Where to?

Lately, my rowboat has been doing that spinning thing that happens in a boat when you don't know how to row. It's a surprisingly gentle motion, a kind of slow aimless spinning and I freely admit to not doing much to stop the spinning. It is also not the kind of gentle drifting that happens when you purposefully put the oars up and rest back to enjoy a bit of afternoon sun on the lake. I am somewhere, then, between contentment and crisis.

At almost 40, I am feeling a deep joy in my life as is but also a feeling that I have to be doing something....more? This may not be the right word. It's more that I feel like I need to do something that is going to bring money into my home. A feeling that someday my beasties will be grown and I will be home, idle. I certainly can not imagine spending my older years being a housewife. I am not a housewife now. I am a mother who is educating her beasties into hopefully radical beings. But this will not forever. And that is where the aimless rowing comes into play.

What next? My carefully laid plans for a Ph.D failed to materialize from dream into reality. I am not ever going to be a writer because while I have grands plans, I don't really write. And let's be realistic even if I did manage to discipline myself into writing there is only a small chance I could sell what I write. I am feeling ever more unsure of the Ph.D. But I don't know what I'd do with  myself if I didn't do the academy.

A recent mini crisis has thrown this all into the light. For awhile I was satisfied with just kind of spinning around, looking at the various option through the prism of motion. But now something has happened that has brought the spinning to stop and put the oar in my hand.