Writing and Other Household Chores

About two weeks ago, I was in the kitchen, scrounging through the refrigerator hoping to pull together a meal with leftovers.

"Don't take this the wrong way, Mom," said 17, from a chair at the table. "But you don't really...umm...you know...cook anymore."

I'm sure she was expecting me to argue. Her face registered surprise at my response.

"Yeah, I know. Food doesn't seem as important to me as it used to."

I have devoted a good portion of my life as a mother to food. Not only the making of it, but the art of it, creating a table of menus for the week, adding quotes about hunger and appetite and delayed gratification at the top, setting the table with real dishes and clothes napkins.

My efforts didn't stop at dinner. When we hit the high school years, with kids coming home all hours of the evening, as someone else was leaving for work or play practice or a game, I came up with family breakfasts. I often woke up at 5am to make homemade pancakes, a particularly time-sensitive batter that had to set 20 minutes before being poured onto the griddle. Other mornings, I made breakfast burritos, yogurt and fruit smoothies, or grilled peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. The night before, we set up an assembly line for everyone to make their own lunches.

These days, money gets direct deposited into their lunch account, which was set up by my husband. When the balance gets low, he gets a notice to replenish the account. I am not sure if the cost varies that much, particularly now, with my time becoming more and more precious.

That day in the kitchen, 17 listed some of her favorite dinners that I "used to make." Fried rice, roasted red pepper soup, pasta salad, none of them fancy dishes that took excessive time to prepare. What they did take was planning, and creative energy, to put together meals that offered a somewhat balanced menu for each of our eaters (one vegetarian, two self-proclaimed carnivores, one with egg allergies, and a young one who would eat anything as long as it came from my plate.) And shopping, making a detailed grocery list, stopping at the bread outlet, the farmer's market and a couple of grocery stores. These days, my creative energy is going other places, like into these blog posts, as well as revision of my current collection of short stories, submission of completed stories to literary journals, meetings with my writing group, and working on art pieces to sell for income.

To be completely honest, cooking isn't the only chore I have fallen behind on. My kids and husband have been doing their own laundry for years, but at this point, I am usually wearing my last clean pair of socks. I drive my car until the last second before making time to get gas. I don't chaperone school field trips. We regularly run out of toilet paper, as well as toothpaste and laundry detergent (Fortunately, our milk gets delivered).

And I have not bought a single Christmas present this year. I am even contemplating giving them money.

Which brings me to my biggest question so far. How did Sophie do it?

I researched the site of the Tolstoy's summer home. The home itself has been preserved just as it was when Sophie and Leo lived there. Their grandson operates a hotel on the site, as well as a cafe which uses Sophia's recipes. I read that they have developed an app that would allow me to download her recipes to make in my own kitchen. It is only available in Russian, though they expect to launch an English version in 2015.

Great. Then what will I do? I am reminded of the documentary about women artists, Who Does She Think She Is, in which one of women says, "I needed a wife too."

The rub is that I enjoy(ed) doing things for my family. But I want to do more than support their lives. I want my own. I have stories that need to be written. And the further I get into this project, the louder their voices become in my head. So the problem becomes a matter of choice, Sophie's choice. I can either go crazy trying to suppress the creative calling in my head while tending to my family, or I can let some things fall away. Day by day I am deciding what those things are, trying to avoid the narcisstic trap of the artist, keeping it in balance with the needs of my family. I don't think that I will find an answer to this dilemma, in part because my life is not static. Just as I shifted from family dinners to family breakfasts, I will have to stay resilient, bending to pick up something that gets dropped along the way, holding on to as much as I can, and hoping, hoping, that it is all worth it.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Souvenirs

I spent yesterday at the British Library. Yes, the British Libary, in London. About two weeks ago, my husband called and asked if I would like to join him on a short trip that he had to make for work. In uncharacteristic style, I said yes,without considering the consequences, like childcare and my daughter's winter band concert and deadlines. Had I thought about those things, I definitely would not be here.

And I would not have seen Jane Austen's hand written manuscript of Persuasion, the pages on which Charlotte Bronte wrote the death of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic. Or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Within the manuscript were revisions suggested by her husband Percy Shelley. Beside the manuscript was a letter from Lord Byron describing it as "wonderful book considering it was written by a nineteen-year-old woman."

The previous day, I toured Windsor Castle, where I saw handwritten journals pages from Elizabeth I, a letter to Queen Victoria from Abraham Lincoln, and my personal favorite, the diary of 11-year-old Elizabeth II, opened to the page describing her parents' coronation as King and Queen of England. The young future queen describes the gentleman she didn't know who led them out of the cathedral to a room, where they had tea and cakes before.... at this point she reaches the end of the page, which I cannot turn as it is behind glass. The words are written in pencil, and for some reason, this strikes me as remarkable.

I have already purchased a pencil in the gift shop, my standard souvenir. It is red, with WINDSOR CASTLE written down the side and a tiny gold crown on top. I like pencils as souvenirs, for many reasons. One, I don't have to worry about size. It is easy to pack and inexpensive. But pencils are also usable, and as such, do not last forever.

