from work next week, but I’ll stop short of calling it a vacation, because I will probably be all over the Northeast looking at colleges for my middle son rather than doing what I really need to do, which is get myself to the beach with a stack of books and a notebook.

On an unrelated note, for those who have read some of my deleted posts, recall that I wrote one about a crush I’d had on someone who had an unattractive habit. I had been concerned that somehow that post, among others, would get read by the wrong people. I don’t know if that happened, but I do know that I saw the fellow with the habit last weekend, and when I said hello, he didn’t respond except by glaring at me. Hmmm. His friends are still speaking to me, though, so who knows. I would feel bad except I don’t truly think I said anything to disparage the guy’s character, and my follow-on post, in fact, praised him as, apart from his tendency to ignore me, I always thought he seemed like a fine person, and the tone of anything I wrote about him should have reflected that.

And on another unrelated and random note, I had kind of a novel thought the other day. My 11-year-old went into one of his helpless and whiny modes, which happens far too frequently for a child that age. He still counts on me to get him his breakfast, and if I don’t do it, he’ll eat cookies rather than pouring himself a bowl of cereal. The helplessness is annoying, but his acting like a 5-year-old on occasion is what really gets me. And that’s when the thought hit me: I am closing in on 50 and have been taking care of babies for 19 years. I am too old to continue to handle that behavior.

The reason that is novel is that a few months ago, one of my classmates from high school referred to us as “almost 50″—too old to party as we always have at our upcoming reunion. Wow. Almost 50? I’m still in my 20s, pretty much. Who’re you calling “almost 50″?

Yet in this context, it seemed to fit. I know there are people who have or adopt babies late in life and what a blessing that is for them. But for me at this age, I am so weary of responding to the needs of what feels like an overgrown toddler. So in that context, I hate to even think it, I am…almost 50.