Day 79

One of those days when everything I read over sounds childish and bad. Need to take a break from it all but can't really afford the time... Something to be remedied by kids' spring break next week!

Day 78

Finished a sendable draft of my writing for this packet, but exhausted. Can barely read at night...resorted to catalog shopping! Rereading "Beloved" after a period of years and finding it this time absolutely electrifying, now I get it a bit more and can be more patient with the quirks in the writing. Just beautiful, but maybe I'm getting too old to read about such suffering. Longing for some peace.

Kids were wild this weekend -- too much indoor time and red food coloring (Cat in the Hat cokies). Consequently, I have few reserves. My eczema-ringed eye is beginning to make me look like  a battered wife. I can see people looking at me, wondering if they should ask...

Gave up two hours of writing time this morning to go to yoga, just so I could survive the day. Wonderful. Even helped me with my essay on somatic memory, though of course I wasn't supposed to be thinking about that!

Day 77

The more I try to edit, the more the memories come flooding and the pages grow and grow...

Day 76

Ballet with my daughter and "Queen of the Sun" documentary with my 6 year-old son, a wonderful date, then walking in the rainy blossoms. No possibility of doing any work. Time to just think and be.

Day 75

The effort of remembering is making me ill...
but it is a purging.

Day 75

In the twenty minute period between teaching and picking up my son early from school for a half-day today, I looked into my office and peered wistfully at my computer. "Tomorrow," said she, so I went to Starbucks with my son and we ate cake pops while together we did his first ever homework assignment. I saw the man in the corner smiling at us and thought, "Yes, I am as lucky as you think I am."

Tomorrow, of course, no more excuses!

Day 74

I've said it before but I'll say it again, the practice of memoir writing is epiphanic, mind-blowing and a better healer than just about any therapy. Talk about the examined life -- even the little dust bunnies of moments that went creeping off under the bed years ago and think they are safe, even they get pulled out to stand to account. What a marvelous time waster!

Walked tonight in the evening after looking after 4 kids and getting to a crazy point with my son, who had displeased his teacher with his over-exuberant behavior at school today. The light was soft, the blossoms fragrant, the birds loud as spring itself. On that walk, I clarified the purpose of my writing project and maybe came up with a subtitle for the book. 'Oh,' I thought. 'I can relax, I can take a walk and call it work!' Ha!

Day 73

Bought books, ordered books from library. Now just have to READ books!

Day 72

Work interrupted by taxes...

Managed to get a couple of hours writing done -- edited some pages and read some Gornick. Then T-ball this evening -- unable to think too much about anything but my little man and how cute he looked in his uniform!

Days 70 & 71 Tired & Humbled

Worked like crazy in the few work spurts I managed to steal this weekend. Otherwise, tried to clean up the house -- dust under my son's bed to make my mother (and me!) cringe... Got further exhausted in the process.

Reading Vivian Gornick's "The Situation and the Story" about writing non-fiction. A wonderful read -- she just gets it! Getting anxious about all the other reading I should be doing in preparation for a 10-page essay, due in a couple of months that is the basis of a lecture I will eventually give when I graduate. Thinking a lot about somatic memory and how it gets revealed and can be useful in writing, especially memoir. Fascinating stuff, but there's so much I don't know.

This evening, we fished in the river and the kids played so happily together, I couldn't help but smile through my tiredness. Beautiful creatures. May their sense of freedom and togetherness last a lifetime. They teach me every day how to live and what matters -- a cliché perhaps, but the best kind -- absolutely, perfectly true. I bless them and this body and the science and miracles and tenacity that made them each possible.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, such suffering...and here, the dogwoods about to break into blossom, big moon, everything changing and changing, me evolving and actually watching it happen 'on paper' in the edits I make in my writing. Wow -- I am so lucky to have been given this direction, this love of words. They help me see myself and the world in ways that help me love this life so much more than I ever could before I simply sat down at my desk and picked up a pen -- An exact parallel with the gifts that are my children. And if the writing doesn't keep coming, then I'll always have these children in my life, my heart. I am so humbled. I am so TIRED!!! Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep....

