Life.
It chews you up and spits you out.
At least, that seems to be the case in the magnificently chaotic and ever-revolving world I love to call my home life.
Summer vacation, if you can even begin to call it that these days, is supposed to be a joyous and magical time full of grand experiences and memories. A time to relish and enjoy the days that come with a break before the adventures end and reality sets itself back into the mundane repetition we fear and cringe that haunt our souls.
I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed my time with family creating a scrapbook inside my skull to open periodically to make me smile and yearn for the next revolution of the planet to repeat.
And now, the real reality sets in.
I chose to put aside most of my writing and social responsibilities to focus on something I view as vastly more important, at least to me, my wonderfully supportive family. The time we have is limited to truly create and encourage memories and bonds that will last an eternity with our immediate nucleus. Put distracting priorities, though in the life of a writer, critical ones that feed our souls and minds as our bread and butter, ahead of our family, and we lose in the end.
No matter how many books we sell or fame we modestly gain.
You can never get back time. I wish we could. My son wants us to build a time machine so we can travel through the ages, exploring and seeing for ourselves the events of the past. I’ll get to work on that as soon as I break the paradigm of how in the known universe I can do it.
Really, I will.
Time is fleeting, a measure that moves forever forward and never looks back. When it’s gone friends, it’s vanished in the blink of an eye. It slithers and undulates along a path and just keeps going on and on, never veering off course. A straight line I would love to control to get back all of the things I have missed or ignored.
My life lessons taught me to stop and smell the roses. To step back and be the person I need to be as a parent and as a partner. Fame comes and goes. Money there for the taking only to dry up without notice. Each is not all that worrisome for little old me. I’m content being this guy right here.
What I’m not OK with at all is not being there for my children. Losing out on the small details of their lives and being absent where it manifests resentment in them. I cannot and will never be “that” dad.
There are instances when as an adult we have to be gone. Miss something important we wish we didn’t have to make a choice.
It’s inevitable.
However, we also have control over ourselves and really, our lives. The pandemic really taught me that. If you ignore family, you lose them in the end. So, in my loving heart, I put aside what I really needed to do and just let it all go to the wind.
If, only for a little bit.
What did I do? I pretty much went ghost and disappeared. Maybe not the smartest thing to do in the modern age of digital. I barely wrote or thought about my creations, though I did manage to plug away a tiny bit on my next two books. Enough to keep juices flowing and the plots prodding along as they should. A minute or two there before going back to summer fun.
Where do I find myself now?
Frantically attempting to get back on track and schedule to meet my own deadlines. I do have to produce, that’s not something that I can totally ignore. But, taking time away has refreshed my being, allowed my brain a rest from having to develop and mold creativity to put on paper my suspense thriller stories that drive my giddiness and makes my wife’s eyes roll when I get excited to talk about a plot point for the hundredth time.
Don’t get me wrong, she is my most ardent supporter and loves to read my works.
It’s just a tad monotonous to hear the same detail over and over. I get it and feel for her.
As authors, we absolutely need time away. Vacations away from us. Writing can be all-consuming to our lives and put our loved ones on the back burner from time to time. If we push them away too many times, they move on without us and we are left casual observers in the dark shadows, praying we could step into the light, though now it is far too late.
As I now journey into the latter half of 2022, and those around me have their own priorities to address, I can take a breath and begin to pen my words once again. That is not to say I forget family and we all do our own thing.
Oh, hell no.
Friends, even in the busiest of life, we have to stop and still enjoy our relationships. While I am pressed for time with my upcoming books, and really need to get back to these posts and my social accounts, I would not be whole without my wife and kids. Spending time with them makes me a complete person. I drop everything for them, because, that’s just who I have to be so my children know they are loved and come first, above all else.
At the end of my life, when all is said and done, I don’t want to be remembered as a famous author.
I want a smile on my children’s faces as their memories of us flood their minds and they know they were the most cherished things in my life.
That’s my fame, being the best dad I can and could ever be for them.
Jason McDonald 