Work, Work, Work

Two big things happened last week. I made it page 600 in Anna Karenina, and I began to write the first draft of my new book.

I have been inching toward page 600 for a while. And I have been ruminating the stories for the new collection much longer. And I have been telling myself every Monday, that this will be the week, this week I will begin the last quarter of the the Tolstoys' novel and begin the writing my own new stories.

Each week it didn't happen.

So when a colleague of mine said she was getting back to her early morning writing practice, I asked if I could join her. We do not write in the same physical space; she lives in the next state just south of me. But through the magic of technology, I know there is someone waiting for a response to her 6AM text: Making coffee.

I reply: Making tea.

And we begin.

The first day was easy, like the first day of most things: school, marriage, job. But Tuesday's writing was harder and slower work. Wednesday found me jiggling my leg and fidgetting in my seat, but I stayed right there. Thursday, I woke up late, but I managed to do some writing before the day was over, in part because my colleague texted me toward dinnertime, asking how things were going.

Friday was a bust. I overslept.

But I wrote Saturday.

I took Sunday off.

Monday another bust.

And today, this morning, I was restless in the bed at 5am. I rolled back and forth until finally I could not wait any longer. By 5:30, I was in the kitchen, boiling water for tea, putting away clean dishes while I waited. While the tea steeped in the pot (no single mug for me this morning), I lit the fire in the living room, got out my new binder, took out paper and pen.

Did I mention that I am writing the new collection by hand?

Yes, just as I round the bend toward the last leg of an 800 page novel, I embark on a new exercise in creative torture. I don't know why I am doing it this way. I only know that something suggested that I needed to get these ideas down on paper. By hand.

So let's time travel back to last week again. Each morning, after I wrote, or failed to write, I put away Anna Karenina binder and pulled out my other one. Well, actually, I left the binders where they were and moved my body to a table in another room. That was easier, and got me out of my seat, like walking from biology to English class in high school.

Each day, after I coped three pages of Anna Karenina, I took a walk and wrote my daily essay in observation, a practice I have had with another colleague. She lives in the state to the west of me.

Then I had lunch and read for an hour from Four Sisters, a book about the Romanov Grand Duchesses in the years leading up their murder during the Bolshevic Revolution.

After that, I collect eggs from the chicken coop.

Then I sit down to submit one or two stories to literary journals or writing contests.

The rest of the day played as it does for most of us: making dinner, washing dishes, folding laundry, and yes, to be honest, watching a little mindless television.

When I would finally lied down in bed and fall asleep, some partly conscious part of my brain was writing down my dreams. In the morning, all I could remember were words: dandle, atmosphere, cricket, running. The only visual memory I could recall was seeing my hand scrawl those words on my dream.

The life of a writer. This was supposed to be exciting and organic. Instead it is the same thing day after day.

A couple of years ago, I read a quote, written on a post-it note stuck to the desk of another collegeague, in the state to the east of me. "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Flaubert, another old, smart, white dude (I'm quoting my colleague,whom I contacted after I failed to unearth the quote, because I thought it was written by Proust).

Still, there is truth in it.

In five days of practicing (and I do mean practicing) this routine, I have written about feeling for phantom uteruses, developing a vaccine to prevent adultery, drowning mice in the toilet, and rescuing baby opossums from a dead mother's body.

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The Jane Effect

Jane had it all. Her brother invited her to live on his estate rent free. Her sister managed the household. She didn't have a husband or children to suck every drop of creative energy from her soul so that she fell into bed exhausted each night, berating herself for not having written....again...

All I am saying is that she had no excuse NOT to write. This explains perfectly why, despite dying at 41, she wrote and pusblished seven novels. Right?

Wrong.

I am the master of not writing. Sometimes I am best at it when I have nothing else to do.

Here is a (partial) list of things I can do instead of write:

nap.

freeze 20 pints of blueberries.

sort winter clothes.

clean out the chicken coop (yes, some days, I would even do this to get out of writing.)

bake pumpkin bread to give to the teachers, the assistants, the school social worker, the school secretary, the school nurse, the cafeteria lady, and the principal on the last day before winter break.

watch What Not to Wear marathon.

watch Sex and The City marathon.

watch recorded episodes of Modern Family.

watch Angels in America.

watch Grey Gardens.

fold laundry.

drive two hours (one way) to rescue three hens.

walk the dog.

copy Anna Karenina.

If a writer doesn't want to write, she can find a way to get out of it. Jane could have done that too, even without cable television. She could have hand embroidered the bed curtains.

The most worthy of causes can be used to avoid our own work, the work we are meant to do. This becomes especially tricky when we avoid writing in support of those we love. Because of course we want them to succeed, to be healthy, to be happy. And this is a good thing.

In the winter of 2010, I was in my last semester of graduate school, the time when one is most likely to give up. I was revising my creative thesis, or would I call it now, my bookmanuscript. I worked in a little room off the kitchen that was the old butler's pantry. I turned the thermostat down to 60 degrees. I shut off the radiator in my little makeshift studio. I placed a small space heater beneath the desk, creating the only warm space in the house.

Once, when the kids were home, requiring me to heat the whole house, I stood up from the chair and yelled, I quit, I can't do this. In less than a minute, three faces appeared in the doorway, three daughters, one of whom was 17, though she was younger at the time, who put her hand on her hip and looked right at me and said:

"You can't quit. You have come too far to quit. And what kind of example would that set for me?"

Damn you, daughter who listens to my every freaking word.

Sometimes what we do for ourselves is what we do for the ones we love.

And so she write.

She carves out a tiny space where nothing can fit except her and her words, whether that is a small round table in her bedroom somewhere on her brother's estate or the one warm spot in an empty house, or the voice of a daughter who won't let her quit.

 

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The Cassandra Effect

I arrived in London at 8:30 on Tuesday morning. Despite having taken a red eye from Chicago, and knowing I had three days and no time to waste accomodating jet lag, I dropped my bags in the hotel room and headed back down to the front desk to call a taxi. I had read that we were close to Jane Austen's house, and I decided to venture out and find it.

This was not a planned trip to the UK. My husband had to go for work, and falling over our ten-year wedding anniversary, he cashed in ALOT of frequent flyer miles to surprise me with a ticket of my own. Our 25-year-old daughter, a teacher, agreed to stay at the house with 17 and 13 while I was gone. I located my passport and packed a bag, after I did the laundry, went grocery shopping, visited my dad at the nursing home and wrote out dinner menus for the girls.

"You should go to Bath," 25 said to me, having visiting the town when she was doing a semester abroad in college. "You will love it."

So I did my due diligence, read the train tables and made plans to go on Wednesday. (Details of this adventure to follow in the next post).

Jane's home, however, the house where she did most of her writing, is in Chawton. Her brother Edward inherited the Chawton Estate from a distant cousin, changed his surname to Knight, and invited his mother and two sisters to live rent-free in a small cottage on his property. They accepted. And it is here, at a tiny writing table by the window, that Jane wrote and revised her novels.

