When my second child was three weeks old, I started taking a writing course. Why? Because I needed to do something during my maternity leave. I’d found an in-person course and emailed the professor asking if I could do it online. In two days, he agreed to the arrangement, sent me a $50 invoice which I promptly paid, and class began via email and phone. It lasted just under a month.
As odd as that sounds, or downright nuts, it still sounds like me. The habit of doing too much has yet to leave my bones which is why I’m up at 9:49pm determined to write something—and it had better be something good. I wonder when God first saw that I was developing this habit and what his thoughts were aside from, “It has begun.” I’m guessing the habit began in high school. College was worse. And 17 years after undergrad, I was definitely experiencing a splash of madness. Who goes on maternity leave and thinks, “Huh, after these three months, what will I have to show that I’ve used my time well?”
Um…A baby?!
Dear reader, I can hear you screaming at me right now. I get it. But you have to understand, my mother was in town helping us and I guess I felt as if I had the time and bandwidth to write some words here and there while breastfeeding. Visualize it with me. Breastfeeding, once you get the hang of it, becomes a hands-free operation. I could either thumb away on my phone or prop my laptop up just right and type away with two hands that learned to type back when my overt-the-top habit was taking shape. So let’s blame my high school typing teacher. Kidding.
Three months after delivery, my husband lovingly agreed to drive me to Louisville, Kentucky to attend a write-a-thon. A friend I’d made in grad school organized this all day event as a fundraiser. His non profit partners “with communities in Louisville who are misrepresented or underrepresented in public discourse to preserve precious history and to document their stories in their own words and images.” Fantastic work. I wanted to be a part of it all. So we drove four hours from Knoxville…with a three-month-old baby who I took breaks to breastfeed throughout the day. It was all worth it because I got to work on my words and see a friend I hadn’t seen in 13 years. Did I mention my oldest was two? She stayed home with grandma.
I have yet to develop the sort of relationships with my writing life that seems to make sense in retrospect. Maybe that’s okay, but I want it to make sense, to have a realistic flow. That’s why I took forever to reply to a recent email from the organizer of a local writing group. I’d emailed her last year in hopes that joining a group would help me to take my writing even more seriously. But they were full. She agreed to keep my name on a waiting list and in the months that followed, I forgot all about it. Her recent email was to tell me they had two open spots and to ask if I wanted to join. I immediately knew that I should say no. Thursdays from 7-9:30pm? I couldn’t commit to that. I’m not retired! Submitting up to 20 pages the week before so that others could provide feedback? Who has 20 pages?! Because of how impossible the description sounded and because of how much I remember wanting this before, I decided to ask if I could come to one meeting, see how it goes, and then decide.
Hello, Liz.
Thank you for reaching out.
I hit save draft and moved on with my day, unsure of how to word my request. I deleted the draft. I created a second, a third. Then I sensed that I should re-read her email, try to read it slowly without any nervous energy. That’s when I realized I wouldn’t be committing to every single Thursday but to one each month. And that’s when I realized I wouldn’t have to submit 20 pages for critique but could submit no more than 20 pages which is another way of saying, I would have enough to share and didn’t have to. It wasn’t impossible. Plus, most meetings were on Zoom and any in-person meetings were also hybrid.
Two long days after her invitation, I wrote Liz back, to say that I’d be happy to join the writing group. I also included the requisite writing sample so that the group could get familiar with what I’m working on. Of course I obsessed over it before attaching it to the email. Is this enough? Will someone steal my words and pass them off as their own, publish a whole book? With peace in my heart, I added the meeting to my calendar and closed my laptop.
There’s no perfect situation where the writing stars align and the writing angels sing over me, not that I’m aware of. What there is is the slow down, walking things back from atop the decision precipice on which I’ve placed them. And there’s the reminder that just because it won’t be perfect doesn’t mean I shouldn’t pursue it. I hope that when I look back at this moment a decade from now, I’ll be proud of myself. I hope that I won’t see the madness of it all but the steady steps I took to becoming more of who I am.
But I’ll probably see the madness.
“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”
(by Aristotle, Seneca, or some other ancient mind)