I have had a remarkably good life but it has also been quietly difficult. I learned a long time ago that life can change in the blink of an eye. The chapters of my story read like a Greek tragedy and yet if I tell the tale in its entirety it sounds as though i have always been the luckiest person in the world. I suppose that my grit has carried me through the ups and downs that seem to be the way things are in most people’s lives. 

Anyone who has followed my blogs knows the challenges I have faced as well as the wondrous happiness that I have experienced. Until I was eight years old life seemed perfect to me. I lived in a kind of wonderland of middle class abundance. I rode around in a new fancy car. My beautiful home was filled with fine furniture, books, music, artwork. My parents were brilliant and well educated. I attended private school and had many friends that I still count among the special people in my life. I suspect that I might have been the envy of people who saw the seeming perfection of how I lived.

My roller coaster ride began from the moment my father announced that we were leaving our model life behind and striking out for adventure in California. I eight years old and never really adjusted to saying adieu to everyone and everything that had seemed to define who I was. Somehow I was not inclined to be as daring as my father. He had constantly moved from one place to another with his family when he was a boy. He liked the idea of exploring and trying new things. He had a kind of wanderlust baked into his personality. I would have preferred staying with what I knew.

After my father’s announcement that we were heading to California we seemed to hook up with a whirlwind from October to the following May. Ours was an unsettling journey from one place to another as my father struggled to find something that I never quite understood. After living in San Jose and Los Angeles California and then Corpus Christi, Texas, I felt like the kid who comes and goes to different schools never having the time to make friends or understand the expectations of how to behave in a new environment. I was an unhappy vagabond until we finally landed back in Houston, Texas at the tail end of the school year. I set aside the loneliness and confusion that I had been feeling and looked forward to a new beginning in the city where everything and everyone that I loved seemed to be.

Of course I had not counted on losing my father in a car accident. I had never heard of anyone whose parent died at the age of thirty three. The trauma that I felt would alter me and stay with me for years before I felt that I was in control of my life. I went inside myself and learned to celebrate small moments while not counting on anything to last forever. 

My new outlook on life made me cynical but it also kept me optimistic as strange as that may sound. I learned not to be surprised when terrible things happened. In fact I expected such things to take place. But I also knew that if I took a deep breath and kept pushing forward even the worst times would ultimately go away providing me with respite from my sorrows. 

Thus has been my life. I have had long stretches of good fortune almost always followed by painful challenges. Because of my background I have navigated through life with a sense of wariness but also the knowledge that I have the ability to weather any storm. So when my mother was diagnosed with mental illness that would last for the remainder of her life when I was only twenty I grieved for a time and then set to work facing the reality of the situation. There would be beautiful ups and tragic downs in my relationship with her but I chose to concentrate on the times when she was well and happy and inspiring. 

I somehow found the perfect husband to accompany me through both the good and bad times. He has always been supportive in the situations that threatened to break me. When he contracted a fungal disease that is sometimes deadly and spent many months in the hospital being treated with chemotherapy I prepared myself for both the best and worst possible outcomes. I shed my tears and focused on my two little girls and kept the faith that his doctors would know what to do to restore his health. 

Surprisingly after all of these tragedies had affected me and the people I loved until my late twenties there came a decades long period of relative calm that allowed me to enjoy my family and my friends with only minor annoyances. While I still had to watch over my mother who would have many recurrences of her worst symptoms I mostly felt a sense of balance and stability in my daily routines, I enjoyed my family, my work, my neighbors, my friends, my trips. My children grew up, went to college and left home to begin their own lives. There was a tranquility in my world that was healing. 

Now that I am older it seems that the challenges are arising with great frequency once again. None of the elders who supported me for all of my life are still alive. With each passing year more and more of the friends who were so important to me have also died. I have grandchildren now and many of my friends are young enough to be my children. The changes keep coming more and more rapidly and sometimes I do become afraid. Then I tell myself that I know the drill. I have suffered many times and each time the sun has risen once again and I ventured forward in happiness. I don’t worry as much as I once did because now I am certain that I know how to do whatever I must do.