Standing in the bedroom Jane shared with her sister Cassandra, I read a plaque that told me about Jane's daily routine. She spent the morning writing. In the afternoon, she and her sister would walk for hours in the fields and pastures of her brother's estate. They spent the evenings reading, sewing and embroidering. Throughout the house I find examples of Jane's handiwork: a glass case of embroidered baby bonnets for her nieces and nephews, replicas of hand-sewn bed curtains, a pieced quilt top, and a delicate, embroidered shawl.

The plaque goes on to say that it is because of Cassandra that Jane found time to write. Those mornings that Jane spent at her desk, Cassandra managed the household. She oversaw the baking, the cleaning, the collecting of eggs and vegetables, as well as herbs from the medicinal garden. She planned meals, sewed her brother's shirts and took care of hundreds of other minute details necessary to keep house in the 18th century. She also drew and painted the only two known portraits of Jane. Reading this, staring at the little painting of Jane in a blue dress, I know who I came here to see.

Across the street is a teashop called Cassandra's Cup, a nod to Jane's sister, to her creative contribution. Two unmarried sisters, one of whom is wife to the other.

Instead of sitting in the teashop and enjoying scones and clotted cream as I had planned, I walk in the rain toward Chawton House, the old manor house of the estate that is now a library for women's writing of the 18th and 19th Centuries. I wander into the cemetery beside the church.

I find Cassandra's grave and pay my respects.

 

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Losing vs Letting Go

Two days ago, I finished Caroline Moorehead's A Train in Winter, the story of French women sent to German concentration camps, women who worked to undermine German occupation in their country. Not everything that happened to them came at the hands of Germans. Many were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and died because of French collaborators, people along with German orders to keep their families safe. while others were rewarded for their actions.

I have read many books on WWII. I have heard talks given by concentration camp survivors. This book was different. I had to put this book down more than once, walk away. I dreamt of being held against my will. These are stories of loss and suffering beyond anything I have read about before.

I have spent much time healing from my own losses. They are many, but they are nothing compared with what these women experienced. The few who returned home mourned executed husbands, bombed homes, children who grew up in their absence. And the French people were slow to recognize the role they played in the suffering by the women, fellow French citizens. Who should be punished? What measures should be taken to hold them accountable?

Many women never could reacclimate to a life after after Auschswitz and Ravenbruck, in part because the return home took away the very thing that allowed them to survive: their reliance on each other. In the camps, when one women's meager food rations were withheld, the others all chipped in pieces of bread, often summing up to more food than she could eat. Women who worked as secretaires for the SS risked their own lives to find safe jobs for others. They hid sick women from the guards. Over and over they commited acts to guarantee survival, not necessarily their own but someone, anyone. It was the only way to keep themselves alive.

About Christmas 1943, Moorehead writes:

"Food, saved from parcels from France and vegetables pilfered from the gardens were made into

a feast of beans and cabbage, potatoes with onion sauce and poppy seeds. The women ate

little, having lost the habit of food, but the sight of so much to eat made them cheerful."

I copied this passage into my journal. I was so struck by the vision of starving women, deprived of food, that the mere sight of it was enough to sustain them.

Some children of women who did not survive refused to believe that their mothers were not coming home. Moorehead reports one child who went to the train station for years, despite being told that her mother had died. I am reminded of Anna Karenina's son, who refuses to believe she is dead, the lie that has been told to him by his father. Nine-year-old Seryozha looks for his mother's face in every woman he sees on the street, so certain is he that she is still alive.

One dead mother, one living mother, two motherless children.

We have all faced losses, some greater than others, but I suspect none felt more deeply to the individual than their greatest ones. Much harder to let go of than the thing itself is our own hope for how we wished it had been. I had lunch with my sister yesterday, and we spoke of much we can hurt each other and those closest to us when we refuse to let go of this hope for what we cannot have. In 2014, our parents sold their home, after months spent cleaning, throwing away and selling stuff that had been accumulated over several decades: a secretary desk belonging to my grandfather that crumbled to sawdust when my sister reached out to touch it, a broken ceramic windchime that was a gift to my dad, hundreds of pieces of well-seasoned lumber, walnut and cherry and oak, crates of license plates, and church statuary of the saints.

And tools.

At one point, we counted 14 pitchforks. I may be off in that number, but does it matter? Isn't 2 or 3 or 4 too many, especially when you don't have anything to pitch?

It's been almost a year, and still my father won't stop talking about what he has lost. And my sister said something so wise yesterday. She said, how do you make someone want something he doesn't want for himself?

In a few days, I find out if my short story collection might be published. For those of you who don't know, my collection Three Sisters: A Hybrid Collection has been selected as a finalist in the Sou'wester First Book Award with Dock Street Press. I want to win. I didn't think it mattered to me. I am playing all the mind games I can to convince myself otherwise. But I want so much to get that email that says, Congratulations! Some days, some hours, I am more rational about it then others. I tell myself, if I lose, then I will go back in and revise one more time, maybe I'll ask for feedback about how I can improve the piece. I'll read the winning book to see if I can glean any wisdom from it, and to support the press and the author.

At other moments my thoughts spin out of control and I am imagining how it will feel to hold my book in my hand, as if that is the thing I have been wanting. I imagine myself being interviewed on Fresh Air (when I confess that to another writer, she says, why do we writers always imagine that?). I dream about which story I will pick for readings.

I do not want to lose. But I don't get to make that choice. The only choice I have is to decide whether or not to be cheerful at the mere sight of a feast set on the table before me.

 

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Bathing Beauty

This morning I want only to curl up on the couch next to the dog and close my eyes and sleep. But then I receive a text from my walking and writing companion, asking if I am ready to begin. She knows that on Tuesdays, I walk to the Writing Habit, a weekly gathering with a few other writers where we...well...we write. We don't critique our work or do writing prompts. We bring our laptops and notebooks and we find a spot and we write for two hours.

To the text message I respond, I feel tired today.

Then I send another text to my writing group, repeating that I am tired and ask if anyone else is planning to come today, the implication being that if they stay home, I can too.

Someone respond quickly.

"I'm coming! The kids are back in school!"

And so, I drag my ass up off the couch, leave the dog sleeping soundly and head upstairs to shower and dress.

I don't shower every day, less frequently since spending the summer in Michigan. The water pump at the cottage does not allow for excessive water usage. I am always trying to find ways to conserve water, which is kind of funny when you look out my window and see a beautiful blue lake.

When I cook, I start by bringing the water to a boil while cooking seven or eight eggs, which go in the fridge for lunches. Then I cook broccolli or green beans, next some ears of corn and finally, the rice. All these things go in to the fridge to be used at another time. If I am not cooking rice, maybe I am ending with potatoes that day, I cool the pan of broth and use it water the basil growing in boxes on the front porch or the hanging basket of morning glories.*

We encourage sailor showers, where one rinses off, shuts off the water, soaps up, then turns the water back on to quickly rinse again. One of the kids, who shall remain nameless, asked if he could shower with a "friend," to save water. While he made a convincing argument, we did too: there was a good chance that shower could take longer than the ones they would take separately.

