Validation!

A friend and I recently started a little writer's group. I had a great time at our first meeting and am looking forward to continuing it, both for the company and for feedback, but especially for her wonderful know-how about writing professionally and submitting pieces to publishers. (I know, that's a little funny coming from someone who works in publishing.)

On the other hand, I have no idea what she'll get out of it other than the motivation to write before meetings. I'll leave her anonymous in case she prefers it that way, but I want to let her know that I had a great time and want to do it again!

Tonight I went to the writer's group at the local branch of the county library for the second time. Before I went for the first time, I expected it to be a bunch of young readers. You know the type: book lovers who desperately want to be writers but just aren't. Kind of like me. I was all set to feel critical of their work. Wow. First of all, the 8-12 people in the group are amazing writers. Second, they're all published. Very very published. Third, with one exception, they're all over 50. Some are way over 50. Fourth, they're mostly men. There's one older woman, then a younger woman who's in her late 40's, then me.

I read a short story tonight, for the first time. Before I read it aloud, I had no idea how much sex was in there. Gulp. I mean, it's not explicit or gratuitous, let alone titillating, but it is sex and I was reading to a bunch of father-aged men. I had never read any of my writing aloud before.

They liked it. They laughed aloud. They praised the form, the imagery, the style, the symbolism. "This is a very accomplished piece," the leader said. These are people I don't know, whose opinions I value because I admire their writing.

"Does it need . . . ?" I ask.

"Send it off," they said. "See what comments you get back and then decide if you want to add to it. It's ready to go."

I am walking on air. Maybe I can write after all.

On Writing

I love writing and I've always wanted to be a writer. A fiction writer. I've always felt like I could do it for real, as a career - once I got started. Getting started was the hard part.

I wrote my first stories before I could write. I told the stories to my mom, who wrote them down, and I illustrated them with pictures cut from the J.C. Penney and Sears & Roebuck catalogs.

When I was 7, I wrote and illustrated my first story all on my own. It was a read along book about a little girl who loved reading more than anything else in the world. After her birthday party, she found a small unopened package. It turned out to contain a magic lotion! (Those who know me well will laugh that my lotion obsession was evident even at that age.) The magic lotion allowed the girl to float in the air! How did the girl use such a precious gift? She applied the lotion in her bedroom, floated up to the ceiling, and reclined to spend the rest of the afternoon reading in midair. I taped myself reading the story, and still have the tape although I think I've lost the book. On it, you can hear my pedantic/precocious voice saying, "You may now turn the page" after every 6 words or so.

In college, I took a couple of fiction writing classes. I wrote a lot in college and felt good about what I was writing. Finishing was my big problem then and afterwards.

More recently, I decided to get serious about it and do some real fiction writing. Lately I've been having a little crisis of faith. I don't think that what I've been writing is very good. And that's really what I was afraid of all along, that's why it was so hard to get started. What if I can't do it? What if I'm really really bad? Who am I if I'm not the girl who will, someday, be a writer?

Weekend

Sarahlynn's weekend in a mini-meme

Last time you exercised: this afternoon
Last time you er, uh, you know: last night
Last time you wrote creatively: 5 minutes ago
Last time you did something useful: this afternoon, playing with Ellie (we're working on stacking and nesting and putting in and she's got the hang of it now)

Woo hoo! Even though the Christmas decorations are all concentrated/exploded in the front room, I think I can call this a productive weekend after all.

Resolutions

I don't make New Year's Resolutions. I know that they work for some people (my in-laws quit smoking 3 years ago after lifetimes with the habit) but for me they feel trite and ineffective.

Nonetheless, this year I made a few resolutions. They aren't New Year's Resolutions, I tell myself, but are rather Resolutions to Get My Life In Order Before I Go Back To Work or Beat Myself Up Over Getting Older and Not Having My Life Be the Way I Hoped it Would Be. Catchy, no?

1) Go to bed at a reasonable time, most of the time
2) Exercise more
3) Write lots

I especially like the way they're not "SMART" goals. Nary a measurable one in the bunch!

Well, the first was out. It's a holiday, for heaven's sake. Belongs in December with the rest of 'em. On the second I didn't do too badly. I exercised. And while I didn't "really" write, I blogged and decided to count that to make my stats look better. Nothing like getting off to a good start. On the third I exercised and blogged again.

Today, well, yesterday, I was crabby and exhausted from the lack of sleep. So tonight I forwent exercise and writing and fell into bed at 8:30. Of course I woke up at 12:30 after a reasonable amount of sleep (better than I've done all week!) and am still up, reading blogs and eating spray cheese out of the can. Alas. Tomorrow (today) will indubitably suck. Isn't it always the rainy, sleepy days when the baby won't nap? Feels like it.

Looking over at the Recent Posts, it occurs to me that recently this blog has become very . . . er, mama blog. Not that there's anything really wrong with that. It's just that the political entries and essay-diatribes tend to take more time, thought, and energy than I can summon on fewer than four hours of sleep.