And perhaps that is why I am intrigued by the young queen's diary. A pencil seems so small and unsophisticated, especially for a queen. At the library, the sketches in William Blake's notebook are done in pencil, and so Leonardo da Vinci's drawings studying the flight of birds, and Michaelango's notes about his work on the Sisteen Chapel ceiling. Even those writers whose manuscripts are written in ink are not precious with words. Percy crossed out and rewrote things in his wife's writing, as did Charlotte and Jane and so many others.

What I see in looking at these manuscripts is their humanity, of queens and presidents and artists. Somewhere along the way, these are people whom we have exalted, but there was a time where each of them was a person at a desk, trying to find the right words to tell a story.

This morning, when I sit down to copy lines of Anna Karenina, I feel a tiny bit closer to what I have been trying to find through this project. I am trying to find the magic that moves words from my head to the piece of paper in front of me. Like my decision to come to London, I must not overthink this, or I will lose the magic that can be created by taking up a pencil.

Posted with Blogsy

Motion Sickness

Last Saturday, I went to my sister-in-law's fiftieth birthday party, held in the barn behind a friend's house. The Birthday girl hired a contra band (not to be confused with contraband) and a couple of musicians from a small town south of Indy. A young women played the fiddle and used her foot to drum out the rythym on a wooden platform at her feet. The caller, an older man with patience that wore very thin by the end of the night, instructed us in the moves of a series of dances. We do-si-doed and almandered and bowed, to our dance partner and our neighbor. We swung each other round, we sashayed between two lines, and we convinced ourselves we had it down, just as the caller sped up and we went the wrong direction, smiling and laughing the entire time.

The dance floor only started to spin when I stopped moving.

We sat down, heaving for breath and trying to steady ourselves, both feet on the ground. I gulped water, and took small sips from the whiskey and coke that I made earlier that evening. The dizzy feeling was frighteningly reminescent of drinking too much, when I would lie down in bed, one foot on the floor to stop the room from turning on its axis.

Sunday morning, I woke with a headache. My body felt heavy and stiff. When I sat up and asked my husband why I felt like I had been hit by a train, he said, the dancing, in a calm voice. He, of course, was already up and showered and dressed, and like a good husband, presenting me with a cup of hot tea.

What does this have to do with copying a manuscript by hand? Well, for one thing, the physical feelings are strikingly similar. I spent most of yesterday catching up my AK pages. I got behind due to a writing conference that backed right up a Thanksgiving week where we welcomed home three of college students,children, cleaned house and prepared for two family gatherings, one for my side, one for his. I baked pies (an activity which also had to be doubled when I forgot to put spices in the first batch), brined a turkey that only days before had been running around on a farm just out of town, and mopped floors. Okay, my husband did the mopping, alongside 13, who for some reason, inherited a recessive toilet-cleaning gene from me. All this to say that I had not copied pages for almost two weeks.

Monday morning, with everyone gone, I sat down with a cup of tea and a leftover-turkey sandwich and put pen to paper. I coped seven pages, which is still behind schedule but edging me closer to my next mile-marker of page 150. I hope to reach it by the end of the week. I have not timed myself as I write, but my best guess is that writing my daily two pages takes just over an hour (without interruptions). That means I estimate that I spent close to four hours writing yesterday. When I stopped and looked up, my stomach gave a lurch. I pushed my glasses to the top my head to acclimate my eyes, then moved to the couch to lie down.

An hour later, I opened my eyes and managed to walk upstairs. I still felt nauseous, but I needed to head out to pick up the kids at school. In the car, I turned on the radio and sang along to Christmas carols. I stopped at Target to buy rabbit food and green beans to serve with macaroni and cheese for dinner. After checkout, I bought a bag of popcorn at the concession and filled my water bottle from the fountain. By the time, I stepped outside into the cold wind, I was feeling fairly normal again.

When I copy pages, I am physically engaged in the act. My shoulders, my neck, my back get stiff. I stretch and move, try to remember to tighten my core muscles, sit up straight. I cross and uncross my legs. Sometimes I stand up and move behind the chair, crossing my arms across the back of it and folding my body forward at the hips. I stand back up and twist side to side, swing my arms wide. When I began this project, I had no idea that it would be such a physical process, which may sound stupid, but I thought only of my hands, how they might get tired, my carpal tunnel might be aggravated. I have been surprised by how exhausting this work is. I cannot help but wonder at what we have lost, creatively, by removing the physicality of work from our daily lives, not only for writers, but in other areas too: the swish-swish of the spatula and the flicking in my wrist as I smooth the frosting on a cake, the squaring of a shirt when I bring in the arms and fold it in half and smooth out the fabric, the pull at my midsection and in my shoulders when I sweep or rake. At its very heart, this project, like so many things in life, is about the physical act of creation.

Last night I sat down on the bed, tired but not ready to sleep. It had been a productive day.

"Why is it that the more I do, the more I want to do?" I said to my husband, who was already lying in bed with his book propped on his chest.

"I don't know, but it's true."

I was dressed in pajamas, but my body was not quite ready to rest. It had a momentum going, like when I was on the dance floor and I had put my hand up to meet my partner's and we twirled round each other without even trying.

 

Posted with Blogsy