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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