Baggage

I have pretty much totally lost track of my goals. Even my most recent goal of writing just for myself has gone by the wayside. I have mostly been reading instead from the three different books I am chewing through.

I’ve also committed myself to helping a friend-of-a-friend revamp her memoir. I have set the goal that we have one year to get it ready for publication and then we will begin the arduous task of finding an agent or a publisher.  Her manuscript needs a LOT of work and she doesn’t have a clue where to begin. She now considers me her “co-author”, which I am balking at. She is the author of the book, and if this gets published, my name may appear in small print on the cover as “with Chris Loehmer Kincaid” or something innocuous like that.

The other big news is that my daughter has talked me into being the one to lead the first team to Kenya on behalf of Tumaini Volunteers. We only have one volunteer who will be ready to go by this fall, so the two of us plan on doing more of a fact-finding mission and pinning down the project (building chicken coops is at the top of the list right now) which Val and her team will undertake a year from now. I can face going two weeks without a shower, I can deal with the bland, tough meat they serve, I can manage more rides on matatus. My only fear is that this news may put my mother in her grave. Or on the upside, I get to listen to her lecture me for the next six months. Perhaps now though is the time to tell her as a 17-year-old girl just killed her parents in the neighboring town, so let me remind you, Mother, that nowhere is safe.

The small amount of mental health counseling I have had over the years never even touched the emotional scars my mom subjected me to and apparently is still subjecting me to.

Well, that’s it for now. I’m not making any goals for the coming week and don’t know when I will check back. Sorry for not playing by the rules. Perhaps my mother will only have a debilitating stroke and I will have lots of time to write as I sit at her bedside.

My mom with my sister Pat on the occasion of my first wedding, in 1985.