Cheating a bit today

Usually I'm writing to you about something that has grabbed my attention during the day...or the week...

But because I've been feeling crook for over three weeks now, I just haven't been in a writing mood. I've read a fat novel, Tully, by Paullina Simons, during those hours when my brain just wasn't up to thinking about work.

I had an email from Facebook reminding me that my A Cuppa With Kerry 'likers' will be missing me...I wonder if that is true...

Anyway, to fill the gap until I'm ready to write again, I thought I'd share a little something I wrote when I was at a Writers' Group meeting a couple of years ago. It still rings true for me in many ways, and even though my numbers this year won't be a nine, I'm still enjoying a lucky year. 

I have full-time work, a lovely little house to live in for now, visits from both of my precious children (one starting next Sunday, so I'm very excited), other family not too far away, and a very thoughtful and loving partner in my life. Today, I have flowers! Today I had a lovely walk on the beach, made my very favourite Red Lentil and Root Vegetable soup and spent a couple of hours at work. 

Life is often what you make it...I've been saying over and over, I'm so happy, but I feel so awful...but I'm so happy :) So my lovely readers, here's a snip with some thoughts I had in the past. Hope you'll enjoy them too.

A Little Hard to Bear

I was born on the twenty-seventh. 

Two plus seven makes nine. 

Nine is my lucky number so my birthday is lucky too. 

This year I turned fifty-four. 

Five plus four makes nine. 

So this is my lucky year. 

I might not have another one like this until I’m sixty-three or seventy-two or eighty-one or ninety. 
But the thing is that at this age, it’s a little hard to bear that I don’t yet have life all worked out.

I mean, I’ve done all this mid-life menopausal soul-searching.

I've lost myself and found myself and even learned to like…no, love myself. 

But still I feel like a child. 

I’m sure I ought to feel ‘grown up’ by now. 

Isn’t it true that by fifty-four you are ‘mature-age’? 

I was a mature-age student at forty-seven!! 

I felt so sage, sharing my wisdom with the just-out-of-high-schoolers. 

Ha!

I brought life experience to the table. 

I felt sort of superior in a sense. 

But really, I shared only snips of knowledge. 

My opinions, formed over a longer time perhaps, but of no greater value really than anyone else’s. 

No less valuable, and no more. 

Really. 

It’s a little hard to bear that at fifty-four you can talk and talk and talk and listen to others talking and talking and nothing seems to be getting any better. 

The world declines in health minute by minute. 

Television spews forth talk of wars, hatred, violence, destruction. 

Not on four channels like in the good old days; now there are forty-four or a hundred and forty-four or more! 

It’s a little hard to bear clicking through all those channels looking for something to watch. 

And so to the daily entertainment; grim visages of rotting corpses, larger than life, plastered like wall-paper across the lounge. 

X Factor, The Voice, Australia’s Got Talent, Idol; people singing, people screaming, shouting, applauding the people singing; mania.

They did that for the Beatles; then, I was only two thirds of nine. 

But now it is bigger, grander, and madder on screens that eclipse the view from the window, and steal sleep with their insistent presence.  

Close the curtains to keep the sun off the screen so we can all enjoy a make believe nightmare, no longer working on a tan but upping our chances of becoming Vitamin D deficient. 

Slip, slop, slap. 

Click, goes the computer mouse, click, click click…type in Vitamin D deficiency; symptoms…oh look in the side bar – Nicole Kidman loses 5kg of ugly belly fat – really? 

Now what was I doing? 

Ah, that’s right, checking the Lotto numbers…this is my lucky week. 

The ticket is not a winner. 

Suddenly it dawns on me; I’m going to have to get out there and make my own luck. 

It’s a little hard to bear…knowing it’s all up to me. 

It's all up to us people. We have to make our own luck. Hope you're having a lucky day, a lucky week, a lucky month or a lucky life. 

Luck and love to you all. Kerry