Days 68 and 69

Getting a little frazzled and bedazzled. So much I want to do. Read, write, revise, work on other projects...got my packet and helpful comments. I am a melo-dramatist, who knew!

The weekend cometh, and walks in the sunshine.

Had another epiphany on the massage table, about somatic memory, which seems to be becoming my subject...

Day 67

So many things to want to do: my mothers' group project, my chapter, going to hear David Shields read tonight. How do people ever find the time to research markets and send out their stuff, I wonder? It's so much easier to just write!

Trying to keep it all together and clean the kitchen too, while Tinkerbell and Wolverine have a tea party.

Still no packet...

Day 66

Slogged through some editing this morning in between teaching. feeling good about the chapter I'm writing, but dreading the next one, which is woolier by far. Still no packet -- what if all those comments are lost in the mail?!

Back to teaching after spring break -- writing about our little camping trip, good fodder for fiction, though everything feels a little tenuous and guiltily achieved considering what's going on in Japan right now. Impossible to explain to the children. How lucky we are as innocents -- no wonder we cling to our childhood.

Day 65

Still waiting for my packet to come back -- trying to fend off thoughts of dread!

Kids went off happily to school this morning, in spite of daylight savings, proving that they too just needed a break from the routine and some oceanside fun.

Spent the morning grading -- genuinely impressed by my students' work -- then working on some poems for a SC competition. Made me work fast and forget all about what I should have been doing.

Have to teach tomorrow, so lots of homework for me tonight. By the time I get back to working on my non-fiction, it will have been almost a week. Hopefully my brain will reboot without too much trouble. My back, in any case, has thanked me for a few days not hunched over the keyboard.

Almost at the end of Joyce Glassman's Beat memoir -- an interesting read, but the prose feels a bit flat. Maybe I just need a little fiction to spice things up. Proust, perhaps, or Tolstoy...

Days 61-64-- I Give Myself a Break

Spring break. We drive to Edisto Beach, where we camp beside the ocean and sit watching the children delight in the wonders of nature and their first camping trip. They sleep like angels while we grown-ups freeze at night in the tent, and I dream of a tsunami swallowing us up, then wake to find such an earthquake-induced disaster has struck on the other side of the world in Japan. Co-incidence or not, I am in touch, I think, with the world, and this is the life of the writer-mother, its great privilege and burden, too: to be alive to everything, each detail, the rushing in and sucking out of each wave, the shells and fossils each tide leaves behind.

And should I never publish another word, it doesn't matter because my children are already both poets. "There is no remote to control nature," sings my six year-old on the car journey, looking at me through the eyes of pure, simple adoration a son has for his mother, and my daughter delights us all with the sweet crazy wisdoms that come out of her lovely, rosebud mouth. I cannot get enough of kissing them.

So easy to be in love when you sleep in the same small space as your family, and feel their every living breath and their first joyful utterances on waking. Easy even to love the alien place that, in spite of my resistance, holds out its Spanish moss covered arms to me and says, 'I'm not so bad, see -- I have pelicans and dolphins, I have angel-wing clouds and moon snail shells and angels' toenails and whelks that look as if they've been imagined by mermaids, carved by ocean gods.

When we get home, I'm hoping there'll be a packet of comments back from my teacher on my last submission, but it's not here yet. Funny, it's like waiting for love letters, almost -- a reminder that love is a far-reaching thing, and something that is in part about ourselves, and that that's okay -- it's alright to love what we create, in fact, it's essential.

Daylight savings and the children are asleep already as I write this, back in their own beds. And this break from my work has let the thoughts in my head and heart settle into a deeper place, and create, I hope, a more resonant music. Maybe when I sit down to write tomorrow, I will be on fire, or maybe nothing will come. How wonderful to feel, truly, that either outcome is a good one.

Day 60

Graded, edited my next writing assignment, then got ready for the beach tomorrow -- 4 days away from computers, editing, annotations, blogging.

Went to yoga this morning and my teacher spoke of how we learn the most when we suffer -- I'm writing about things that inspired my youthful suffering. I smiled, then hurried home to apply the lesson. Made looking at the past so much easier. We DO heal, though of course it can take a very, very, very long time...So good to live in the present moment.

