doing my dreams

Today I start a new way of life.... again. E is in dagplejer! He started this morning. Dagplejer is part of the Danish government's system of child care and education. As a mother, I had three options of what I could do with E when he was big enough to spend the day away from me. I choose the option of keeping him at home and not trying to work. We could have sent him to a vuggestue, which is an institutional day care. "Institutional" makes vuggestue sound a lot more sterile and prison like than it is- a vuggestue is daycare at a school; the same type of school that E will start in nine months when he goes to the Danish version of kindergarten called børnehaven. The third option besides keeping a child at home and sending them to a vuggestue is, obviously, sending them to a dagplejer.

Dagplejer is daycare in a local woman's home. Our dagplejer mor (literally: daycare mom) is a short 5 min walk away from our door. One women will have three to five kids in her home during the day where they play, eat and nap. It's normal to start your child in dagplejer at 8 months old in Denmark, but we started E now, right after he turned 2. We choose a dagplejer over a vuggestue because we specifically wanted E to get used to being away from me during the day. We decided to start him at the børnehaven would be overwhelming for E. Imagine going from being alone at home everyday with just your mom to being in a school with 80 other kids. And this is not a "sit down at a desk and learn to read or write or glue something to something else" type of school. This is a school complete with ball pit, dance music and tree forts in the forest. So, we felt like a good step in between would be a dagplejer where E can process the idea of being away from me everyday without so much background noise.

So, in my first two hours of freedom, I have run :-) and done the normal morning chores. Now I am writing. Marc wants me to do my dreams (that is his line, not mine :-) so I am going to spend time writing everyday. I am going to write a book. I am going to re-vamp my blog. I am going to start putting some effort in getting page views. Because right now this blog is about me. Me communicating to whoever cares enough to want to hear what I have to say. But I want to be a writer. I want to call myself an author and I want to be self-published (though that is another topic all on it's own). I don't want to scrounge for whatever will pay me. I have done that as a technical writer for a few years and it's almost worse then not writing at all. I want to write about what I love and I want to push myself into realms of expression I have never had to be in before.  And I want to be able to do that forever.

The problem is the forever part, because eventually I will need to have a financial incentive to keep tapping on the keyboard in front of me. I hate it, but it is the reality. Our family basically lives paycheque to paycheque. Anytime we save up some money, it goes towards travelling and we don't even save up enough money to cover all of those costs. We are blessed by our mothers and siblings who cover the bills that we can't. But eventually, we won't be able to say to them "we can't pay that because Catherine has been trying to be a writer..." Eventually, I will have to be an income earner. period. So I hope today is the first day that I can work towards doing what I am truly passionate about (obviously that is writing) everyday for the rest of my life.

I'll keep you posted on how that turns out.