This probably isn’t the right week to write this since I’m on nearly 100% kid-duty while N TA’s an all-week class, and therefore feeling/thinking these things more intensely than I might otherwise (normally I have three afternoons away from home a week to write), but I think they all still stand.

I’m feeling the tug of work-outside-of-home these days–a growing internal momentum for it, a kind of ripeness for all the things I’ve studied and learned and experienced and contemplated to be funnelled into my writing life.  One’s 30s are often a time of intense engagement with work–when careers start to hum and when the gangliness that for many of us is our 20s starts to mature and deepen into something more like full-blown adulthood.  Couples who have young kids in this decade, and no nanny, probably all have to choose which in their pair will run with this outside-of-home momentum, and which will run with the inside stuff–which will work primarily with the kids, and which will "work" primarily with other things.  (intentional, even if not totally serious, use of quotes in that sentence)

But then there are those, like me, who are trying to do both.  And this is what I’m thinking about tonight.  At the same time that I feel the tug of outside-of-home work, I feel a tremendous tug to be home.  Or rather, multiple tugs, quite literally, on my legs all day.  The work of being present to and engaged with Elijah in the ways I want to be and the ways I think he deserves, combined with the work of running a household well–it fills up every hour I’m willing to give it.  And more.  This dance that is running a household and tag-teaming childcare with N and working on my book and maintaining this blog and keeping a percentage of my brain active on dreaming up next projects, well, I have to say it often feels less like a dance and more like a tug-of-war.

Sometimes I daydream about how spacious my life would feel if I just gave up writing–if I devoted myself to home stuff and kid stuff alone.  On one level, the thought feels like utter relief.  It feels like letting waves push me to shore rather than struggling against them, like joining the current rather than fighting my way always upstream.

But every time I have that thought, the very next one is a kind of voice, calling me to not give up.  It sounds like parents do when encouraging infants to walk.  "There you go–YES–nice work!  You can do it!  Yes, keep going.  Alright!"  Unlike them, it’s a lot more subtle, and speaks more with the twinkling of eyes and a beckoning glance than actual words.  But it has the same effect on me:  it keeps me standing up again and again, no matter how incessently gravity pulls me down.  It keeps a kind of hopeful grin on my face, and my banged up (or, as per the tug-of-war, pulled-apart) mind and body ever pressing on to sit down in front of this screen.

I feel like the universe wants me to write, and like something in me is alive and strong and beautiful when I am.  I can’t give this up.  I don’t want to.  I so terribly don’t.

So I keep doing it.  And living in the midst of all these tugs.  I feel weary of it, wanting to say to any one of them, "Fine!  I give up!  You win."  But I’m simultaneously energized by the writing part and the childcare part (no, I will never love spending hours on the phone with insurance companies, nor scouring the tub.  And I’d totally love the next place we live to have a dishwasher.).

But…so…is this just how it’s going to be?  Is living in this tension just the way of life as a dual-career person?  Can tug-of-war, practiced long enough, ever turn into a dance?

Jen Lemen, writing partner and co-conspirer of an ever more lovely world, has just launched a beautiful new site.  She writes, she makes art, she doulas, she tells a knock-out in-person story.  And I’m guessing she’ll give glimpses of all of that on her blog.  Yay, Jen!!!  Go see what she’s done!

Okay, so here I am again.  I’m soul searching this week, trying to figure out what mix of things is sustainable for me, and so far I’ve gotten one clear answer:  not this one.  I’ve packed every minute to the brim lately, and feel something deep inside of me, some important place where children run barefoot and there’s time to watch clouds and what you do isn’t groomed for resumes, was never meant to be–I feel that place wilting and shrinking and getting overshadowed by this other place, a place that isn’t bad or even something to be wished away, but a place that must be held in check.  A place that wants badly to produce.  To matter to lots of people.  To have tangible things to show for my time, and not just things, but really wonderful amazing wiz-bang kinds of stuff.  Stuff that impresses people.  Lots of them.

And guess who suffers, besides me, when that place starts growing beyond itself?  The people who matter to me most.  Isn’t that ironic?

I have a non-fiction book I want to write.  I have a new and more complicated blog I want to start.  I have a novel that’s itching to see the light of day.  And I also have an 8-month-old who needs me quite a lot at this point, and deserves to be seen far, far differently than as a roadblock to some race track I’m trying to ride.

