Introducing Me! My First Entry!

I have had this blog set up since 2008, but have not had the courage (?) to write anything!  Pretty sad that it has taken me 5 years to get going on it; but I am at a point in my life now that I feel more comfortable sharing my thoughts, experiences, perspectives and life on the internet.

As the title implies, I am in my so-called "second half of life," that is, over 50 years of age, and soon to be 60 (!) years of age in October.  I have mixed feelings about turning 60, but will address that later in another blog.  This blog is just to introduce myself to the blogging community and hopefully get me motivated to keep blogging!

How I got interested in blogging is fairly straightforward - my daughter (whom I shall call K) blogs and a lot of her friends do also, and I started reading those and thought, hey, that might be fun to write my thoughts down, too!  Actually, my daughter has no idea that I read her blog, as I am not sure if she would be comfortable knowing that I do read it, but I do want to say that she writes extremely well and I have learned some things about her (good things!) that I didn't know.  

K and I have a great relationship, we can talk about almost anything, but for some reason I get the feeling that there is a part of her that wants to keep her blog and her Facebook account separate from what she shares with me; and I am okay with that, as I respect her privacy, but still at times wish she felt comfortable sharing those aspects of her life with me.

I have another daughter, whom I shall call L, and is younger than K, who is completely opposite in this respect of being open with me.  She doesn't blog, but she was more than happy to be my friend on Facebook, which shocked me, as I figured she would want to keep that private.  L and I have a wonderful relationship, too, and I guess she is more like me in that she is very open and down to earth and very easy to talk with about anything.

K is more like her father, whom I shall refer to as CJ.  (Sorry for the use of initials, but I guess since I am new to blogging, I feel the need to not use full names right now, maybe later on I will use names.)  CJ and K are not good at communicating - it is very frustrating for me, as I grew up in a family that shared nearly everything with each other - good stuff, bad stuff and argumentative stuff and emotional stuff.  Sure we would get angry with each other, but after a blow-up, we were able to talk about our feelings and generally would come to a much better understanding of each other, and the best thing was that our arguments/discussions always cleared the air.

It has been very hard at times living with CJ, since his way is to totally STOP communicating and the main thing I have learned over the years is that if CJ doesn't want to talk about something, there is NOTHING in the world that will make him talk.  It is frustrating and upsetting, but I have come to terms with it, and so as a result I am not the same open and lively person I used to be.  I guess with marriage comes compromise, and that has been my biggest compromise - learning to keep my mouth shut and not cause waves in the relationship, as it is pointless to try and discuss things with CJ.

Unfortunately, my daughter, K, is very similar.  She will talk sometimes more about issues than her father, but many times she is very closed-mouth about her feelings and what is bothering her.  I hope that as she goes through life she will find ways to cope with her feelings and not hold them in so much, as I don't think that is healthy.  

My daughters are both married, and both of our sons-in-laws are wonderful men.  We feel so blessed to have such great sons-in-laws, and also they are great friends with whom we enjoy spending time.  

So, this was not much of a post, kind of rambling and not very cohesive, but future posts will have more of a theme to them.  

I hope that you enjoy reading my posts and that in some small way you will come away from reading them feeling like it was worthwhile.  Please feel free to leave comments, as I would love to hear from anyone and I hope to be able to make many new friends with blogging.