lately

Birch Bay, Washington, August 2012

I really wanted to have my new blog up and rolling by October.

But then life happened.

My husband went on a week-long business trip.

Then another week-long business trip.

I said "yes" to another grantwriting client.

I probably should have said "no."

The Jewish New Year came.

And went.

I thought a lot about my grandfather.

In my writing group, I wrote a list of things I remember about him.

I cried when I tried to read it. 

Maybe I'll post it here someday.

I mean there - on my new blog.

Which will be coming soon.

Sometime in October, I swear!

For now, I'm cooking and running and running around and food shopping (because it suddenly seems that we never have any yogurt in our house) and grantwriting grantwriting grantwriting.

I'd kind of rather be writing writing writing.

But no one's paying me to write write write.

(Yet)

(Maybe someday)

Life feels like it's sped up since Elan started kindergarten.

I'm waiting for it to slow down.

Even though I know that it's probably up to me to slow it down.

Since I'm most likely a big part of the reason it feels sped up right now.

I'm putting parentheses around my dreams, my hopes, my ambitions. 

Like little whispers.

Does that mean they're coming closer?

sneak peek

A new home for this blog... coming soon.

I'm so excited!

i want to write about

Another crazy morning with 2, April 2012

I want to write about having a full plate. How my current slate of two part-time paid grantwriting jobs, one part-time volunteer job at Elan's preschool, full-time mama/wife/runner of the household, and still trying to do that other writing, that creative work that feeds my soul, is too much for me. How my 2 days of full childcare, while I still feel their luxury, are eaten up in a flash. And yet I have chosen all these things, and they are all good things, and I either don't want to or don't know how to give any of them up.

I want to write about how I feel like I am driving down a freeway, at a speed just over my comfort zone, and I keep passing these exits. They are enticing, with names like "Rest Here" and "Take a Nap in the Sun," and all I want is to get off the fast road and drive along a tree-shaded boulevard, but the car just keeps on going, and whoops, there goes another exit.

I want to write about 18 months old, how it is full-on in a different way than babyhood.

I want to write about how the sun is glinting off the glossy leaves of the camilia tree out the window behind me, and the dappled sunshine is reflecting in my computer screen.

I want to write about writing blog posts and essays all day in my head while my hands are busy with my kids, and then sitting down to the computer and choosing to work on a grant proposal or read People magazine online instead.

I want to write about the process I'm in to relaunch this blog, how scary and confronting that is. How I alternate between Do I want to write a well-read blog? Do I want to expose myself and my family to the creepy people who lurk anonymously on the Internet? to What if no one reads it? What if I put myself out there and I fail?

I want to write about wanting to lose The Last 10 Pounds. My disappointment that, despite trying hard on the exercise front, it's not happening. And yet not really being willing to give up bread or sugar, at least not for more than a week or two.

I want to write about how Cheeseboard challah, warm from the oven, spread with Clover butter, is a slice of heaven distilled.

I want to write about how lucky I am - these healthy, beautiful children, this lovely little home, these wonderful friends, this loving family.

I want to write about how, once the children are asleep, I feel like I've run a marathon and the house looks like a tea storm came through and scattered the contents of my tea drawer over every surface, how I find tea bags tucked behind the couch cushions and in the baskets of clean laundry.

I want to write about how my old back injury keeps flaring up these days, about how I keep getting migraines that I don't know are migraines, how the four of us have had one cold after another since mid-February.

I want to write about how grateful I am for my health.

I want to write about how I hardly take pictures these days, except with my iPhone, because it's right there, while the camera is two feet away, behind a cabinet door and inside a case, and those appear to be fairly insurmountable obstacles.

I want to write about how Elan doesn't sleep through the night, even though we spent thousands of dollars and put all of us through the ordeal of surgery to try to fix the sleep problem.

I want to write about how maybe some things can't be fixed. Maybe my stomach muscles can't be brought back together behind my belly button, no matter how much Pilates I do. Maybe my son can't ever sleep more than one night a week without waking up screaming. How do we decide when to let go of something, and when to keep fighting toward it?

a book a month

Journal, March 2012

I don't make a lot of New Year's Resolutions. I like to look back, set intentions for the future, create possibilities. But I don't "resolve" to do many things for an entire year. This year, however, I resolved to read more. Specifically, these awesome things called books. Even more specifically, these even more awesome things called novels.