I’m realizing that life isn’t something you wait to live until the kids are grown or even just in school.  Life isn’t something you put off until your resume is long.  It isn’t something you hold like your breath, or keep locked in a cage, feeding but once or twice a day. 

It’s here.  Right now.  It’s this week, and this spring, this night with all the trees in bloom, and the crickets cricking, this lamp spilling golden light across my lap, my hands, the little scar where I accidentally poked myself with led in seventh grade.  I don’t want to fill this glorious life I’ve been given so full that the glory fades, and it doesn’t even matter because I don’t have time to notice anyway.  I don’t want to be so preoccupied with the next ten things I’m trying to accomplish that the one right in front of me gets only half of me.  The little boy whose eyes are so blue and smile is so big and heart is just bursting with eagerness to be mine right now.  Not half-mine, but all the way.  And that goes for N, and the other dear ones in my life, too.  My own face in the mirror.

Be still, I hear, and I feel that place inside of me expand.  I feel my feet on cool, green grass, and see clouds start billowing by.  There’s one the shape of the book I’m writing, and it’s whispering all in good time, and another the shape of the book I hope to write next.  There’s one the shape of fear, the fear that I’m losing time on a race I need to win, and if I don’t catch up now, today, or at least by the end of this year, some important thing will get lost forever.  Something I really want.  That cloud is shifting into some new thing, a new mist that looks like gladness, and it’s coming down to catch me up inside itself, catch me up and make me laugh like Eli, when all he can do is glee (if that’s not a verb it should be).  Because glee is what a lot of life calls for.

When it finally sets me down I see the landscape of my life, and realize I don’t want to get everything done I set out to do if that means missing out on here and now.  I don’t want to if it means not living in the fullest sort of way, thinking living will have to happen later.  Because later sometimes never comes.  And even if it does, there will never be this night again, this season, this dear one on the phone or at my neck or lying next to me in bed, at this age, with this sort of love.

So I’m here on my blog right now because it makes me happy, and because speaking publically helps call a thing to life.  I’m trying to imagine my way into a lifestyle that’s slower paced than the one I’ve lately tried to live, that still finds ways to honor the hats I truly love to wear:  writer, soul-nurturer, mother, wife, friend.  I want to honor these things in a much more liveable way.  As far as posting goes–here or on a new blog–we’ll have to see what this might mean.

I consider myself contemplative–one who thrives on time to ponder.  Multitasking isn’t so much my thing.  For this reason (and surely a hundred more), having a child and pursuing a beyond-home career are stretching me.  At the end of most days I feel it, that combination of exhaustion and reved-upness, where my mind is still trying to puzzle together the things I wanted to do today but will need to do tomorrow (or the next day) instead, while my body is saying ENOUGH.  EAT.  SLEEP.

In an attempt to get a handle on when to do what, and when to tell my mind enough already on trying to figure it out, compulsively, I have officially turned into the guy from About a Boy who has his days divided into units.  His life is way too empty, so our motivations are different, but you should see the weekly schedule I’ve created for myself.  All the non-childcare moments are divided into blocks.  I’m super excited about three projects, simultaneously, that all require huge amounts of time, so here’s me and my gangbusters looking way more like the drip, drip, drip (i.e. an hour during this naptime, two before bed) that look like nothing, but slowly, tenaciously, get canyons made.

This all is to say that for a few weeks, I’m closing up shop.  Here.  Not for good, but until I can get some marked headway made on these projects (and thus have units to spare).  One of them is a new blog, so if all goes well, you will hear much, much more of me after the break.  In a different venue, but one I think (hope) you’ll like.  I can’t wait.

So stay tuned, and take care of yourselves, and much, much love to all of you.

Last night I dreamt I was a student at some prestigious university, fast approaching finals.  I opened my binder to get a sense for how to prepare, and realized I had completely forgotten to attend one of my classes.  All semester.  I realized my notes for my other classes were mostly gone, and that the few notes left were only doodles, little notes to myself having nothing to do with course content.  I flipped and flipped through that binder, willing something to change.  What did show up were a bunch of voting sheets I had agreed a month previous to tally for a club I was in, and had completely forgotten to tally.  The dream went on like this.