By July, the lake is warm enough that we stop showering altogether (as opposed to all together).

We bathed instead in the lake. We carried our biodegradeable soap and shampoo out to the end of the dock. The girls jumped in right away. 13 even took to shaving with the lathery soap we bought from a local alpaca farm, the soap encased in a felted wool cover that exfoliated the skin as well. We would lather up our hair too, pile it on top of our heads and swim around. We gave ourselves mermaid names. My favorite part was after scrubbing clean and stacking the soap and things on the dock, we waded out to the deeper water. I have never been partial to diving, but here, I would lift my arms over my head, hands outstretched to part the surface and dive down into the cool lake water. This bathing left me feeling cleaner than I have ever felt in my life. No bath in a porcelain tub has ever left me feeling like that, no shower of water from overhead either.

I remember a scene in the novel where Dolly, Anna Karenina's sister-in-law, has been banished to the country with the children. Anna's brother, Stepan Arkadyevitch, arranges this as a way to save money. He finds it less expensive to raise a family in the country. Their cow provides milk; chickens give eggs. On Sundays after church, Dolly takes the children to bathe in the creek. The children splash around, playing and cooling off until the governess makes sure they are scrubbed and polished. Dolly admits to herself that bathing with her children is one of her most pleasant activities. I remember well the feel of a child's slippery naked legs clasped around me.

A group of local peasant women join them at the river, and at first Dolly is self-conscious. As the two groups of women begin to strike up a conversation, they talk of children and breastfeeding. Dolly, whose youngest child is still an infant, is surprised to hear that the peasant women nurse their children for two or three years. The whole time they are talking, Darya and her children are half-dressed; the peasants in their good Sunday clothes. The scene remains, five hundred pages into the novel, my favorite moment of the story. The intimacy of the moment comes not from their nakedness, though it does provide a backdrop that suggests we humans are not all that different from each other. Tolstoy could have written Dolly ashamed, made her run away in the bushes to dress and whisk her children away. But he doesn't do that. He imagines instead, an opportunity for the women to come together on equal ground and find the other women more pleasant and engaging than they expect and probably than they had been taught. Dolly finds herself not wanting to leave the women's company.

This morning, standing in the shower, I pick up a bar of lavender-scented soap and rub it over the washcloth spread across my hand. I watch as the outline of my hand emerges in white lather set against green cotton. I spread out my fingers to make the shape more distinct. I could, in theory, stand here letting the hot water run, but I don't. My experience of water is different now. It has changed me, and I can't change it back, even if the lake is hundreds of miles away.

*I discovered this idea in An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler.

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Two Markets

Not long after I set out, I realize the bike ride from home to the farmer's market downtown is almost the same distance as from our cottage to the market in Elberta. All summer, I rode those six miles on a trail that follows the Betsie River, past turtles sunning themselves on logs, water the color of milky tea, and numbered bluebird houses.

Also sweet peas growing wild.

And campsites.

And homes of people who live here year-round: snowmobiles covered in blue plastic tarps and parked in front yards, snow plows unhinged and set beside the garage, gardens already bearing fruit, unlike mine, planted in mid-june and still has only blossoms.

I have moped around since my return to the city, fretting the noise and the air-conditioned air.

Riding along this hot pavement, I am finally glad to be home. And it is an abandoned building which brings me joy. I park my bike and look inside each of the shops, their back walls busted out and letting in sunlight.

I am hot. I have sweat running down my back, along the sides of my face. Drops of it rest in the curve of my eyelashes. My water bottle forgotten, I cannot believe the peace I feel at being back in this rundown place. Right then, I decide that I will take pictures of this trip, to share here with you, because I have been trying to understand how Sophia felt, returning to Moscow after a summer at their country home. I thought she would have been sad, like I have been, but maybe by leaving and coming, she was able to see the beauty in both places.

 

I love the symmetry of these two doors.

 

An empty lot beside the house is now an urban garden.

 

Years ago, a giant clock on the side of this pet shop used animals in place of numbers.

 

 

 

These wildflowers (as opposed to weeds) grow around a gray utility box. This is the last picture I take before riding on to the farm market, where I buy corn, red potatoes, 2 cantelopes, and pork burgers.

For lunch I eat a saugage slider and a roasted Indiana sweet corn popsicle.

After that, on a whim, I ride to the fabric shop on Massachusetts Avenue. I buy three fat quarters of fabric by Liberty of London, which remind me of my story titled "Liberty," part of my current collection. It is named after the department store famous for these detailed floral prints. I also buy a pattern to make throw pillows for 17's bedroom and one button, shaped like a fawn.

I refill my water bottle in their bathroom and ride home.

 

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Vinyasa Writing

Back home again, in Indiana.

For two months, no one looked at me at 6pm and asked, what's for dinner? We survived on an odd mixture of pie, frozen pizza, bagels and salads. Or my personal favorite, a bowl of fresh cherries, pits disposed into the grass, or in 13's case, at the person sitting across from her. Once I made stir-fry, another time pasta, which we ate for several nights in a row.

The kids and I took turns washing dishes. Each person was responsible for their own laundry. I had more free time than I have had since childhood.

 

And yet, I did not write. Not one blog post. Not a letter home. Not a draft of a single word for the new story collection, even though I had set the lofty goal of finishing a first draft, just a shitty first draft (thank you, Anne Lamott) by the end of the summer.

What was I thinking?

My completed collection took five years to finish, and who knows, made need another revision before it gets published. It has been a long time since I wrote a first draft. I forgot how much time is spent in the percolation stage. That's what a composer/musician friend calls the period of time when an artist feels or looks to other people like she is doing nothing, when in reality, lots of good stuff is brewing inside. Twyla Tharp calls this scratching. This summer I did lots and lots of scratching. I plan to share some of those things with you in the coming weeks.

In addition to scratching, I also did the hardest work of my life.

I learned to sit still.

Easy, you say?

Well, hold on. I don't mean sitting still on the couch, stretched out, binge watching The Food Network, or even reading a good literary novel.

I mean sitting upright, muscles tightened around my spine, my pelvis and the bones of my thighs; shoulders relaxed away from my ears; my head and neck aligned with my spine; an imaginary thread lifting from the top of my skull into the sky so that I feel tall and straight. I mean feet planted firmly on the ground as if I am standing in mountain pose. I mean working so hard to sit straight and tall, strong and yet not tensed, that sweat rolls down my back and along my temples, a line of it across my upper lip.

That kind of sitting takes more strength than I ever imagined.

I was able to do this work with the help of the yoga teacher I found in Michigan. I did some research about area yoga instructors, finally settling with Jess on instinct after I read her bio. It was a huge splurge, but the best money I ever spent. We began with private yoga sessions. 90 minutes focused only how I am moving my body. I was pretty closed up at the beginning, and those first stretches left me feeling exhausted and tender. When we finished our first session, I stood up and walked straight to the tiny bathroom at the back of her studio and threw up.

