I haven’t been on a
writing hiatus this long since I began writing with intention, sometime in
early middle school. I used to write all
the time, about everything. Writing, and
art, were how I processed and made sense of life and my place in it. Sometime within falling in love with Josh my
need to write lessened, and since having our son it’s completely vanished. It’s funny because I now have so many more
joyous things to write about. I realized
recently one thing about having a baby is that suddenly everything is
fragmented. Nothing can be focused on solely
for very long, if at all, because this beautiful new being is the primary
focus. Yes you have to take care of
yourself, but you are no longer the center of your universe, you are an orbit
around a new universe. I sometimes think
I’m pregnant again because I will need to pee with such urgency, until I
realize my bladder has been telling me quietly I’ve needed to pee for hours
now, I no longer have a choice. It can
take me three days to get laundry put away, not for a lack of trying; I’ve
started to put it way twelve times. It
can take me an entire day to sweep the house.
I’m not complaining, just observing this funny new normal. And writing so doesn’t fit into it! When I write I like to do so without time in
mind, without expectation and without interruption. It takes me a long time to get the words out,
even longer to widdle them down into something sensible and with proper
spelling and pronunciation. But I know
at any given moment that the new sun, my son, will need me before I can get to
any of that, so I leave it aside. But
tonight, hopefully, he’ll stay asleep a good stretch and I can pretend the night
has no end and I can finally write. He will be a whole year old in less than
two weeks and it’s about damn time I got down the story of his birth. This is my
rusty warm-up.
2 comments:
OMG, you are both the writer and mother I always wish I was.
I often tell a newly wed couple that they have no idea how much their world will change when they have their first baby. It seems you are going along fine down this direction - all of the sudden this little life enters and off you go in an entirely new adventure.
Love you, grandpa
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