A Sacred Balance is about my circle of personal growth as I’m maturing into who I am designed to be.
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About Me
I’m proud to be Gen X. My parents are older, born in 1942, making them from the Silent Generation, whereas most of my peers have Boomer parents.
I’ve been blogging since about 2005, when there were free little scrapbooky online journals. Those posts are long gone now. This site began on Blogger and I migrated to WordPress in 2012. I’m not a techie, but I manage everything myself. I don’t have an assistant. I like to be in control.
I spent a couple years of almost no sleep, spending way too much money we didn’t have on a blog that makes next to nothing. It wasn’t worth it.
I’m more balanced now. I blog a few times a week about parenting, homeschooling, recipes, our travels, and sometimes military life.
I schedule social media posts that I find interesting and I hope you will too. I won’t post clickbait. You won’t find me on YouTube or Snapchat or TikTok because I’m over 40 and I just don’t care about any of that. I don’t even really like Pinterest or Instagram since it devolved into something different than their original designs. Some days, I just want to delete it all and be normal and other days I’m crying happy tears over a sweet comment that makes me feel like I make a difference.
Having an M.Ed. in secondary English education never prepared me to be a homeschool mom.
I was a school teacher for almost ten years. I taught English/language arts in grades seven through college level in public and private school. I earned a gifted education endorsement and taught ESL, regular ed, and gifted ed students.
I still keep in touch with some of my students. I love them and I am so proud of their accomplishments. I am especially fond of the ones who became teachers because of how much negativity they’re up against in our American society.
I’m married to an Air Force medical laboratory officer and we’re excited to live all over the world and soak up history and culture while he serves our country.
My children come first – before the blog, before any work opportunities, before social events. They are my priority. They teach me lessons every day.
I’m an INTJ. And a 1/5 on Enneagram. So this makes me seem a little weird and even intimidating to most people.
I enjoy writing about homeschool curriculum and product reviews that suit our interests and lifestyle.
Why I Write:
It’s always been a natural thing for me to write.
I loved learning to write and practicing in the workbooks or worksheets at school. I remember begging to learn cursive. Then my first grade teacher wrote a BIG RED X beside my name at the top of a paper because I wasn’t supposed to know how to write in cursive yet. She was not a nice person in many ways.
From middle school on, I scribbled in margins while I was supposed to be taking notes in class. I kept poetry notebooks in high school and college and ceremoniously burned them, thinking I was some modern-day Jim Morrison or something.
I had lots of alone time growing up as an only child with older parents.
I was an observer. I was quiet. I was often forgotten and got to hear more than I should.
Someday, when all the people who will be offended are gone, I shall write about them.
I hated reading until I was about 12 or 13 years old. I had no mentors to guide me into good literature. I’m embarrassed by all the time I wasted reading Sweet Valley High
I love exploring children’s and YA literature with my kids now. I had a really crappy and stressful K-12 education in Georgia. I was plagued by anxiety, bullied, and often left behind socially and academically.
I’d sit in the back of the room in my English classes in high school and read novels and poetry that were not in the textbook. I still made straight A’s in English somehow. I had a poorly qualified substitute teacher for two years during my junior and senior years of high school because the real teacher had cancer.
So, I didn’t even know how to write a 5-paragraph essay when I got to college. Thank God for Dr. Voss, my Shakespeare professor, for mentoring me and helping me along. But essays aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things.
I took a variety of college classes that stretched my thinking: Southern lit, women’s studies, Black history and lit, Faulkner, neoclassical (I still shudder at that one!), sociology, and psychology.
I majored in English literature and minored in psychology, only a few credits shy of a double major. I wish I had finished that double major or gone on to earn a Ph.D. I’ll never go back to school because I hate being a student in a classroom.
I want to understand.
I read so many books about parenting, metacognitive guides on writing, classic literature, historical fiction, and poetry. I love learning.
I still keep journals – prayers, poetry, thoughts, quotes.
I have several books in progress – mostly just chapter titles and outlines and stories about my life.
Being a perfectionist often paralyzes and the thought of pushing out a mediocre 21-page eBook of no content without citations is appalling to me.
I’m not a name dropper. I loathe Christian celebrity and the worship of fame in Western society.
I’m really disgusted by the rise of the mediocre white woman memoir – most of whom come from fame, money, or connections within the publishing or media industry. Isn’t it time to listen to other voices and their perspectives?
10 Things About Me:
1. I’m an only child.
2. I lived in the same house for my first 16 years.
3. I am proud of my parents for staying together.
4. I’m an Army brat, but my dad was Army Reserve and both my parents were GS (which is why we didn’t move around). My grandma was a Navy widow.
5. I’ve lived through some interesting trauma. Read about them here and here.
6. I only have a Southern accent when I’m really tired.
7. My first car was a yellow ’74 VW Bug. His name was Charlie. I still miss him.
8. I began college classes during my senior year of high school and never took any summers off. I began my teaching job right away after my master’s graduation. So, I haven’t had a break since 1993. I’m tired.
9. I’ve had my children’s names picked out since I was a preschooler. I have one son and another favorite boy’s name is Nicholas if I’d had more.
10. I did not grow up in church or with any religious education. That made for some interesting trials.