Write Now

Posts around here have been infrequent of late, because D1 has been waking up just as DOB is leaving, destroying my one lull time of the day when I can sit down and collect my thoughts enough to type. There is naptime, but I still need a nap. Especially after D2 woke up at 4 a.m. one day last week with a terrible cold which magically disappeared by breakfast. (As you may guess from the length of this post, they're both sleeping in this morning. Amazing.)

Sometimes I read the blog of Melissa Wiley, who is not only the homeschooling mom of five young children, one just born, but writes books on the side. In a recent post, she explained how she does it.

Aha! I thought. I do not have anyone who does my laundry, or my grocery shopping. No one brings me meals (well, we got one a week after D2 was born). No doubt if I had less to do, I too could spend time with my kids and still have time to sit down and Write Brilliant Things. Or at least, I'd like to think so.

But I don't have that time. And that's OK. I didn't marry DOB for his useful housekeeping skills. (He can help out in a pinch, but it had better be a pretty tight one.) Indeed, he's probably a bit more time consuming than the average husband, being as he needs help with physical therapy and tasks that require steady hands and strong ankles. My children are too little even to send outside to play for a few minutes while I fix dinner. Until you've tried to fix guacamole with the "help" of an avocado-loving toddler while spoon-feeding a ravenous baby, you don't know what complicated is.

About this time three years ago, I was preparing to leave the life I loved behind and move out here to marry DOB. I was quite eager about it, and yet every once in awhile it scared me.

Then I got a writing assignment that really mattered to me--an interview with the man who carried the flag up Iwo Jima. And I was stuck. It wouldn't come out right. None of my co-workers' suggestions were helping. Finally I sent my mangled draft to DOB and we chatted over it for a few minutes, and I went back to work. It came together; it turned into one of the best things I've ever written. I realized then that whatever it was I hoped to do in life, I wasn't meant to try it alone anymore. I needed DOB. He has the other half of my brain.

Right now, I don't have much time to use that brain on the things I'd most like to do. But at least it's there. I still have time to read and think, and every once in awhile to write. I have hope that someday, somehow, I'll have time to write again--and that when I do, I'll have something worth saying because of now.

Right now, I'm here. And this is where I'm supposed to be.