Help! I’ve lost myself!

What am I passionate about? I am a mother of three little boys; 3 years, 20 months and 6 weeks old. I am married to a gorgeous man and I love them all madly. I give all of myself away everyday to the point of not knowing what even makes me tick anymore. I am not passionate about my family. Passion requires enthusiasm and I’m just too fucking tired for that. For it to be real passion I should never have to share IT or explain IT or feel guilty about not having IT. But what is IT? And, more importantly, where did it go? Is passion still there – lurking around the edges of a life full of baby food, nappies and breast-feeding?

The first in my family to ever finish high school I used to fancy myself a writer. As a child I wrote and authored stories and stapled them together to make books, could read before pre-school, explained rhetorical questions to my year 4 classmates (naïve to the concept that they might not care), grew tall and fat and spent most of primary school hiding in the library reading Enid Blyton stories to get away from the teasing of the cool kids. I got clear of my small town, went to university, studied seriously (no, seriously), graduated with HD average and said lofty things like “I’m a writer not a journalist” to anyone who cared. I wrote and wrote and wrote. Even got published here and there, almost made a living from it. I took notes, collected quotes, kept journals. . . One day these would serve a rich source to mine.

I took ‘real’ jobs. I fell in love. I became a widow. I met my soul mate. I had children. I dared to be happy.

Then A Strange Thing Happened – I stopped writing. Thinking it would always be there. That I could always come back to It. I looked at my journals with a critical eye – Self conscious? Check. Pretentious? Check. Needy and trying to be quirky? Check. So I committed the cardinal writer’s sin. I burnt them. Journals were unnecessary I thought . . . I was going to live life not record it.

By setting fire to my words I had extinguished an internal flame. Something that had fuelled me since childhood, kept me from . . . from falling so many times.

So I have decided to start writing again. But it’s not going to be easy. In fact in writing this I have been followed from room to room twice by Mr. magentafrog making jokes about losing me to the internet where he’ll have to read my blog to find out what’s happening in our lives. I tell him bluntly, it’s about me my Beautiful not you. He nods his head in acceptance, farting for emphasis.

I have discovered a passion for fresh air.