Guest Post From Linda Kovic-Skow, Author of French Illusions

Create a Mid-Life List - Maybe You’ll Find Your Passion

About four years ago, after my husband and I dropped our youngest daughter off at college, I went through a sort of mid-life crisis. I missed being a mom and I wondered how I would fill the void. Volunteer work didn't appeal to me anymore. For fifteen years, I had helped teachers in classrooms, assisted coaches, and worked in school libraries. I wanted to do something different. Sure, I had my part-time bookkeeping business, but it consumed only a few hours a day and it wasn't interesting any more. Something was missing, but what?

This prompted me to review what I like to call my "mid-life list." This is similar to a "bucket list," with an important twist. The idea was to refocus myself and figure out the things I wanted to do with my life in my fifties - while I could still do them. My list was short.

-Learn to play the piano

-Travel to Africa to see the elephants

-Travel to Tahiti and see the island of Bora Bora

-Travel back to France (with my family this time)

-Write a book

At the time, I didn't own a piano and, with two daughters in college, I couldn't afford a trip to Africa or Tahiti. I had already traveled back to France in 2001 with my family, so that left me to examine the fifth item on my list more closely.  If I did write a book, would it be fiction or non-fiction? What genre would I choose?

The answers to my questions came to me in the shower (which is where many of my ideas seem to materialize, strangely enough.) I'll find my diary from my au pair adventure in France and write a memoir, I thought. For many years, friends and family had suggested I write about this experience and I would finally have the opportunity.

Over the next few days, I tore the house apart looking for my diary. Where in the world did I put the thing? It wasn't in the garage. It wasn't in the closet under the stairs. It had to be somewhere. I drove to our storage unit and searched through a few containers, but left in despair, certain I hadn't put it there in the first place. The next day, I checked the house again and then went back to the storage unit. One item at a time, I carried everything out of the storage unit, searching through bins and boxes until only one remained. Buried inside this last container was a plastic bag and inside that bag was. . . my diary! Clutching it to my chest, I almost wept as I whipped out my cell phone and called my husband to tell him the good news.

There you have it. That's how I found my passion. French Illusions took me three years and countless hours to write, but the effort seems to be paying off. Now I can scratch another item off my mid-life list.