Welcome to Vinegar and Vanilla

Hello, and welcome to Vinegar and Vanilla.

I know I am not writing to anyone tangible out there in web land...yet. But I hope that some day I will be. In the meantime I am going to borrow an old-fashioned style and say, Dear Reader.

For some reason I get a kick out of that, and frankly, it makes it a little bit easier to write if I can picture some benevolent reader out there who thinks what I have to say is both witty and interesting. Kinda like a grandmother.

I don't have any of those left, but I imagine that my father's mother would have loved to be able to log on and read about what was going on in my life and my world. She would have loved my children - wow, would they have given her joy. I know that whenever I wrote her a note from college she really enjoyed it. Later, when I would come by to see her (not nearly enough - but the guilt column will come later) she would tell me how she loved to hear about the classes I was taking and how school was progressing.

I often say that I come from a long-line of frustrated women. I don't know definitively that that is a true statement, but it certainly is my belief. My grandmother was one of them. There may be family members who would disagree - and I don't mean to start anything- but I think that any woman who basically spent the last decade (at least) of her life in her bed, smoking and reading paperback novels was probably frustrated about something. Or wished for more, or different, or elsewhere.

My maternal grandmother was not much different. She had a predilection for prescription drugs and had tried, on several occasions, to commit suicide. Obviously this was a woman who was not happy with her lot in life, although it looked pretty okay from the outside. She lived in a nice house in a nice suburb. They got new cars every 2 or three years, if not every year. I remember driving up to my grandparents' house and seeing that Grandpa had a new car! It was so cool and exciting to me. I always wanted to climb in, check out all the buttons and the new car smell. One year my Grandfather got a BMW for my grandmother. It was a big switch from her usual large American made car. I got the impression she didn't care for it as much as she had thought she would. Not as large and luxurious - it was only a 325.

OK, I am a little off topic right now. The point of this, the inaugural post, was to introduce you (dear reader) to me, (dear writer) and I suppose I have inadvertently told you more about me right off the bat than i intended to. Ah well, I will have plenty to add and subtract at a later date.

The reason I am starting this blog today, December 9, 2009, is because it is my birthday. Not a major, huge, milestone one like 16, 18, 21, 30 or 50...but a year older nonetheless. I don't know how or when I became the adult in my life. It coems at you at a slow boil and then - like the proverbial lobster - you realize you are cooked. I am no longer a child, a teen or a young adult. I am a married woman, a mother, an adult. Someone who seems to have her shit together.

What?!? Who? Me? Really?!?

Some days I own that fully and some days not so much. My goal for this year is to own all parts of me equally, and give them all their due. This means the wife, mother, friend parts and ALSO the writer me who has been trying to get out and stay out for so long. Even though I let her out from time to time like a charming party trick, this year I would like her to make her official debut to polite (notice that, dear reader, p-o-l-i-t-e) society. She is a little scared, so please, be gentle.