They say You are what you eat. For writers, they say You are what you read. I read a lot online, and while it's fun and interesting, and it can make me feel connected and keep me up-to-date on news both small and large, it's not Reading. Reading like falling into a new world. Being transported. Sinking into someone else's luxury or poverty so completely that, for moments, you forget your own everyday reality.

Yet reading for pleasure, reading to feed myself as a person and as a writer, is often crowded off my to-do list by other items, either more urgent or more in-the-moment. So this year I set myself the quite enjoyable resolution to read a book a month.

In January, I read The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin. In February, I read Save Me The Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald. My interest in Zelda Fitzgerald was sparked by watching Midnight in Paris, the Woody Allen movie. (If I ever had a daughter, I might name her Zelda. Of course, Zelda Fitzgerald had schizophrenia and died in a fire in a mental hospital at age 48. But I do still love the name.) This month, I read The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, a wonderful Gothic mystery, a literary page-turner totally worth a spot on your bedside table.

It feels so good to read novels again! Any suggestions for April?

for writer/artist/parents

view over SF Bay from the Lawrence Hall of Science, Elan's new favorite place

Have I ever mentioned that the money-making part of my writing life is freelance grantwriting? I had a few small jobs last year, and I've been working part-time steadily since Emry was born. Even though I don't make much (I'm writing grants for non-profits, after all), my work has been a helpful piece of our ever-evolving employment puzzle this past year. But what I'd really love, of course, is to be paid for my creative work.

So when I heard about a grant for writers and visual artists who are also parents (of children under age 18), I was pretty excited.

The Sustainable Arts Foundation is a non-profit foundation supporting artists and writers with families. Our mission is to provide financial awards to parents pursuing creative work. Too often, creative impulses are set aside to meet the wonderful, but pressing, demands of raising a family. The foundation's goal is to encourage parents to continue pursuing their creative passion, and to rekindle it in those who may have let it slide.

How cool is that? Check it out here (deadline May 15, some preference for San Francisco Bay Area residents).

I have to admit that I was tempted not to share news of this grant. My thinking was: there will be plenty of competition - why should I go out of my way to create more? But, though it is sometimes difficult to find evidence to back up this thinking, I would like to trust that there is room enough for all of us creative souls to make our way in the world. The ups and downs of the last 16 months have taught me that while living with a good dose of frugality is fine by me, feeling closed-off, over-protective and stingy is not. Despite the news and the way the economic crisis has impacted my family, I am choosing to believe in the possibility of abundance.

Abundance: an extremely plentiful or oversufficient quantity or supply; overflowing fullness; affluence; wealth.

So go for it - apply! I know I will.

transformation

After Mikhail lost his job over a year ago and started working from home, he took over our home office and a corner of our bedroom became my office. It was a plain little space, my beautiful vintage table that I used as a desk perpetually piled with projects in progress.

Truthfully it was not a very inspiring place to work, but I don't usually do my creative writing at a desk anyway. I use a desk for paying bills and doing household and organization work. The work that needs more intense focus I usually do at cafes, away from the chatter of little voices. Or when the house is quiet, I often migrate onto the couch, laptop on - well - lap.

When I was pregnant and couldn't sleep, I often found myself rearranging furniture in my head. I think it was part of my obsessive need to make the baby a real entity, a tiny person who would need a changing table, storage for diapers and ridiculously small clothes. It was like if I could just figure out how to arrange the furniture to make it all work in our small house, I could guarantee that the baby I so longed for would become a reality.

But when it came to implementation, I hesitated. When was the right time to take the plunge - to buy a changing table, to wash the baby clothes, to buy the diapers, to move the contents of my desk into cabinets in the living room? And I struggled with what it meant to no longer have a desk, that symbol of working life. Would it mean that I was no longer a writer? Would it mean that motherhood would have overtaken my life completely, leaving me no opportunity for my creative life? Would it mean that I had no chance for paid work?

The funny thing is that it totally works for me to have my office downstairs. Most of my papers are contained behind cabinet doors, there when I need them but not where I have to look at them. My laptop is perpetually within reach and regularly carted up and down the stairs. I've pulled out a pewter bowl that was a wedding gift to hold my stack of unopened mail, which before would just stack up on the counter. Ironically, I'm generally better organized than when I had my own desk, and I've done more paid work since Emry was born than I had in the previous four years. Of course someday, I'd like to have a desk again. Mostly because that would mean that my gorgeous & super-smart husband had a full-time job again.

