Girl On the Road

Men don’t forget who they really are. A woman, she forgets.

She forgets the “girl on the road” …that sweet, idealistic young lady with grand dreams and even grander plans.

A man, on the other hand, is still searching for himself and chasing what he wants long after some woman has told him to grow up, get serious and buckle down already. Long after she has forgotten who she wanted to become and what she wanted to do, and given up her own chase.

In PS I Love You (DARE you to try to watch it without crying), her husband writes in one of his last letters that “I’m not worried about you forgetting me luv. It’s that [young, idealistic, dreamy] girl on the road you have forgotten.” So true. As women, we don’t call it forgetting. We don’t realize we’ve forgotten a thing.

We call it growing up or moving on. We forget that we once wanted to chase corner offices, safaris to Africa to save the animals, careers at a big 4 accounting, law, engineering, etc. firm, painting, fashion design, interior design, photography….or writing. Instead, we say that our dreams changed when we met the man of our dreams, or when we ended up in a good career that buys us good shoes, or both. We say our kids, husbands, work, homes, friends, Bible studies, churches, book clubs, gardens, pets, cleaning, cooking, and all those other little (and big) things are what is important now. We don’t understand it when our husbands still want to climb Everest, catch the biggest fish or climb to new corporate heights simply because that’s what they want to do, or even the guy that wants to drop back and take a “dream” job that buys a smaller house. Guess what? They don’t understand why their women have forgotten the "girl on the road," that one they met and loved.

But I ramble. As much as we love him and them, it’s not about the things that drag us away and make us forget and grow up. That’s not the point.

The point is that I definitely forgot my “girl on the road.” That is, if I ever really knew her at all. And it’s time to remember. To write. Because I, as the “girl on the road,” was a writer. Not one that anyone ever knew of or talked about, but one that had piles of ideas laying around, and even one whose professors told “you should be a novelist, not an attorney,” and who relished pen pals (and who perhaps led more than one guy to think there may have been more behind a missive than a girl who just simply loved letter and email writing for the sake of writing – ha! oops!). Who knows where life will lead, or if the things that made me forget will get in the way, ultimately, of becoming any sort of novelist or “real” writer (as I like to think of those who get up everyday to write and get their stuff in print). But at the very least, I’m taking back this little corner of my little world.

Feel free to read the musings, or not. Because while a blog happens to be the easiest way to write these days - the easiest way to not have messy piles of paper laying around, anyway - getting back to the “girl on the road” is not about anyone else, it is about feeding my soul. And if I’m lucky, encouraging someone out there to do the same for herself.

(Besides, I have a whopping four followers who didn’t sign up to see my ramblings, but to look at wedding pictures that I never got around to posting. I heart y’all and you are my Besties, but that’s hardly an audience.)