I’m not sure what triggered this dream, whether my entry into book revision mode, and the accompanying pressure to get other things published along the way (…the feeling like I should already have much more published), or the fact that I went to a play last night (or stood in line for a play, rather; it ended up being sold out) that was to be introduced by a famous author, and the woman in line behind me asked if I’ve ever read his stuff, and I have, a little, but can’t for the life of me remember the names of what I’ve read, or the content.  But regardless of why the dream came now, it’s a good picture of some of the yuck that pops up in me sometimes.  This nagging fear that I’m not prepared for some important thing, some thing I have no business not being ready for.  The fear that the tasks I so heartfully do aren’t the right ones, and I’ll wake someday to that fact.

So when I opened Seeker’s sight today, and read the following poem, it was just what I needed to hear.  Mary Oliver has such a good effect on me.  She makes me feel more comfortable being me (and me means knowing and doing only what I know and do), blessed to be nothing other.  Thanks for posting this, Seeker.

The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

But this one is WAY more exciting to report on, because it’s MINE!  I finished a draft of my novel!!!  Yeeehaawwwww!!!!  I wrote a note to a bunch of friends saying this feels like a pregnancy, and finishing this draft is like getting to see an ultrasound of the baby.  There’s still months of revisions to go before the birth will actually happen, but this right here is milestone enough to set me dancing!  And this kind of pregnancy is the very best kind for actually jumping around in the middle of.  (I tried dancing with joy one time late in my pregnancy with Elijah and quickly realized why people don’t do that sort of thing.  Not twice, anyway.)

I am a very happy duck.

Two weeks ago I had a minor meltdown about this book I’m writing.  The fear that I could get to these last, most important chapters, and they won’t say what I want them to paralyzed a good half my brain.  The other half I used to email my writing group to say the sky was definitely falling, most probably because of my own bad writing, and gee, it sure has been a nice ride.

Welcome to my life as a writer.  (I hear I’m in good company.)

Luckily a week away from the project and a good conversation with N got my gumption back up, and I decided to try and just write without thinking so much.  Just sit down, and let whatever comes out splatter onto the page.  The day I decided that was one of my best writing days ever.

So to celebrate this small victory, I’m gonna post a chunk of what came out that day.  You have no context for this, but you probably don’t need it.  Let your own imagination fill in what this character’s dream can mean.

*   *   *

I had a dream that night I felt guilty for having.  I shouldn’t have had it.  I don’t even want to tell you it, I loved it so much; things you love that much can disappear if you look at them directly.  Let’s just say it was sort of like this:

I was on a plane, going somewhere far away from where I live.  There were lots of people on the plane, and none of them had clothes on.  It wasn’t gross, though.  It was normal.  It was like we were all in Eden.

So I’m on this plane, going who knows where, and I look out my window, and there’s the MOUNTAIN.  It’s in front of us, stretching way up into the sky, farther up than I can see.  I’m assuming the plane will turn sometime, we’ll curve away from IT and go wherever it is we’re going.  But the closer we get, the more we pick up speed.  We’re picking up speed.  We’re not turning at all.  I start grabbing the arm of the person next to me, shouting we’re gonna hit, and the person looks and notices, too, and a ton of us are just yelling our heads off, trying to get someone to figure out what happened to the pilot, and whether there’s any hope at all of us surviving.

I’m looking back between the people—some of them don’t seem worried, for some reason, but most of them do—and the window, feeling myself absolutely panic, my adrenaline hitting toxic levels in my veins.  And in the middle of all of that, we’re just BAM!!!.  We hit.  We hit going a million miles an hour. 

The plane explodes, and all of us go flying.  Metal and glass and fire and flames missile and plume and shatter my eardrums, and I know I’m about to die.  I close my eyes and just wait.  Wait for when my body hits something or gets hit by something, and I’m a total goner, smashed dead to smithereens.

But it never happens.

The plane’s a wreck.  Parts of it are burning.  People have dirt and blood and cuts all over.  But no one seems dead.  We’re all just walking around, dazed, feeling actually…good.  I feel good, and somehow I know everyone else does, too.  We’re shaken to pieces, scared out of our minds.  Probably half of us pissed our pants.  But we slowly realize none of us is dead.  That it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it’s true.  All we can do is look at each other and try and figure out how we can do even that.

