mudFence Creations | Conni Delinger

Someday. It is a date, in the faraway future, by which all of our goals, dreams, and aspirations will have been achieved. Someday, I will travel. Someday, I will change jobs. Someday, I will go back to school. Someday, I will win the lottery…..

I started adulthood in all the wrong order; I dropped out of high school, a pregnant teen, married too young, just two days after my eighteenth birthday. Three years later, I was still a high school dropout, and now a single mother, just like my own mother, but with far fewer mouths to feed.

I quickly reversed the direction my life seemed to be taking and, within five years, I had my associate’s degree, I had remarried to a great guy, and had started my dreamed-of career in the medical profession, quickly rising to the top of my field. Life was good.

Sitting around the nurses’ station late one night, we were lamenting about “someday,” and I said I would love to go back to school and get my Bachelor’s degree, becoming the first person in my family to earn one. One of my friends casually asked what I was waiting for – “If not now, when?” That simple question changed my entire outlook on life.

In 1989, I quit my job to return to college for that degree, with the goal of achieving it by my 40th birthday. Before school started in the fall, I had the whole summer off. I had always known I had a brother who had been given up for adoption, and I had hoped to ‘someday’ find him. As I drove home from visiting my mother out of state, I thought to myself, “I have the whole summer to look for him and, if not now, when?” Thanks to good information from my mother, and the unusual last name of his adoptive parents, I found my brother in just five phone calls! Why had I waited for ‘someday’ to look for him?

I did get that degree, and was headed for my master’s degree. I didn’t make it by my 40th birthday (I took a semester off to be Mother of the Bride for my only child), but had just turned forty-one. I joined my husband in his firm, and life went on, and I was content.

Someday became an even more urgent concept when my brothers died, a year apart, at ages 46 and 44. Suddenly, the idea of never getting to see ‘someday’ was very real. Our father had died at age 57 and, all of a sudden, I felt like a duck in a shooting gallery, and someone could make that lucky shot, get the stuffed toy, and my somedays would be gone.

Over time, I saw the marriage failing, but stayed on, since there was never a good time to make the move. Finally, I realized that my ‘someday’ would only happen if I made it happen, so - if not now, when? We got divorced.

First on my Bucket List has always been to see all 50 States, so I bought a small motor home, and my dog and I hit the road. Almost immediately, my mother’s health started failing, so she had to move in with me, thus shelving my ‘someday’ for a couple more years. With my 50th birthday in the rear view mirror, I started traveling again, going where I wanted, in the manner I chose, staring at as many trees and watching as many sunsets as I wanted, and picnicking from the ice chest in what my husband had termed “hillbilly style.”

I have also always wanted to find my two sisters from my father’s first marriage, but I have had little information available – “maybe someday.”

With the ease of Facebook and the internet, I did find them last year and set off across the country to meet them. Armed with dog-eared paper maps, with all the desired sights circled in orange, and with a good GPS unit, my dog and I headed out, this time staying in comfortable mom-and-pop motels rather than in a motor home. We spent ten weeks on the road, and one of those weeks was spent getting to know my sisters!

I had never been to the Midwest, so I made a special effort to mark every possible point of interest. I visited every covered bridge of Madison County. I saw John Wayne’s birthplace and Lincoln’s childhood home. I stuck my feet in every Great Lake, and saw Niagara Falls from both sides. I stayed at Amish motels in Pennsylvania, and witnessed the devastation of the floods in West Virginia. I read every historical marker I found.

I fell in love with Iowa. I returned home after 10 weeks and 13,000 miles, and told my only child that I was moving 1,900 miles away, to Iowa! I told her I wanted clean air, green grass, and four seasons. I told her what I was told so many years ago, around the nurses’ station late one night: If not now… when?

Conni Delinger lives in Stanton. A business woman, she also is a freelance writer. Her column appears monthly in The Express. You can reach her at mudfencecreations@yahoo.com.