In the meantime, I love how the nook in my bedroom has been transformed. It's cozy and bright and warm. Perfect for cuddling up in the rocking chair and having a nice snack of milk. It's the baby's space, and it's magical to me.

Art by Kelly Rae Roberts,

mobile with removable cloth insects/finger puppets by Furnis Spielwelt

happy 2 years, blog o' mine

It's been two years since I started this blog.

I'm really glad I did.

It's given me an outlet through some crazy times, a way to keep in touch to share news both difficult and joyous, a place to tap into my thoughts & send them out into the world.

Thanks for reading.

one thing i've learned

I was writing a post about New Year's resolutions, but I didn't finish it, and when I came back to it, I was in a different mood, a different place, a different person. That's the danger of not finishing something -- I either wait until the mood comes back around again, have to force myself back into it, or let it go.

I will finish the post about New Year's resolutions, I will!

But suddenly at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, the weariness set in. I don't know how else to describe that kind of tiredness that makes you wish that, more than anything, you could just lie down. And when the baby wemers from his vibrating chair to nurse two minutes after I've plopped into a mostly-prone position on our deteriorating couch (which was not so comfortable to start with), I feel a little dizzy propelling myself up again. That kind of weary.

So as soon as someone else was available to look after Elan, I took to my bedroom. I hadn't done this in a while, but it brought back memories of night after night of terrible first-trimester sickness, when I'd hide out in my bedroom from the smells of food, and later in the pregnancy-that-went-on-forever, when I'd collapse into bed in the early evening, my body exhausted and sore from the rigors of a day spent defying gravity.

I got into bed with the baby, nursed him, watched a bad TV show on hulu. Let myself ignore the state of my messy downstairs, my father-in-law's visit (I knew he'd understand), Elan's bedtime. My body, so much more active than it was a few months ago, or even a handful of weeks ago said: Retreat. Rest. Lay down.

And so I did.

And then I took a very hot bath, drank water, ate chicken coconut milk soup, and socialized a little bit.

It's a lesson I really did learn from the pregnancy-that-went-on-forever: sometimes you just need to retreat.

And watch some bad TV.

this is why i don't read

Because I get hooked, lose all self-control, and - boom! - just like that! - the precious morning Elan-in-preschool hours are gone, and I've got nothing done.

Nothing except lose myself completely in a love story. It's nice to see a woman who, after 4 children, still has the hots for her husband so much that she posts a picture of his Wrangler-clad assets in the sidebar of her website.

I have the hots for my husband, too. But I'll hold off on the picture, at least for now.

In the middle of the night, as our children were tag-teaming us in the wake-up department, I had an idea to turn this woman's story into a screenplay. But then my writing partner informed me that Sony & Reese Witherspoon had already beat me to it. Aw, shucks. I was *this* close.

The Adoration

After both of my sons' births, Eugenia, the matriarch of Mikhail's mom's family, known to everyone as Granny, has sent me this poem.

Eugenia and Emry

The Adoration

-Adrie Kusserow

It's morning.

I pull you from the crib

all warm and yeasty,

your hair stuck up like two soft horns,

you beaming brighter than a headlight

in anticipation of the nip.

Silly boy,

tender pink niblet,

luscious little beast,

water nut, love blossom,

Panis bulbosa, lactata nippiana.

And so begin

the verbal fevers

of my love-smitten Tourette's,

speaking in tongues

wild with metaphor,

swinging from branch to branch of simile,

rooting about for words

to match your roundness, your just succulency,

your sheer plump thigh-liness.

All morning I groom you with tiny love-names.

I am a cat, you are my kitten, cowlicked

with locution. I am a sound nymph

tickling you with alliteration, a Swedish masseuse

rubbing you with vowels.

Who would have known my love

would rise up so fiercely, hover

delirious in small bits of sound,

all day the adjectives landing and relanding,

determined to match your infinite perfection,

my sweet boy, my sweet boy.