And then the MOUNTAIN starts doing something.  That or the air, or some other kind of magic I guess.  There isn’t any sound to what it’s doing, no sucking or crinkling-up noises.  It’s the same kind of quiet as fog.  But it isn’t still.  It’s a moving quiet.  We’re looking at what’s left of our plane, all broken up, strewn everywhere, and it’s soundlessly shrinking and softening. That’s right:  shrinking and softening.  In front of our eyes all that plastic and metal and upholstery—I even saw a coffee pot and the lid to one of the toilets—is turning into what look like deflated balloons.  And we’re all just watching it happen.

And it finishes. 

The quietness is still now.  So quiet you can practically hear the sun drop.  It feels like the pause in a joke before anyone starts to laugh.  It feels exactly like that, actually, because someone does start laughing.  We’re so high up, the sound is huge.  Pretty soon we all can’t help but laugh too—the kind that isn’t really laughing, so much as saying I’m so, so happy, and I can’t believe this, I cannot believe this.  We crashed smack into the MOUNTAIN and lived.  It’s the kind of laughing that’s almost the same thing as crying.

I woke up doing it.

It’s okay to be a beginner.  No matter how old you are.  No matter how slow you are to pick up on things that others have mastered long ago. 

It’s okay to not know how to do things that you wish you knew how to do.  It’s okay to ask for help.  It’s also okay to say, "No thanks," to help.  "I’m going to do this on my own this time."

It’s okay to write shitty first drafts.  And seconds, thirds, and fourths.  It’s okay to never win a Pulizter.  It’s okay to do your art just because you have to, and not because anyone wants you to, or to do it because it makes you feel happy.  It’s okay if it doesn’t make money.  And it’s also okay to try to dream of ways that it might.

It’s okay for people to reject your work, or not connect with it.  It’s okay for people to rave about it.  It’s okay for people to have little reaction to it at all.

And it’s quite alright that you have your personality, and not someone else’s.  That you get tired in crowds.  That you actually like light beer.

You’re okay.  You’re actually far more than that.  And you can rest now, all you voices that say otherwise.  You can stop trying to keep this girl from flying.  Thank you for working overtime to try to protect me.  I want to take it from here.

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,–seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d–till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
                                                                                                ~Walt Whitman

I don’t stop searching for places to belong, people to love and be loved by, anchors to build a life on.  I muse, I venture, I throw into oceans of space, “seeking the spheres, to connect them.” This is why I read, why I write, why I take classes and attend lectures and strike up conversations with strangers.  This is why I love friends.

Last night, filament clad, I made my way to a dramatic reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  And really, why hasn’t anyone ever told me about this guy?  I was captivated.  The whole time I felt like I had just stepped into a hot bath.  I closed my eyes and just sank down into it, goose bumps and all.

Leaves of Grass, for those of you who don’t know, is an expansive collection of poems that grew and grew over the course of Whitman’s life.  It speaks of nature and humanity and the divine.  It speaks of life and death and the cycles of things.  It challenges sexism, racism, classism, religiosity, body-fear.  It lifts us all up, cosmic things like planets, comets and stars, small things like birds and plants and dung beetles, and everything in between, inviting us to notice.  To notice.  To hallow, while not taking too seriously.  To recognize interconnectedness and unity in everything.  To find a holy spark in even what’s lowly and forgotten.  It’s spiritual, sensual (!), playful, contradictory, prophetic.  Amazing.  Truly.

I’ve found a new friend.  A new bard to help divine the times.  My throwing last night was so not in vain.

P.S.  I’ve often found poetry inaccessible, like it’s written for insiders rather than me.  I’m thinking it’s time I change my view on this and actually do some exploring in the field.  Get my feet wet in it.  Suggestions gratefully welcome (anthologies and otherwise).

It’s been a good few days since the yuck of that last post (a hearty thanks for the prayers and good wishes!). I spent all day Saturday and Sunday commuting back and forth to a writers conference in San Francisco, and, despite having a slow start to the day today (pregnancy and too much stimulation, I’m discovering, are not the greatest mix for sitting healthfully upright when it’s all over), come away very much encouraged and inspired in my life as a writer. Met and listened to a whole array of interesting folks, and just ate up being in the presence of so many people who relate with what I’m doing – for whom the particular joys and challenges that I experience are altogether normal. Verrry nice.

So here’s to sunshine coming out again after rain, and to buoys of connection and belonging!