secretary by birthright

I say that my mother is a queen.

Actually, she was desperate to be educated and employed like her friends.

Finally she picked up a job at a real estate concern for a few years as an administrative assistant. She was a typist of course, as she was when she met my father, and as her mother was before her. She took care to see that I took a typing course after 8th grade? or was it 12rh grade? So, I was able to type my English papers in college and I got temp secretarial work during the summers. Someone said not to do that. But I was always able to pick up work as a typist. I realized that I was disabled when I wasn’t able to do this any more.

Then, after the horrific incident in the ICU in ’86, I just literally couldn’t even get up any more. Social Security came to me at the State Hospital to sign me up for disability benefits that got me out of the hospital and kept me afloat for the rest of my life.

So, somehow I wound up following the course I avowed as I anticipated matriculating at Harvard; which was to become a writer. But for dignity rather than for pay. It was always my strong suit. i was a childhood reader and words came hard to me at times and overflowed at others in a way that is difficult to explain. (Ditch the book Dad. Start over. You’ll live to 100. Trust me on this.) I was simultaneously a brilliant mathematician. i had to choose, and I ditched the math. But the math and the English came together in my beautiful computer program that I bespoke in my last post. i was a gifted writer in a way that was sadly lost. But I learned to write for a cause–my human rights pursuits such as the pro-Life cause. My mother, my sister, and I all turned out similarly: we were politicalized, and used our talents–secretarial and otherwise–to support our causes.

I encouraged my father to take up writing in his retirement and he did so to a fault. I am just begging him to quit mincing words and open up his soul. It runs through all the men in the family–my brother I don’t know about. My husband and son are both gifted writers.

I have been blogging since about 2008 and it has led me to a world of hurt. i just didn’t understand the medium and where it was going. It became an escape valve and I didn’t understand how far it was travelling.

So, I have been backing off a bit recently and trying to get a grip here.

What I really want to talk about today is hi-tech and aliens and Jesus and how the hallucunigenic mold problem in the cottage blew me out of the stick-in-the-mud avid reader who didn’t want to do “shrooms” into an Andy Warhol styled “Mom” intellectual; it was just CRAZY what I went through there but now I finally understand. And I am finally out of the 80’s and into the 21st century and the 3rd millenium! And maybe I will beat this illness and live to see anorher day!