***

Thanks, Granny.

random confessions of a so-so-big pregnant mama

my first engagement ring

This pregnancy has really forced encouraged me to re-think my expectations of myself and of my body. Pregnancy this time around has been so different from my pregnancy with Elan. I'm more tired and crabby. I have more aches and pains. Back pain, hip pain, pain places I don't want to talk about on the Internet.

The baby is low, and my back is straining, so I have a back/belly brace to help support my back.

I have a map of veins down one leg, so I have black thigh-high compression hose. After I melted-down trying to buy them at the local medical supply store, my husband googled "sexy pregnancy compression stockings" -- mine are Italian.

I can't tell you how sexy I feel.

All the layers of binding and supporting make me crazy after a while, and I just want to rip them off. Sometimes I do. And some days I suck it up and make it most of the day wearing all this stuff to prop my body up and try to keep it from hurting more.

And now the latest occurrence in the "never happened last time" category: my wedding rings are getting tight. I'm not visibly swollen, but I don't want to take any chances about them getting stuck. I'm trying to be more accepting about all these discomforts and necessary adjustments, relax into being in the "so so big" phase of pregnancy, and remember it's all temporary, and really, in the larger picture, I'm right where I want to be. So I put my rings away and got out my first engagement ring. It's silver, and Mikhail bought it secretly in Bolivia and then gave it to me when we got engaged in Peru - on the top of Huayna Picchu, which is the picturesque peak just behind Machu Picchu in all the pictures of that awesome place.

From life B.C. (before child) -

Mikhail and I got engaged on the top of the peak shrouded in mist.

This ring is just a little bit bigger, so it's giving me that much more room to grow. Plus, it's fun to look at it and remember back to a time when our lives were so different. Soooooo different.

A combination of wearing this ring and a form of late-pregnancy distracted tiredness is making my mind wander. I keep thinking about the time Mikhail and I spent in South America - 5 months traveling, and then we went back to live in Peru for a year. I'd love to write more about the adventures we had there, and the discoveries we made, internal as well as external. It's on my mental list of writing projects. That list I'm not getting to before the baby comes. Someday, someday... I have visions of a series of essays that might someday make up a book. How crazy is that? I can't even believe I'm admitting it here, in "public" of a sort. I guess it's the hormones. These crazy confess-everything hormones.

My nesting urges have kicked in big-time, and I want to DO EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. As my friend said a week before she birthed her baby: "I want to purge every single drawer!" I have that feeling too. But I am also so easily exhausted; I don't make it very far into my projects before I have to put my feet up or take a nap. It's a strange state: rushing and fretting and do-do-doing, and then zoning and resting and just not caring. Back and forth I swing all day long, and more often than I'd like I wake up in the middle of the night and start listing things in my head.

I keep trying to tell myself that I have time. That no matter when this baby comes, it doesn't really matter what I get done right now. Life will continue after October, and though it will be so so different again, I will adjust. I will still have me, my own interests and passions, my own wants and must-dos. Of course I am telling myself this because a part of my brain has decided that after October, my life is over. That I will never again have time to write, or pursue my own dreams. But I've had one child. I know it's that way for a while, and then it's not completely like that anymore. So I keep talking myself down from that particular ledge.

I tell myself: take a rest. You have time. Someday, someday...

Morning Pages: An Update

I'm halfway through my 3-week goal of writing Morning Pages 5 days a week, and I wanted to share my progress. I've done it! I've done my 10 minutes of "brain drain" writing 8 days. It hasn't always been in the morning, and I'm okay with that. Doing morning pages sometime during the day is a habit/practice that reminds me that I'm a writer. It's especially important on the days when that's the only writing I do, and my little guy is clinging to my leg all day.

I'm a fan of achievable goals, and 5 days a week for 3 weeks feels very achievable. There's room for flexibility there, for a day when I just don't get to it or I forget or it gets overshadowed. Achievable goals help keep the perfectionist in me from getting too obsessive over something. Deciding I will do something everyday never works for me; I end up falling off the wagon and then feeling too bad about myself to get back on in a timely manner.

I'm curious to see, at the end of this short experiment, if I feel like it's benefitted me as a writer. I'll let you know.

a goal

Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what kinds of habits or practices I could put in place that will support my vision of myself as a writer. Immediately I thought of Morning Pages, a classic tool for artists of all stripes from Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way. I last did Morning Pages regularly many years ago, when I was living in San Francisco and trying to decide if I wanted to go to a M.F.A. program for creative writing. As soon as I thought of the idea, I rejected it as not possible. My mornings are not my own, I thought. They're run by the 3-year-old dictator in the house.