Before I go off to hang out with my faithful buddies Strunk and White in the hopes that they will soothe me to sleep, let's look again at the last line in the previous paragraph and smile about getting "fewer" hours of sleep rather than "less". Who needs to get all riled up about politics and the willfully ignorant when there are so many grammatical errors begging for attention? I'm sure that this post itself offers a veritable cornucopia of such errors for those inclined to point them out.

Birthday, Beautiful, and Patriotic

That's it. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this month, so things might be quiet here. You can go read my "novel" if you really want to lose all respect for me. Or you can just come by here from time to time to look at these adorable pictures of my kid.

"I'm a Christian"

Nearly everyone I know is Christian, Jewish, or very anti-organized religion. The Christians are mainstream/line Protestants, evangelical Protestants, or Roman Catholics - many of whom don't realize that the word "Christian" applies to Catholics.

The Catholics might be onto something here. I've begun to hate the word "Christian". When someone describes him- or herself that way, I'm immediately turned off. I make assumptions: Evangelical! Conservative! Judgemental! And, yes, I note the irony here.

There are 50 million mainline Protestants in the U.S., 65 million Catholics, and 40 million evangelicals. Evangelical denominations are the only Christian denominations that are showing any real growth lately. I don't know if there's anything I can do about that scary trend, or about Americans' related need to see everything in very simple black-and-white. I hope that I can do something about the fact that "Christian" is starting to sound like a dirty word. (And researching the figures in this paragraph was incredibly depressing.)

I hope I can help remind people that 50 million of us are like this. We can see shades of gray. We value context. We don't blindly follow our leaders. We don't vote en mass.

I'm thinking of doing that November Blogger novel thing.

To Be or Not to Be (a Stay at Home Mom)

Do you ever feel like you're balanced on the cusp of two very different realities? Like your life could take off in two different directions from here, each of them plausible and exciting, but mutually exclusive?

I felt that way when I was pregnant. My career was going very well, it was exciting, and I felt that I could really throw myself into it and make a name for myself in my company. And yet . . .

A part of me always wanted to be a stay at home mom. My mom stayed home with my younger sisters and me until the youngest was in school. She was really good at it. She always had constructive, fun, creative things for us to do. And she took on mothering like any other career. She read books, she prepared in advance, she worked hard. I have always wanted to provide the same kind of wonderful, magical childhood for my own children.

Which way to go? Either way, there would be guilt. Guilt at putting my children in daycare while I worked at a job that wasn't really "important" (in as much as that I wasn't actually saving lives or anything like that) or guilt at staying home, not being a "good enough feminist," not using my college degree, etc.

There were also dreams. I dreamed (and still do) of being an author. I want to make a living writing fiction. I'm not asking to be Sara Paretsky (though I think she's amazing) but maybe Dorothy Cannell? To make enough money that we don't have to worry about money, enough that I can call myself a writer and mean "as a profession" rather than as a "hobby."

I was further confounded when I learned that Ellie was going to have some serious health problems. I coped with the news much the way I usually cope with big things: I threw myself into the moment, working really hard and not thinking too much about the future. My boss always wanted to be a stay at home mom and asked me unofficially what I thought I'd do. At this point I was still really torn and told her that I was sure I'd come back to work because it would be too hard and too depressing to be home alone all day with a seriously sick and disabled baby.

After Ellie was born, I had a hard time imagining her sleeping in another room, let alone leaving her for an entire work day or - God forbid! - a business trip. I was still thinking of going back to work, somehow, even though Ellie wouldn't take a bottle and I hadn't found a sitter for her. Then, a month before I was to return to work, I learned that Ellie was going to need open heart surgery the week that my family medical leave expired. I asked for more time off, unpaid. No dice.

So in effect, the decision was made for me. In some ways, it was a real relief not to be responsible for making such a huge decision. I love staying home with Ellie right now. I also miss work. And if my company had been more flexible - if I could have had 6 months or a year off unpaid, I believe that I would have returned to work and that the company would have been better off for it.

I'm almost certain that I would have returned to work if my company had offered:
- extended leave (up to a year, unpaid)
- on-site daycare
- reduced travel
- the opportunity for job-sharing or part-time employment

Alas, none of those options were available to me and I'm still a little bitter. I know that I am fortunate in that I don't have to work in order for us to keep food on the table, although we have had to tighten our belts (figuratively speaking only). I know that I am fortunate in that my not working was a choice that we were able to make as a family. But I feel that - in my situation - I didn't have much of a choice. I simply couldn't go back to work while Ellie was having or recovering from surgery. I simply couldn't leave her during her first and most vulnerable months. And that was the right decision for us.

Hopefully my career will resume, or take off in an exciting new direction, when I'm ready. When we're all ready, as a family.