We continued to work together, transitioning to classes with her or other instructors in the area. By the time I left Michigan to return home, I was going to yoga class three times a week. This might not seem like much, but that practice extended far beyond the mat. I was paying attention as I rode my bike, walked, bent over to pick up the newspaper, swam in the lake or lay down at night to sleep.

Even though I did not start my own new writing project, I did continue copying Anna Karenina. I found that when I sat with my feet planted and stayed aware of the placement of my spine and shoulders, kept my jaw relaxed, focused on my breathing, I could sit still and copy much longer. If I caught my mind wondering how many pages until I would finish a chapter or thinking about what I needed to do when I finished or, the worst, how much longer it would take to finish copying the whole novel, I brought my attention back to my breath, I moved my hand word by word, until I reached the end.

When I told Jess about this, about how I felt like I was truly developing a "practice" for the first time, after years of attending yoga classes, she said this:

"The physical practice of yoga was designed 1) as a way to make the body strong enough to endure long periods of stillness and 2) a way to understand what we are capable of with discipline, practice, mindfulness.

All this time I thought writers did yoga so they could let go and be creative. Turns out, yoga was giving them the strength to sit in a chair for long periods of time, to hold that pose, even when the character was about to make a huge mistake, or when we wanted to walk away because writing that story hurt too much. I have never felt more acutely how important my physical body is to telling a story.

 

 

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Diagnosis

When my son was 2 years old, we were standing outside the front door, diaper bag over my arm, his hand in mine, while I closed locked the front door with the other. I turned to head to the car when 2 turned to me and said, "Can't we sit here on the step for a moment?"

Now 2 has become 20. He is still the boy who would rather sit on the stoop and think about life rather than rush off to parties or class or work. It is hard for him to find his groove in a world that says, go here, do that, buy this, wear that, watch this and this and this, now sleep for five hours then get up and do it again. And if you are one of those people who is always rushing around, trying to get to the next thing, you might think that 20 is not doing much with his life.

He has a label, thanks to the powers-that-be in education, which tell us that we cannot identify his needs unless we know what to call him. And that label served him well when it allowed me to lobby for a one-on-one assistant in the classroom, not so well when he became old enough to want his independence and the school, understaffed as most schools are, did not want to delete the need for an assistant from his education plan. By that time, his original assistant, who allowed 20 to earn drawing time in exchange for time spent moving at the pace of the rest of his class, had become a classroom teacher at the school, a teacher who plays music while kids work and spends much of the spring growing garden starts under grow lights with his students. I see him in his classroom, with his daughter, now a student there too, hours after school has ended, puttering around his quiet space.

And I see 20, who still owns every one of his original Bionicles, every piece, in their original container. 20, who put together a 200 piece puzzle when he was four, and 2000 piece Lego set of the Sydney Opera house last Christmas. 20, who read two books in the Game of Thrones series simulataneously, because they take place at the same time but were too cumbersome to be published as one. 20, who when asked if he needs new shoes, says, no, thanks, I already have a pair. 20, who cannot get the groove of how fast you have to move to get a summer job, or get the hang of a full college courseload.

When 20 was in 7th grade, I got a call from his science teacher, letting me know 20 had broken a beaker in class, because, she said, you know, kids like that just don't understand the need to take care of things. Later that afternoon, walking down the street, I turned to see 20, half a block behind me, picking up fast food wrappers and a half-empty styroam cup left on the curb.

"What are you doing?" I called to him, annoyed and in a rush.

"Just trying to pick up some of this trash."

I read recently that if Leo Tolstoy was alive today, he would likely be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Because that label was not available, he became a genius instead. Today, his wife would be attending meetings for spouses of someone diagnosed with mental illness, or perhaps she would have divorced him, taken the kids and gone to work as a teacher or an administative assistant. We likely would have neither Leo's novels or Sophie's photographs.

Sophie took up photography intending to document the life of the great man to whom she was married. She could not have predicted that in later years, Leo would meet and become great friends with a man who would replace her as her husband's confidente and biographer. Still, I have this book of her creative work, pictures of her grandchild at that baths, and a beautiful photo of her standing by a painting of her 7-year-old son who died. And as I reflect back on my life spent helping other people rise up, I am coming to believe that I have not lost myself. I have postponed some of my own dreams until those in my care have grown up enough to be on their won. Along the way, I have tucked stories and experiences into the suitcase of my mind, until I had time to unpack them.

I sit in Michigan, letting myself, perhaps for the first time, take a moment to sit on the stoop and stare at the lake in front of me, to watch the fog roll in, to color mandalas, to collect rocks and pieces of driftwood that already line the my windowsill, to soak and cook a pot of black beans all day on the stove, to eat only rhubarb pie for breakfast. And I am doubting my choice to hurry all those little people along to adulthood. I am wondering what they lost, what we as a society has lost, in my drive to make sure they became productive, successful members of society.

 

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Advice Column

"Remember the most important thing you can do as a parent is to be a role model."

Make an organized to-do list; then prostinate until the last days while you can catch up on Call The Midwife.

 

"Create goody bags and hide them around the house for your children to find while you are away. That way they will know that you are still thinking about them."

 

Check under sofa cushions for dirty socks, candy wrappers and dirty dishes.

 

"Leave an item of clothing you have worn for you children to snuggle when they get sad."

 

Give up on finding that embroidered shirt from Anthropologie you loaned to your daughter for her friend's going-away party.

 

"Stock up on their favorite snack foods."

 

Eat out every night before you leave, because you are too busy trying to catch up on the chores you were behind on before you even conceived of this idea.

 

"Freeze individual size meals and label each one with a date for nights when things get chaotic."

 

Jack's Frozen Pizzas, 4 for 10 bucks this week at Kroger.

 

"Plan a date to spend some quality time with your child before you leave."

 

Sneak into their rooms when they are sleeping and brush their hair back from their faces. How did they get so big? What if something happens while I are away? Something already did, and yet, I am still going. Does this make me a bad mother? What if I get there and I procrastinate just like I do at home and don't get anything written? Is this the right thing to do?

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Broken Bird

Since my last post, I have been ticking items off my To-Do list, in preparation for my departure to Michigan. I am feeling the pressure of time, a growing awareness that I will not get to everything. When my sister texts to ask if I could meet for lunch, I have a tiny meltdown. Then I move a couple of things around, erased a couple of items from my To-Do list, which, wisely, I had written in pencil.

I think I am doing okay. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

Then I get the call that every mother dreads. 13 has fallen and broken her arm. She says, I am like that baby bird that Murphy stepped on, a bird with a broken wing.