But then I thought some more: what if I could spend a little time every morning establishing my identity as a writer? I already have a lot of morning practices that reinforce my identity as a mother. In fact, I've been feeling just a tad bit resentful lately about my son's early morning tendencies to wake up too early and then fuss a lot, as if someone forced him to get up by 6:30 every day when he really just wanted to sleep in till 8. I can't convince him to be in a better mood; all I can really do is control my response to his mood. So I decided - what the heck!? I'm going to give it a try.

Julia Cameron has a specific method for her version of Morning Pages. My version will be a little different. I will write, free-hand and stream of consciousness-style, in my journal, for 10 minutes straight, 5 days a week for the next 3 weeks (until the end of the e-course I'm taking). The idea is to not think about what you're writing - just do it. I think of it as brain-drain writing: a place for daily cares, to-dos, lists, fears, thoughts, memories - anything that comes up in those ten minutes gets drained onto the page.

Ten minutes of showing up at the page, of reminding myself that I am a writer, an individual with her own creative life, as well as a mother. Today was my first day. I did my morning pages in the car after dropping Elan off at preschool. I wrote 3 pages. My hand got tired. It felt good.

emerging

"The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery,

but a process of creation.

You are not discovering yourself but creating yourself anew.

Seek, therefore, not to find out who you are,

seek to determine what you want to be”

– Neale Donald Walsch

I'm thinking a lot lately about the idea that I am creating my own life everyday, with every choice I make. This way of looking at things doesn't come that naturally to me. I feel like so much of my life since becoming a mother is about reacting to circumstances - my son's behavior, my husband's work schedule, how much sleep I got the night before. My reactions can be very emotionally-driven: I tend to get easily frustrated, angry, overwhelmed, worried. I am an emotional person; I keep reminding myself that inside my emotions, I still have a choice about how I react.

I am currently enrolled in my first ever e-course. It's called Flying Lessons: Tips and Tricks to Help Your Creative Business Soar. It's being led by Kelly Rae Roberts, whose journey from full-time social worker doing art as a hobby to full-time, successful artist is so inspiring to me. I have been reading Kelly Rae's blog for a little while, and I kept seeing her talk about this e-course, but I thought: that doesn't apply to me, I'm a writer, not an artist (or jewelery-maker, or photographer, or crafter). I don't create something I can sell on etsy. But then, when the start of the class (her first ever) coincided so perfectly with my writing partner and I finishing our screenplay and switching into marketing mode, I decided to go for it.

The truth is that though I deeply want to be a professional (paid) writer, I have not yet found my path to that goal. This course has got me thinking about how to fully take the leap upward into a new kind of career success. And how to do that with one small child and another on the way. Since my miscarriage last year, I have felt like the time is now. And though it is beyond intimidating to think about making new career commitments, even if only to myself, while expecting a baby, this is my year of courage. You can't spend your life waiting for the perfect moment.

It is such a blessing to be emerging from twelve weeks of brutal morning-sickness. You know how, when you have a bad cold, the kind where your sinuses are filled with gunk and your nose is totally clogged, you fantasize about when you'll be able to breathe normally again? You think about how much you'll enjoy taking a nice long, deep, clear breath. And then you feel better, and for a day or two, you do enjoy the simple act of breathing. You feel grateful. But then you forget and you get busy and you take feeling good for granted again, until the next time you're felled by a vicious virus.

Well, I am still in the grateful phase. I'm grateful everytime I walk into a grocery store and don't immediately feel repulsed. I'm grateful for not having to think about food constantly, while simultaneously hating the thought. I'm grateful for 3 weeks with no dry-heaving episodes. I'm grateful that the boat is mostly staying in port, and I have only sporadic episodes of nausea. I'm grateful for having some energy and not just wanting to be in bed all day, even if walking a few blocks uphill does point out to me how startlingly out of breath I get. But most of all, I'm grateful for the clearing of my mind that's happened. I'm grateful for not feeling so darn depressed. Because, out of all the effects of the crazy hormones, just feeling so down is in some ways the hardest for me to deal with.

