I'm The Pink Sheep of the Family

I'll be riding a lull until after the new year. My teaching schedule for the next month hopefully won't be too spotty. I finally have free time to get my car fixed. (I got a ding last spring and finally received a check from the insurance people a couple of weeks ago.) Where to begin to have a personal life? Car, laundry, going through the paper pile? Sleep, eat, nap?

Meanwhile, family obligations landing in the space of long-awaited free time is giving me a sense of pre-claustophobia.

I woke up today again to a troublesome neck. I drive down to San Diego tomorrow after completing my last lesson for the evening at 8pm. I can already hear the lecture that I should stop working so hard and date...

And conform to social ritual, go shopping, dress up for banal conversation in a stupid search that ends with me never writing again or playing the piano so that I may live to do someone's laundry, cooking and cleaning, checking homework, fevers, and humoring attentions 24/7.

Some girls want that and sometimes fight tooth and nail to dissolve their identities in someone else's needs. I'm not that girl.

I am a traitor to span courtship at a mind-boggling pace while my counterparts want to race to the chapel.

I don't think I'm jaded because I enjoy a family where everyone loves married life and is actually ENJOYING it. I am taking my time to other's dismay but not mine. It is both ridiculous and sometimes stressful.

Until cupid strikes me down, I will continue being the pink sheep of the family... enjoying being myself and being with myself.

JNET