In an instant, all my plans go out of my head. But I notice something else: so does all my anxiety about leaving. My panicky feelings about leaving my kids goes away, because I decide right then that 13 will be coming along. 17 has already changed her mind. She had found a barn where she can help with trail rides in exchange for free riding time, and she has landed a summer job hostessing (mom plug: they said she had too beautiful of a smile to bus tables) at a restaurant in the little town near our place. Now, I decide, 13 will come along too. She will lie in the hammock and read I am Malala and The Glass Castle. She will go with me on hikes in the woods. She will spend the summer away from malls and television and concrete sidewalks.

That quickly, in my mind, the anxiety of getting ready for a summer alone becomes my joy at having the kids by my side on this journey. And it isn't an avoidance of doing my work.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has an essay appropriately titled "Writing the Color Purple." In it, she shares her plans to write the novel that was growing inside of her. She would write while her daughter was in school, and in the afternoon, she would put the book aside and be a mom. Each morning, she would sit down. Nothing would come. The protagonist, Celie, remained silent. Then her daughter would come home, and Celie would begin to speak. Celie, whose children are taken away from her and sold to a childless couple, could only tell her story in the precence of a child. Or was it Walker who couldn't compartmentalize her life that way? Walker has also written about the challenges of being both a writer and a mother, saying that a writer should have one child, otherwise she will not be able continue her work.

I am already caring for seven children when I read these essays.

And yes, the writer in me is turning the 13's fall and her broken bone and my feelings into a story. My new book, at its core, is about how the growth of one species inevitably has an impact on another, often in unpredictable ways, how we do not have as much control over our lives as we believe we do. The balance is tricky, momentary, and leaves us wanting, grasping for the fleeting feeling we get when everything exists in harmony. I imagine that I will be spending the summer trying to find that sweet spot. It is not a thing I can catch and hold onto. It is constant motion, the way a hummingbird, its wings beating a hundred times a minute, looks more beautiful in real life than in a painting or picture, which attempts to hold onto its stillness. It is the movement of wings up and down, constantly changing, that captures our attention.

 

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The Way to A Character's Heart is Through Her Stomach

More than once I have spent an afternoon cooking one of my character's favorite foods.

For "Kneading Mother," I baked a batch of German kuchens.

For "Doors," it was angel food cake. I hand-whipped one dozen egg whites to stiff peaks, baked the batter in an ungreased tube pan that I found at a garage sale, placed it upside down on a glass coke bottle to cool, and cried when it fell, the result of baking on a rainy, humid August afternoon. I stared into the bowl of one dozen yolks, wondering how to keep them from going to waste. I would not have known any of this without putting my hands to work.

My newest character is Tatum Birdnest Summerfield. Her name comes from cities I found on a map of Texas. Her middle name used to be Beatrice but when the kids at school start calling her Birdnest, she decides to adopt it for herself. On her 13th birthday, her parents allow her to legally change her name. She likes cooking with wildflowers and plants that she finds in the woods behind her house. She has found some abandoned bird eggs and is going to try to hatch them herself.

In the creative writing workshop I teach to middle school students, we made paper dolls of our characters.

You can see from the photo that Tatum is a bit of a wild thing. What I didn't realize, until some friends pointed it out, is how much Tatum resembles me. Here is a self-portrait I took to compare.

This is the first photo I have shared with my gray Crone look. But back to the topic of food.

This afternoon, my young writers and I are baking dandelion bread, something Tatum makes from flowers she collects on her walks. I want to show them how we can bring characters to life with our hands and allow us to write about them more authentically.

I am trying to find ways to learn more about Sophia's life, beyond copying pages of her husband's manucript. I discovered that the Tolstoy's grandson operates a cafe at their former estate, now a museum. He serves Sophia's most-loved recipes: Anke pie (a lemon pie with a crumble crust named after a friend of the family) apple dumplings, mushroom stew, and potato pudding. The Museum launched an app that allows users to access to Sophia's recipes. The app is available only in Russian but an English version should be released later this year.

Yulya Vronskaya, head of international projects at Leo Tolstoy's Yasnaya Polyana Museum Estate, says the Tolstoy's diet "may have been slightly plainer and and more modest than that of other noble families of the same status, because the Tolstoy family wasn't inclined to serve luxurious feasts." When Leo adopted a vegetarian diet, his wife accomodated him but did not become a vegetarian herself. She ordered two meal options each day: meatless dishes for Leo and their daughters, meat for her sons and herself. I find this a curious family alignment, the way the sons stood by their mother and the daughters flocked to their father's side. From what I have read, this division extended beyond the dinner table.

I have not decided which recipes I most want to try from the Tolstoy's family cookbook. I'm leaning toward macaroni and cheese; I wonder if my kids will notice the turnips. I may even re-enact an entire meal, sons and mom at one end of the table, my husband and our daughters at the other. I'll let you know if they will play along.

For now, I'm off to pick dandelions.

 

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Leaving the Nest

Every summer, Sophia Tolstoy moved her family to their summer home in the country. Most people who could left the city. Even in Soviet Russia, the government provided summer homes to almost everyone. And while no every summer home was alike, it was always a welcome respite to spend the hot summer months in the countryside.

This year, I too am fleeing to the country for the summer. In three weeks, I will be heading to Michigan.

Unlike Sophia, I am leaving my family behind. I have resisted publicly announcing this move. Moms aren't supposed to leave their children behind and go off to play for the summer. I am supposed to be driving 13 to band camp. I am supposed to be waiting up to make sure the teenagers come home on time. I am supposed to be stocking the pantry with snack food and telling them to bring their friends over to hang out in the basement.

Instead I am making a packing list as if I am the one leaving for camp.

Our lake cabin is more like a peasant's home than it is the Tolstoy's estate. Small, basic, lacking in modern ammenties. No dishwasher, no washing machine or dryer, no television. When we bought the cottage last year, I found an old wringer washer in the basement, and a more "modern" tabletop machine by Kenmore from the 1940s, both of which still work fine. The only remodeling I intend to do is install a clothesline out back. There are three small bedrooms filled with mostly, well, beds. There is one small bathroom; when the water warms up, we bath in the lake.

I will not miss any of these amenties nearly so much as I will miss my children. I know this.

And yet, I can't wait to be without them.

When my kids were little, I loved summer break. We went on hikes and joined the summer reading club at the library. We sat in the grass on blankets, eating popsicles. We took bike rides. We spent hours at the pool, coming home sunburned and exhausted the way only a day in the sun can make you feel.

Now all but one of my kids will be working summer jobs. One will be in Michigan with me, but I won't to see much of him. Another will be in LA for a summer internship. The three children I gave birth too will be spending a good chunk of the summer with their dad. Am I worried? You bet I am. Am I going anyway? Yep. And when I suggested otherwise, my kids were the first ones to tell me that I have to go.

Last week, I heard from a literary journal that they wanted to publish one of my stories. When I read the email, I cried, then I laughed, then I texted my daughter. Within an hour, all the other kids were texting me with congratulations. One of them, 18, a high school senior, wrote "I know how hard you have worked." 17 said, "I'm getting teary." Their happiness for me was better than any greeting card message about being a good parent.

