“When will life get easy?”
One of my friends recently emailed me this inquiry. What she meant was less busy. And the answer to her question is never. NEVER. Coincidentally the same week, my sister sent me a card with a well-coifed, apron-festooned mother on the front. She holds a neatly-folded stack of towels. She calls to her children:
KIDS... I HAVE FRESH TOWELS FOR YOU TO LEAVE ROTTING ON THE FLOOR... come and get ‘em!
Inside it says:
Don’t you just love that 12 seconds when all the laundry is done?
Seriously, I don’t think it’s even 12 seconds. But I’m not here to complain about the laundry—it is my personal reminder of the impermanence in life. You do the laundry, you cook, you take care of everyone, you do the dishes, you try like crazy to get some writing done, and then when you’re all done, you do the laundry. See? The laundry will never be done.
I am a novelist. Well, when I finish a novel I suppose I will be a novelist. (I’m gonna say I’m a novelist.) I am a novelist. I also do some freelance technical writing and blogging. I am a Senior Editor for Her Circle Ezine. I do lots of laundry.
I am interrupted 8,000,000 times a day, and while I am, admittedly, prone to exaggeration, I am certain that this is a fairly accurate number. Interruptions such as the request, “Mama, get my water!” when the demanding child is sitting on the couch and simply doesn’t want to lean forward to grasp the water bottle that sits on the tray on the ottoman right in front of her. (I did not make that up. It literally just happened.) The fights, the wounds, the butts to wipe. Then the planned activities—the books to read, the Lego to build, the craft projects to do, the nature walks, the trips to the playground.
This is my inaugural post and I am not using it to complain about my life—rather to sketch it out a little and articulate all the reasons why I don’t have time to blog or get my novel(s) done. Or shower. Why all this is so hard. Why I am so freakin’ tired. Why it has taken me so long to really get my writing life going.
And why I am not going to let any of that stop me anymore.
Because the real truth, which has nothing to do with all these excuses—which are totally not excuses—is that I am simply, completely afraid.
I have been trying to figure out the very most-perfect focus to have here, the very most-perfect things about which to write and achieve it all with the most-perfect timing to ensure literary success. And if all that didn’t happen, if I didn’t figure all that out exactly most-perfectly, I would TOTALLY SCREW EVERYTHING UP and become an UTTER FAILURE. Because, you see, there is one perfect, entirely elusive, precisely right way to do this.
(No, there’s not.)
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” Mary Anne Radmacher
So, I’m just gonna do it. Here it is.
I will write about my family, being a mom, my work, cooking, trying to juggle everything, writing, matcha green tea lattés. I am just gonna take a breath and then that proverbial leap.
Because there is no perfect time—there is now.
There will never be enough time to get it all done. Life will never get easy.
So, where do you start? You just start anywhere. One bite at a time.
This is my leap.
(I really hope I’m not totally screwing this up.)