Six Hours to Change My Mind

I’m glad I took that six-hour drive.

I had thought about ditching my cousin’s son’s graduation open house, but since I didn’t want to elicit any questions from my mother or my soon-to-be ex-husband, I took my two sons to that celebration.

“You be safe,” my cousin-in-law told me as I gave her a last hug. “What’s your mom say about this?” I didn’t answer. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

I shook my head. “She and Paul are up at the lake for the week — fishing.”

Judy looked at me.

“And she doesn’t need to know,” I added. “Besides, I’ve told several people I’m going. And I have family in Minnesota. I’ll be fine.”

Now, I sat in the parked car outside her house, my boys loaded in the back, the keys in my hand. Am I crazy? Maybe everybody’s warnings make sense.

“C’mon, Mom, let’s go if we’re going,” my oldest called from the back seat.

My oldest. The same child who told me no more than two months earlier that if I didn’t start to cheer up and change my life, he was going to drop me off at some bar and not pick me up till I found somebody to spend time with.

I stuck the keys into the ignition, and the car sprang to life. “Buckled up?”

Destination? Minnesota. More specifically, Minneapolis. A six-hour drive at best without construction, one twelve-year-old and one fourteen-year-old-adult in back, a change of clothes for everyone, a full tank of gas, directions, my cell phone, my credit card, and the comforting idea that I could turn around at any time, I was on my way to change the direction of my life.

Six months earlier, I had given myself internet for a Christmas present. Not today’s internet: the 1997s dial-up phone connected internet. Lonely and depressed, searching for the answers to my life and my pending divorce, I would stay up after the boys went to bed and mingle around in the various free AOL or MSN chatrooms, chatting and writing down the important information I wanted to remember about people I met.

“You’re doing what?” a co-worker asked one day. “Don’t you know there are a lot of crazies on the internet?” If she could have projected ahead to the internet of today, she would have realized that the number of crazies in 1998 could have fit on the head of a pin.

Anyway, I got to talking regularly to several different people in a couple of different chatrooms. I’d start in those rooms, but as people signed-off and went to bed, I stayed up and meandered from room to room.

In early March, one of the regulars in one of my regular rooms seemed to be bubbling over with excitement. He was headed to meet one of the girls he had been talking to for a length of time. He was even thinking of asking her to marry him. When he returned to our chatroom the following Monday, it was only to say that he wasn’t going to be online anymore where you couldn’t trust the people you talked to. Come to find out, the girl he went to meet was married with no intent of leaving her husband.

That could have been a red flag for me, but it wasn’t, and I’m glad of that. In late February, I decided that the rooms I was frequenting were getting clicky, so I began surfing the various room categories and rooms: mothers only, single moms, mid-west, and even a Christian chat room or two.

What was I looking for? Real people who were who they said they were. I was tired of the chatroom drama queens and characters. In the mom and parent chatrooms, the topic of discussion was the difficulty in parenting and how to deal with a rebellious child. In the mid-west, people were talking about where and where not to go. In one of the Christian chat rooms, a guy was asking people to pray for his sister who had a brain tumor. Doctors were debating whether it was operable or if there was another way to address the tumor.

By late March, I told my chatroom friends that I would only be online late at night, if at all, because rehearsals for the high school production I directed were starting to run late. The show was scheduled for a weekend in late April, but after that I would be back online.

The Sunday after the show, I logged back into my favorite chatrooms and caught up on people’s virtual lives when an instant message pop-up appeared on my screen: “How did your show go?”

I looked at the screen name. Const. I searched my notes but only found the request for a prayer for his sick sister. I had written nothing more about the person even though we had chatted for over an hour. What caught me by surprise was the fact that Const was the only one who had asked about my show.

We “talked” for a couple of hours back and forth on Instant Message. Const was a construction worker in Minnesota; he had two daughters; he was divorced; and he was living, for the moment, with his sister. I told him some things about myself, careful to be vague about specifics that would lead him to find me in reality.

Now, after several weeks of talking via the internet, followed by several weeks of talking on the internet and then on the phone till the early hours of the morning, I sat in front of my cousin’s house about to take the drive of a lifetime. A six-hour drive to Minnesota that would change my life forever.

Rebecca (Becky) spent 34 years in a teaching career, but when she retired in 2014, she picked up her pen and pursued her passion to write. As a high school English teacher, Becky held the philosophy that she wouldn’t give any writing assignment that she personally wouldn’t or couldn’t do. That philosophy strengthened and broadened her own writing.

In addition to publishing her writing on various platforms, Becky also blogs at Life is for Living, a blog to encourage, motivate, and help others live the best life possible. As an extension of Life is for Living, she also publishes a weekly newsletter, Let’s Chat. (Check it out HERE.) Life is for Living also has a social media presence with the group Coffee on my Porch. (Check it out HERE.)

After teaching writing for 34 years, Becky began Ink & Keyboard, a blog for writers at all levels. She supplements what she writes on the blog with a subscription newsletter, The Writer’s Notebook (Check it out HERE.) and the social media group Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.)

Thanks for reading.

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