I know I am going to take some hits from other mothers for this one, but I believe our children need to see us succeed. They need to see us work our asses off for what we are passionate about. They need to see us sacrifice and push ourselves. They need to see us putting ourselves out there, facing fear, being rejected, and getting back up to try again. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, and my children spent years teaching me. I was applying for a fellowship when 17 was about nine years old. I was sitting at the computer, contemplating not submitting my application. She stood in the doorway and said, Mom, you just have to do it.

"We will be okay," she said.

And when I was writing my Master's Thesis, all four daughters chimed in together, You can do it! I can still see them standing in the kitchen, pointing their fingers at me, telling me not to give up.

When our oldest daughter, 24, a midlde school teacher, heard that my three children were going to their dad's house, she looked at me and said, You're still going to the lake though, right?

There was a time when I would have given my life for children. It was easy to do, much easier than writing a story and sending it out into the world to have a life of its own.

 

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Writing on an Empty Stomach

The company my husband works for has challenged their employees to eat for a week at the World Poverty Income Level: $1.50 a day person.

In our household, the challenge falls to me, the main preparer of meals, and if not preparer, certainly the main planner.

With just a tiny bit of hesitation, I accepted the challenge. 17 became a self-proclaimed vegetarian at age ten, in a family of mostly meat-eaters, so I have relied on a repertoire of vegetarian dishes that most of us enjoy. I knew the only way to pull of the challenge would be to eliminate meat from our diet. I allowed myself a cheat on eggs, since my chickens are producing at least two dozen a week now.

With this is mind, I planned our menu for the week:

Sunday: Quiche and Green Beans

Monday: Macaroni and Cheese and Baby Broccoli (on sale at the grocery store)

Tuesday: Black Beans (soaked overnight and cooked on the stove Monday afternoon) and Rice and Salad

Wednesday: Vegetable Soup and my homemade English Muffin Bread

Thursday: Black Bean and Cornbread Casserole and Salad

Friday: another family favorite, my One Pot Lentil Casserole

Sunday afternoon, I made one trip to the grocery store. I purchased no meat, no sweets, no snacks (with the exception of the store brand version of Ritz crackers for my husband, who often works through lunch and comes home starving). Because I am not starting my pantry from scratch, I also did not have to buy coffee, tea, butter, oil or spices. I stuck to my list, and spent just under $48. By my calculations, I was only technically allowed $40. 50; already I had gone over budget. In addtion to eggs, this amount didn't include milk, which we have delivered every Tuesday. I did splurge on an Angel Food Cake on the bakery clearance rack for $1.50. With the strawberries I purchased, I would be able to serve dessert one night.

Still, I decided, the lesson would be learned.

For me, it means that when I add cooking to copying Anna Karenina pages, my creative time begins to feel endangered.

Sophia Tolstoy did a good chunk of the cooking for her family. She likely had the help of a servant or two, but Leo was a particular eater. At some point, he became a strict vegetarian for philosophical and health reasons. He stopped drinking milk. Sophia had to plan his meals carefully and planned additional dishes for the rest of the family. And remember too that this was a time when most foods were produced at home. Jams, eggs, milk: all these were harvested at home. Bread too would have to be baked. Meat hunted or purchased at the market. The stove heated with a fire which must be regularly stoked.

While Leo Tolstoy wrote and preached equality for the peasants, his own creative time came at the cost of his wife's.

So why am I not feeling overwhelmed? Why am I feeling energetic and motivated this morning to get to my chores AND my writing?

The answer, I think, is twofold.

First, as Grace Paley once told a journalist, the best way to be a successful a writer is to keep your overhead low. If I can go to the grocery store and spend one-fourth of what I usually do, I am exchanging one kind of work for another. And is there perhaps something more grounding and more connected to my creativity in spending my time soaking and cooking beans, baking my own bread, cutting up the stale end pieces to make croutons, feeding and collecting eggs from the chickens rather than getting dressed in appropriate clothes and driving my car to a job so that I can make money to buy the items I need to feed my family?

The second part of my answer is something that I believe Leo Tolstoy himself may stumbled upon. In our over-fed, giant-portioned, dessert-every-day-because-we-deserve-it, can't-have-an-afterschool-activity-without-providing-a-snack, have we left room for yearning? For hunger? For wanting something? What drives us to get up off the couch, turn off the television, and create?

 

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The Silent Treatment

Yesterday, I picked up my pen and resumed copying pages for the first time since March 9th, well over one month ago. My hands felt stiff and unfamiliar with putting words onto the page. It took the whole chapter to reacquaint my mind with the story.

Alexey Alexandrovitch has decided not to divorce Anna, and to allow her continue her relationship with Vronsky, provided she does not bring disgrace to them publicly and that she agree not to bring him into their home. Alexandrovitch's decision is not made in a spirit of forgiveness or compassion. No, he has decided that granting a divorce would be the compassionate choice, because she would be able to go off with her lover. Alexandrovitch wants to punish his wife. Part 3 of the novel ended with Vronsky and Alexey Alexandrovitch passing each other at the front door of the Karenin's home. Anna has summoned Vronksy there, because she thinks her husband will be out. In the opening of Part 4, Vronksy mentally rationalizes Anna's tiresome jealousy, her change from the woman he fell in love with, her nagging inquiries into what he has been doing with his evenings. For the first time, Anna foreshadows her own death, a vision that comes to her in a dream. She will die giving birth to his baby. Both she and Vronsky are unsettled by this notion.

In the time since copyin the last line of Part 3 and the opening lines of Part 4, I have lived an entired life. I finished my short story collection, Three Sisters. I submitted the full collection to three book prize contests and individual stories to many journals and publications. I baked bread, sewed curtains for the bathroom, visited my son at college, and took my 2-year-old nephew to the park to play in the dirt and collect rocks in an abandoned water bottle. I watched movies, smart movies and really silly movies, and the entire season of The Voice (I am torn between rooting for Joshua and Meghan). I began a creative writing workshop for middle school students. I went on dates with my husband. I saw 17 off to the prom.

This past month has been about my story.

I suppose this made returning to Anna Karenina more difficult. I can only describe yesterday's labors as maddening. I use this word intentionally, as this is how Sophia Tolstoy was seen at the end of her husband's life. And no wonder, I thought yesterday as I copied Vronsky's thoughts about how annoying Anna had become. Sophia had been driven crazy by the constant presence of someone else's stories in her mind, stifling her own voice. I began to think of Leo's actions as a form of emotional abuse, a placing of his hand over his wife's mouth, silencing her screams.

When I finished Three Sisters and snapped my laptop closed, I felt a sense of something completely unknown. At that moment, it didn't matter if my book was published. It didn't even matter if anyone ever read those stories. I had heard my own voice for the first time, maybe ever. It would not be an understatement to say that the moment I heard the click of my laptop changed everything for me. I have a voice. It is my voice. I recognize it and know how to distinguish it from the many voices that have filled my head over the years, some of them not very pleasant. Even the kind voices--my husband, my children, my mother and sister, my friends--have always seemed a bit disconnected and so, not quite believable. It is easy to dismiss those kind voices as just that: being kind rather than truthful.