Speaking of pregnancy and first trimesters and Kelly Rae, all in one rambling post, Kelly Rae is about a month ahead of me in her pregnancy journey (this is her first). She wrote a post about how difficult her first trimester was, and I found a little comfort in reading it while I was in the midst of my awful first trimester. I could totally identify with everything she says, especially about feeling none of my usual spark or zest for life. At the time I read it, I couldn't imagine that I would eventually feel better, even though I had done this same thing twice before. So that's part of the trick, I suppose: holding how you are currently feeling, honoring the difficulty, while holding fast to the belief that it will get better.

I'm enjoying my emerging. I'm making lots of plans and confronting lots of fears. And I'm looking forward to sharing the journey here.

Milestones

A long-overdue update...

* I made it to the second trimester! I am now in my 17th week, which seems kind of amazing. A few weeks ago, the nausea improved about 10%, and now I think I've made another 10% jump. It's definitely not where I hoped I'd be by this time, but it is nice to feel some improvement.

* With a corresponding slight improvement in my energy, I suddenly notice how disorganized and chaotic my life and house are. However, I'm still pretty worn-out, recovering from various colds and sinus infection and pink eye, on top of the pregnancy symptoms. So I find myself no longer able to completely ignore the disorganization, yet still lacking the will to really tackle it. The same thing happened after my miscarriage, when I found myself longing for someone to come rescue me. I try to remind myself that 20% improvement means I am allowed 20% higher expectations of myself, no more. Baby steps...

* I managed to swim laps one day this week for the first time in too long to count. I'm trying to use that increased energy to get a little more exercise, since it's such an important mood-booster for me.

* Elan is (occasionally) wearing underwear! This is a big step, as he was very undergarment-averse for the first few months of the potty-training adventure. Finally we graduated to him saying "later" he would wear them. Then one day my clever husband put the underwear inside his pants. Viola! We didn't draw his attention to the fact he was wearing underpants until the end of the day. Of course he still prefers to be bare-bottomed inside his pants, and he has very skinny hips, so he winds up showing off the world's cutest plumber's crack on a regular basis. What 3-year-olds can get away with.

* In the chaos of the last few months, Elan has been steadily napping less and less, and Mikhail and I find ourselves struggling to come up with new routines for "quiet time" to give us all a break. I'll let you know if I find something that actually seems to reliably work. So far, it's all very random and disorganized-feeling. I have realized that since having a child, a firm structure and schedule have become very important to me, which is interesting since in my life B.C., I didn't think of myself as a very scheduled person. I'm not sure how much of this phenomena is due to the fact that Elan is a child who responds well to a firm schedule, and how much of it just how I am as a mother.

* Somewhere in the chaos of the last few months, my writing partner and I finished our screenplay. How did that happen? A lot of very focused work, including several 4-day-long writing marathons, while our husbands wrangled the children. We have now submitted it to a few places and are hoping for positive signs. There's a fair amount of fear involved with putting something out into the world and facing rejection, but it feels great to actually have finished a major piece of writing.

So there they are - recent milestones. I will try to get myself to post more often...

Year Of Courage

On my birthday, a few days after the New Year, we went out for dinner with my parents, sister, and brother-in-law. Everyone at the table made a toast at some point in the evening. Mine was To a year of Courage.

Courage: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty (Merriam-Webster).

Courage means being in action in the face of fear. If you experience no fear, you summon no courage. I think it's interesting that a word we associate with physicality (the image of a knight, sword in hand, going out to meet the dragon) is actually about mental or moral strength rather than physical force. Courage is the mental game behind the physical action - what goes on inside your head and gut as you leap (or crawl) into the unknown.

When Mikhail and I made a list of things we want to do this year, it included:

I would definitely say we are being successful with that one. Because when you're in the middle of major transitions, when your life becomes make-it-up-as-you-go, when you're searching for purpose and vision and security and income, there's lots of scary stuff to do. It's inspiring and invigorating, confronting and exhausting -- often inside the same day.

A Beautiful Post

I swear that this blog is not becoming all-miscarriage-all-the-time. That would be way too depressing for me and for you. But I really wanted to share a post I found on one of the blogs I read regularly. She has an essay out in The Sun about her experience. I've only read the teaser they give you on The Sun's website, but I will be buying the magazine to read the rest.