Day 59

Taking the evening off to go to "The King's Speech" after grading this morning and starting to look through letters from 25 years ago -- such a strange and wonderful process. I am so lucky to have kept all the letters and cards people sent me over the years. Trying, in reading them now, to watch myself from a distance and understand my particular attachments and detachments.

Started Joyce Johnson's memoir about her life with the Beats. Her teenage desires and hang-ups are strangely (or not so strangely) similar to mine. Plus ca change, as the saying is, plus c'est la meme chose (add your own accents!).

Day 58

Good writing session, bad writing session, ho hum, ho hum. When I focus on  particular moment in time, it's good; when I try to get beyond the 'here and now,' not so good. As in life, so in writing.

Very very very very tired. Finding it hard to keep it together with the kid. Had the wisdom at least to go for a walk when husband got home. Making jello with kids while overtired, not such a good idea. When struggling with writing, walk away from the computer; when struggling with parenting, same. It's all so simple -- why can't we always just remember?

Day 57

New chapter on the way. Four blissful hours of creation in Starbucks this morning while the kids did an obstacle course with the sitter -- win-win!

Two hours in Target afterwards: lose-lose. Needed yoga class to decompress!

Day 56

Not a scrap of work done today. Looked at "Sula," thought about reading it, then l lay down on my pillow (this at 2.30pm) and slept like a baby for 2 hours, and I'm still ready for bed at 7pm! Guess my brain is telling me it's time for a break...

Day 55

Started working on a new chapter today. So glad not to be writing about death anymore. I actually felt myself smiling as I wrote.

After school, kids played in the school playground with a million others -- it was absolute chaos (though they were happy enough).  Something necessary about quiet and stillness for the creative mind, otherwise we are merely surviving, watching our backs...waiting for our children to fall and bloody themselves. Maybe we cannot work creatively in an atmosphere of fear. Considering what's going on in the world these days, it's a wonder anyone can make art. We are so lucky to have this privilege.

Day 54

Blossom everywhere...clocks going forward soon. Ahhhhhhh. Breathe it in!

Wrote up my notes from "Eyes on the Prize" today and realized Martin Luther King's ideals are my ideals exactly. This could be a memo from my heart:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Also, I think he has it on the money (unfortunate metaphor) when he said that the wealthy (especially whites in America) were "more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity." When I tried to suggest these ideas to my students on Tuesday night as we discussed a photograph showing a vulture hovering over a starving child, they looked at me with  something like terror, because, I think it meant we -- including me -- must not simply do something to help the disadvantaged, but must CHANGE OUR LIVES.

Jumping down off my soapbox, I ask myself, 'So what are YOU going to do, Nicola?'  Whatever it is might be the most important lesson my children ever learn. It will take courage, something the Civil Rights Movement tells us we have in spades if we will only use it.

I think right now my body is exhausted by my mind's desire to run a marathon every day...maybe tomorrow I will try to rest (ha!).

Day 53

Is it really only 53 days? Feels like my life now -- I guess that's how long it takes.

Wrote an annotation on "Eyes on the Prize" (PBS series) today, and really enjoyed writing in a different vein -- a little bit academic, a little bit critique, a little bit personal. Good to get a head start on the next packet. I have to dive into something fresh with my own writing, and I'm looking forward to it, but at the same time am anxious it won't go well.

Spend the afternoon in the fresh air with the kids -- they do me such good -- force me out from under the desk and into the beautiful world.

Reading Toni Morrison's "Sula" -- wonderful writing and more accessible than some of her later work, I'm feeling.

Day 52

Sent off my packet today -- 100 pages of it, then had a massage at the chiropractor's. While the therapist pummeled my aching hip bone and glutes, working out years of tension and the scar tissue from an ancient injury, I worked out the theme and structure of my forthcoming 10-page essay, and came up with the ideas for FIVE, count them, five stories! Talk about value for money...

Came home from teaching to see my daughter kissing the blossoms on the nectarine tree. Best therapy in the world. :)