And so now, I am faced with a decision. Can I go on copying someone else's story without silencing my own voice?

 

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I'm Ready for My Gravy, Mr. DeMille.

This morning three of the girls woke early to make biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Then they came back to the dorm to get dressed and ready for the day. A few minutes later, one of the other girls came in and said the gravy was gone. The boys had eaten it.

This is not a discussion of gender. No one assigned those girls the task to cook breakfast. And no one intended to serve the boys first. The girls asked if they could make biscuits and gravy, because they wanted to eat it.

I was still sitting in my bed when this unfolded. When I walked out, the boys were sitting around the table, full plates in front of them, enjoying their breakfast. The girls stomped around a bit. A couple of other kids, who also missed the gravy part of the program, dug out the cheerios. One of the dads offered up fresh bagels he had picked up earlier this morning (don't ask me when; I was not awake yet). But I don't think anything helped the girls feel better. And the boys, if they felt bad, did not show it on their faces.

What I noticed was that we adults wanted to fix it, make it right, restore the balance. I heard someone say to one of the kids who had missed out, "Don't worry. Once we are up on that roof, you'll be glad you didn't eat a heavy breakfast." Our leader, who has been on many, many of these trips with kids, mentioned that she would be having a conversation about it later on. As for me, well, once I saw the boys had finished, I suggested they go in and load everything breakfast dishes. I like to even the scales.

After they left, I set to work cleaning the rest of the mess: pans from cooking sausage and making the gravy, bowls in which they had mixed the white sauce, baking sheets, mixing spoons, and a greasy stovetop. There was a bowl full of extra biscuits, thirteen of them, which are now stuffed with ham and cheese and egg and wrapped in foil in the fridge. While I put them together, I contemplated when to serve them, and how to divy them up fairly.

I think at the heart of this is a conversation about work, and about being rewarded. Those girls got up early, cooked breakfast and went off to get ready for work, thinking that they would be sitting down to a tasty, decadent breakfast. And those boys did nothing to earn the right to eat their fill. And I can relate. Yesterday, one of the kids whom I have know for many years, asked me about my book, and when I told her, she said, how long have you been working on that?

5 years.

I am ready for my biscuits and gravy.

I tell myself these words, that I once taped these words from the Tal Te Ching to the wall inside the closet of a house I have long since left behind:

Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

 

 

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Losing Things

The work crew set off about 8:30am. I stayed behind to write. It was hard to do that, let myself and 21 other people think that writing my stories is as important as putting a roof on a house for a grandmother and her two grandchildren, who have been living with blue tarps over their heads for over two years.

I took my walk and ate lunch in the memorial garden. I began recopying the final revision of collection. By 2:30 in the afternoon I had completed the first of eleven stories. I took a break and carried my handwritten copy of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Kindness" out to the parking lot and copied the first stanza in big yellow chalk letters onto the concrete. I want it to be the first thing the work crew sees when they return this afternoon.

Later, after a dinner of spaghetti casserole, prepared at home by my sister-in-law and carried here in a cooler in the back of our vans to Louisiana, I will ask anyone who is interested to spend a few minutes listing out things they have lost. Some of those things will not surprise me, but I am certain that I many things on their lists will. If they let me, I will list some of those things here for you.

I have put aside Tolstoy for the week, to copy my own work, to work with teenagers who are learning how to use power tools instead of laying on a beach, with parents who took their vacation time to work on someone else's house. We are fathers and mothers and and grandparents and sons and daughters. We are plasterers and teachers and students and writers.

And we have all lost things. Precious things, things we thought we could never live without.

my hair

my grandpa

shoes

my dog

my dad

my flip-flops in a lake

motivation for school

Monica

every pen I've ever used in school

my uterus

Shakespeare, my cat

my learner's permit

my best friend Pat to cancer

my right breast

my keys in a Steak and Shake, found three hours later

foods that I used to love when I was younger but now they kill my stomach

tv remote

my homework

two husbands

Aunt Sandy, I loved her

my mom, 10-20-2-12

a stuffed animal from when I was a kid

I once lost my brother but then we found him.

my lucky socks

 

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Surfing in Paris

With the revision of my short story collection (mostly) complete, I am preparing for a writing residency. I leave tomorrow morning at 6:30am. This is not like most writing residencies, where one runs away from home and all its responsiblities in order to focus on one's writing. I am going on a work trip to Slidell, Louisiana with a group of people who will be rebuilding a home damaged by Hurrican Katrina. While the others mud, drywall and paint, I will be writing alonside them. In the evening, I will offer writing opportunities to anyone who is interested.

It has been a busy week in my family. 13 boarded a plane to China this morning. She raised money for her ticket in less than six months. Honestly, I don't know how she did it. But I do: she baked bread; she dog-sat; she sold carwash coupons; she saved her Birthday and Christmas money. She has been packing and unpacking all week, making certain that she had all the necessities, including the right shoes to match the clothes she packed, and a package of Oreos. She loaded her backpack with books. I gave her a journal to record her thoughts.

At the airport, no one cried. Not even me. It could be because she is the last of seven. I have witnessed many departures and returns. It could be because she is an experienced traveler, traveling with her school group to San Francisco last year. This kid has been leaving me since the day she exited the womb.

It could be because I am not a sentimental person, or that I am tired and ready for a break.

By the time we were pulling out of the parking garage, I was making a mental list of what I needed to pack for my writing residency. I can't help but wonder if this makes me a bad mother. Shouldn't I be worrying about my daughter?

This is not the first time that a trip of mine has overlapped with my kids' departures. I think I prefer it that way. It is much easier to go away if I know they are off doing their own thing as well. It is a phenomenon I call Surfing in Paris, inspired by my first trip to Europe, when I was forty. While I was gone, my kids went to the beach with their dad. I was glad that they had something to keep them occupied. What I found was that while I was off struggling to relax away from home, my daughter (17) decided to take surfing lessons. I have spent hours talking this kid into diving off the dock into the lake, so know, without a doubt, she would not have done this if we were together. There was something about going our own ways that gave both of us courage to step out of our comfort zones, to try something new. And when I returned, she was proudly wearing the t-shirt that proved she had ridden a wave.

This time, my baby is the one traveling to another country. She might be anxious, maybe even scared. It seems like we are far away from each other. But that is just geography.

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The End of the Affair

Note: I wrote this more than two weeks ago. I contemplated not publishing this one, but I decided it is relevant and needs to be read. I have not copied a single page of Anna Karenina. I have instead been completing the revision of my own manuscript.

 

One week ago, I finished copying Part Three of Anna Karenina, 353 pages by my bood, satisfied to end on the last line of the back of my own sheet of paper, a good sense of closure.

