Hello, and Welcome to the Darkside…

I used to be an adult. As I said in a previous blog, when I was six weeks old my mother stared into my eyes and got a chill. I was staring back with such intensity she still speaks about it. She took this to mean I would be a very serious child. She was not wrong. Like the word smart, responsible is often used to describe me along with funny, and on occasion house hag is thrown in. (My brother said it. Not even he knew what he meant.) I was a very serious child. I liked to read, play with my dolls alone, I took care of my animals and bossed my brothers around when they needed it. As I grew up, my sense of responsibility also did, especially when my youngest brother Trevor was born. I was eleven, my dad was working all the time, and Mom was overwhelmed with our move to California along with three other energetic children. I took on the extra things she sometimes couldn’t do like bathe Trev or put him to bed, singing him songs and reading stories. I enjoyed it, no question, but felt that I had to. There was no one else to help Mom with all of it, and I was happy to do it. He was a good baby. (He’s a pill now but no matter. He’ll grow out of it.)

Then I entered the teenage years. Things in California were tough for my parents. Dad all but lived at work, Mom had four children, two who kept trying to kill each other (Ryan and Liam), and I was starting yet another new school. Mom needed help, so I pitched in. When I got my license I did school runs, went to the grocery store once a week, helped with homework and nagged the others since Mom was never big on discipline. People always thought Trev was my kid, even people from high school when I brought him into their places of work. (Having the boy you’re crushing on call you ma’am then tell you to get control of your child will scar you for life.) Then I also had school. I wouldn’t call myself a model student but I never turned in work late and never ditched a single class. I listened and actually helped solve a few friends and their problems. One night my parents had been going through a rough patch, and I informally enacted a marriage counseling session. Divorce diverted. Yes, I was no fun in high school or college where I went to the 22^nd school in the nation (Go Wahoos!). I got a B average but had about six extra-curriculars along with writing two books. I graduated, got a job as a Federal Investigator where I had to hold a security clearance, and saved up enough money to move to California. Which was a nightmare of epic proportions. I won’t go into specifics but it involved suicidal roommates, fraud, job loss, taking care of two cats that weren’t mine, a dog, the house, the bills and my 25-yr-old best friend “child” 3,000 miles from my family while trying to hold down a job, write, and attempt to get published. But what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

Or it makes you realize you are tired of dealing with other people’s shit. I think I burnt out.

I left California and soon lost my job as well during the worst time to lose your job. I’d just signed a year lease and had no way to pay for it besides savings. Then came my 3-book deal. The advance tided me over for a bit, but with my limited skills after a year of searching for a job and nobody taking my bait, I had no choice. Yes, I had to move back in with my parents. Where I am right now. As we’re close knit, and my career was slowly taking off, but no one hiring a person who spent her days asking people if their neighbor overthrows the government by force, my parents let me move back in. I pay rent and insurance, I do my own laundry, I help out with dinners and the pets. But it still feels like I’ve made no forward progress in my life. And now all my friends are getting married, having kids (two just this week), go to an office job then have barbeques on the weekend, and I feel like these people who smoked pot between classes and partied all night are hitting all the important milestones and I’m left in my parents basement. And I know I’ve written eight books, have a six book deal with possibly more coming, and that’s a huge accomplishment I know for someone not yet thirty, and that they can’t say that, but still I feel like there’s something wrong with me. But, if I’m truthful, I always have. Since I was that overachieving teen I didn’t know if I want to get married or have kids. I like my freedom and not having to change poopy diapers and washing skiddy underwear (did that as a teen too. Yuck.)So, have I earned the right to mooch off my parents, spending my days writing, and watching Miss Marple on a Friday night instead of trying to find a life partner and father of my child? All I know is in a little over a year (my b-day is March 19) I’ll be…(gulp) thirty. I’ll have published three books, having to write two a year, I’ll have had no children, never been married, and most likely still living in my parent’s basement. Not normal, I know. But maybe normal for me.    

This is Jennifer Harlow, signing out from the Darkside…

Song of the Week: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by                       Tears For Fears

I’m reading: Midnight in Austenland by Shannon Hale   ***