HINGES...what if...



     Even though I’m a non-fiction writer at the moment, I have notebooks full of ideas for writing fiction set in my area of Colorado. Creating characters for my fiction is a powerful feeling. I get to choose their names, their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, as well as their backstories. Often when I daydream about my characters I find myself pondering the twists and turns their lives can take as I plot my stories. Which leads me to recollect the "what-if's," - the hinges on which so much turned as I've navigated my own life.
     The summer I was eighteen, I was so weary of being good, seriously - I was a good kid.  I was tired of tending little brothers and listening to my other brother's loud music and crude remarks. Tired of my parents constant arguing and harping on me for all kinds of things. I even wanted to go to church but my parents didn't have gas money and wouldn’t let me go. I wanted a taste of what I wasn't supposed to do so I spent my days at the lake, walking in the back way to avoid paying the fee. I met a boy/man named Everett, from Houston and I snuck out one night when Everett was there and decided to lose my virginity. Everett couldn't...ah... perform. What a disappointment, at the time. (FWIW having sex lost its appeal that night, until I got married.) I quit sneaking out after that and turned my sights to college in the fall. But what if.....I would have gotten pregnant.....and married Everett....or been a single mom...or given up the baby for adoption.
     I gave birth to nine children when I was married to my X. The first three were born within two and a half years; the first six children were born in the space of seven and a half years. Then I discovered birth control, to the dismay of X, and spaced the next two children. And then I had my last baby at the age of forty-three, when I thought my body was finished having babies. I love my dear children with all my heart, but what if.....I only had three children, or five....The thought is as foreign to me as committing a robbery. Which of my children would I have not had? Mothering nine children has made me the woman I am today.
     From 1990 - 1995, I owned a health food store - "Mother Nature's."  I LOVED that store! My kids worked there, we had extra income, which was oh so necessary with teenagers, and I became an expert in my field, attending and teaching classes and offering people alternatives to good health. I paid our mortgage, bought the groceries, sent my oldest son on a church mission, bought a car all by myself, and gained confidence that remains with me to this day. X never did like me owning the store, it was something he couldn't control. When my oldest kids left for college I sold the store, telling myself I wanted to travel and not be tied down, but really it was X's constant badgering. Sixteen months after selling "Mother Nature's" I was pregnant with my last child - surprise! I went from being a respected and successful business owner to being "barefoot and pregnant." But what if...I wouldn't have sold the store? Would it have been easier to leave X sooner if I was independent financially? Probably. Would I still have became pregnant? Maybe. I'll never know.
     HINGES...our lives swing on hinges, those decisions we make, sometimes in the heat of passion, sometimes with no thought for the consequences and sometimes believing we have complete control of the choice, only to find out later that we don't.
    I get to control the hinges in the worlds I create, in my imagination that runs silent but rampant inside my head. I like being in control of my fictitious worlds!