The next day, I woke up knowing that I was leaving Tolstoy behind for the weekend. My husband and I drove to Michigan. We went cross-country skiing, my first time, and played several games of cribbage, many of which I won. We ate bagels for breakfast, and on Sunday, after springing our clocks forward, stayed in bed reading until 10:30am.

Since coming home, I have had difficulty returning to the pages of Anna. I'm still working, a couple of pages a day, but the romance is gone. I have even contemplated giving up the project. Not because it is too hard, but because I realized the peace and calm of not having Tolstoy in my head. My mulling and contemplating of the story, and his life, and his family had bloomed far beyond the page.

I did not come to this realization on my own. My husband was the one who called me out. I was sitting in the kitchen one morning, hard at work copying pages, trying to get to page 400 by the end of the month, when Mark leaned back against the counter and looked at me.

"Our house doesn't seem like a very happy place lately."

I was shocked. I was feeling pretty good about things. The kids were doing well in school. 17 got a small part in the school play. 13 has saved the money to take a school trip over spring break. The house was clean, and things were pretty quiet in our life. I began to mutter about my own work, and that maybe it was him and not me or the rest of the family. Nothing was resolved.

But after he left for work, I began to think about what he saw when he walked in the door: me, head down, madly copying the work of another man.

Me talking about how I wanted to go to Russia, even as I was telling him we couldn't really take time to get away as a couple.

Me, me, me.

Except not me. My own writing never seemed to make it off the To-Do list. I began each day with Tolstoy and ended with the dinner dishes, falling into bed so exhausted that I couldn't even read a page before falling asleep. Mark would remove the book from my face and turn off the light. So I sent him an email and told him that I was sorry, that while my work was important to me, so was our marriage, that I was looking forward to a weekend away, to getting out of my head.

When we returned from Michigan, I moved Tolstoy to the end of my daily schedule. This has been one of my most productive weeks as a creative person. Not only have I waded through the revision of the last story in my collection, I have sewed several new pieces for the shop, cleaned out a couple of closets, knitted three new dishcloths (while watching The Voice) and finished reading two books.

So when Vronsky bumped into Anna's husband while sneaking into the Karenins' house for a rendezvous, I felt annoyed. Let's get on with it already. Let's wrap this up. Some people have lives to live.

 

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You Are Not the Boss of Me

The romance is gone. I am no longer enamored with Leo's long, complicated sentences. My hand hurts, not my finger and thumb from gripping the pen, but alongside my palm and up through my pinkie, from being curled and cramped underneath as I slide across the page.

I don't want to copy anymore. I dread sitting down to it each day, and yet, I am still strangely compelled to do it. Some days, I get right to it, pages spread out across the kitchen table as early as 5:30am, the only light a lamp that hangs overhead, the sky outside still dark. Other days, I sit and watch old movies, like Inherit the Wind and The Harvey Girls, while I write on a TV tray set up in front of my seat on the couch.

After everyone leaves the house, I trick myself by turning the furnace down to 60 and set up a space heater at my feet, forcing myself to sit in the only warm spot in the house while I copy line after line. I feel a little like Bob Cratchett.

I carry pages with me to write while I wait in doctors' offices. I sit in the car and copy words while my daughter has her saxophone lesson. I even tore out several chapters to take with me on a recent trip to Dallas for a friend's book launch party.

Lately, I have taken to eating handfuls of chocolate chips each time I reach certain milemarkers: the end of a page, the end of a particularly long paragraph, or the end of one long boring conversation inside Levin's head. Last night at the store, I bought another bag, telling myself that I was going to bake chocolate chip cookies for the kids.

The bag is already half gone.

I want to quit. I am grouchy. My shoulder and back ache from stiffness when I get up. I silently cheer each time the chapter turns out to be only two pages. More often than not, the chapters are much longer, five, sometimes six pages. It has been at least fifty pages since I heard a peep out of Anna, or Kitty, or Darya. The only females I come across are the peasant wives, silently gathering up hay or serving tea. I don't care about new methods of agriculture. I don't neet to debate whether sour cream or fresh milk makes better butter.

Where is the passion? Where is the love? Where are the women?

But, I tell myself, I can't quit. I made a commitment, and I have to see it through. Sophie couldn't quit, so neither can I.

 

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The Interview

Friday, I needed to give my full attention.

I posted on Facebook that despite needing to tend to a number of household chores like

and

and

, I was going to get all dressed up for a business meeting, and head out to breakfast with Loretta, the protagonist in the story I am currently revising. My writing group workshopped the story November, three months ago. Since then, I have carried around the piled of marked-up pages, meaning to dig in. Finally, last Tuesday, I sat down and read through them, circled images and words that kept coming up (shoes, feet, femininity and work). I knew then that I needed to dig deeper into what Loretta really wanted. What is she yearning for?

So, I pushed 13 to get read and ride the bus to school. I showered and carefully selected appropriate busines attire: pearls, skirt, gray high heels. I fed the dog and wrestled him into the car to take him to doggy day care. I looked a small cafe where I could sit in a cold unwanted corner, the one by the door that opens every time someone entered or left, which meant I could there without feeling guilty of cheating the server out of her morning tips.

I had ordered tea and pulled up a new document when 17 began texting me about feeling ill. Knowing it wasn't life-threatening, I pushed back, telling her that I needed an hour to finish up my work.

Yes, I put off my sick child in order to spend the morning writing about a fictional character. No, my writing has never been published. My work does not buy groceries or pay the mortgage. It doesn't provide benefits. But neither does much of the work that I do, like running a food pantry, chaperoning school field trips, waiting on repairman, planning menus and grocery shopping, and all other chores pictured above. I suppose I have become accustomed to not getting paid for my work.

But I want to get paid. I hate not having an income.

And so what on earth possessed me, six months ago, to decide to copy Leo Tolstoy's manuscript? I still have not found a clear way to explain this project to people who ask what I am doing. I would like to say that I am building my platform as a writer, or that I am hoping to turn the project in a book, and then of course, a movie, in which Julia Roberts, who is coincidentally my age, would play me.

But the truth is that I began doing this so I could figure out how to be a mother, a wife, and a writer. A strange method, you might think, taking on additional work in order to find time to do my own. And for the first six months of this work, I have been more enamored with the words of Leo Tolstoy, and often critical of Sophia, for not taking more responsibility for her own creative dreams, and for trying to take credit for helping Leo write his novels. But the tide has turned.

These past three months, though I have left my own stories unattended, I have faithfully and doggedly copied page after page of Anna Karenina. And often, I have chosen it because it was easier to do that than to do the hard work it will take to revise my stories. There are so many ways we women can trick ourselves into believing that our work as mothers is more important. Some of it is. But I don't think that a mother's essential work is about planning annual themed birthday parties and cooking dinners that look like color wheels on a plate.

What if my job as a mother is about being a good writer?

What if I am being a better mother by asking my daughter to wait one hour in the nurse's office, so Loretta can tell me that she really wants to love her work and love her children and love wearing beautiful shoes? She wants it all.

And so do I.

 

 

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