And no, referencing this blog post doesn't mean that Mikhail and I are deciding that Elan is our one and only. I just think the writing is beautiful and the sentiments are so understandable, at least from where I stand.

Read it here.

After Yet Another Rejection Letter

Sometimes I ask myself why I write. Writing is the work I do during my precious hours not being 100% Mama, sandwiched between getting some exercise and doing tasks that cannot possibly be done with an energetic 3-year-old in tow, like visiting the dentist. Paying for twelve hours of childcare a week so that I can write (and do other sanity-preserving activities) is a huge investment for a family with very little extra money in the budget. Sometimes it feels like such an extravagance. I should use this time for something that pays real money right now, I think. Or at least something that provides a little validation, rather than just another fresh rejection letter curing on my desk.

How do we know when chasing a dream goes from inspiring to irresponsible?

Does it ever?

I sought out grantwriting gigs, and after many hours of trying, I got one. I made a little money. It felt good. I'd do another, if there were another to do. But I am impatient. I don't want to spend the precious hours chasing after work; I want to spend it writing. I have so many projects in the cue and on my desk. What I lack is not ideas or the drive to put them to paper - it's the time to delve deeply.

But whenever I question my choices, I end up back here: I know deep down that writing is my soul-work. No matter what else I do with my days, writing is not a choice; it is a necessity for my soul to be filled and fulfilled.

And then there is this quote from Joyce Maynard, via one of my favorite blogs Chookooloonks:

"It's not only children who grow. Parents do, too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it myself."

Having faith in myself and my writing, even during a run of rejection letters, is how I show Elan what it looks like to reach for the sun.

In December

It is December now, and I notice that for the past several months I have maintained silence here on my blog about how I have continued to deal with the miscarriage that rocked my world this year. Why is that? Shortly after the miscarriage, I wrote a series of emotionally raw and revealing posts. I did that consciously, because for me, writing is a form of therapy. Writing helps me to process my emotions, to understand my reactions, and to move through difficult or stuck places.

I could have written these things in my journal rather than in a public forum like a blog. However, I also wanted to communicate about this experience. Despite all the supportive and loving people in my life, miscarriage has felt like such a lonely loss. Perhaps all loss is. I know the experience of miscarriage and the emotions it raises are different for every woman. For me it has felt like a death that only I really grieve. And while society might be more open about miscarriage now than in the past, it is still an experience shrouded in things unspoken, people not knowing what to say, women not knowing how to share their experience without making others uncomfortable. In writing about my miscarriage, I wanted to reach out to say how it is for me, to make this kind of experience less of an off-limits topic, to acknowledge the hard stuff rather than gloss over it. For better or worse, I'm just not the type to skip to the happy ending.

I wrote some posts where I started to really delve into these feelings, and then I got scared off. I got scared off by the reaction of a few people, which I feared meant there were more who just wouldn't speak their thoughts out loud. I retreated. Which was okay. I needed to mull over how to use this blog, what purpose I hope it to serve both for me and those who read it. And the truth is that, while I enjoy posting pictures of Elan and the strange and funny happenings in our world, I know I won't keep writing on this blog unless it really serves me. And I think the way for it to do that best is as a forum for me to send snippets of my writing out into the world. This is something I need to practice. It is difficult for me to decide that a piece of writing is finished and to submit it to journals and magazines, when I know statistics say it will most likely be rejected. This blog is a way for me to tell the overly-perfectionistic part of myself to bug off. It is a place for me to experiment, to put my writing out there with less fuss and hassle and patience than is required in the publishing world.

That doesn't mean that I don't carefully consider the words I post here. I know that once published to the Internet, they live outside my control. But I have decided that ultimately, I'm more interested in truth than self-protection. I'm more inspired by sharing myself than by retreating. At least for today.

And so, I write to you from December. Today after I put Elan down for his nap, I suddenly felt overcome with sadness. I flipped the calender to December, and there was a visual representation of why. At the end of this week, a small number inked in my handwriting: 38. At the end of this week, I would have been 38 weeks pregnant. Elan was born at 38 weeks. My official due date is not for several weeks, and yet, I could have had a baby any day now.

Could, should, would. I know these words are not helpful. They are a story of the past, not my current reality. And yet. Grief is like that, I have realized. You go along, feeling fine, focusing on the here and now, until suddenly, a wave sneaks up and takes you down. Or at least gets the hem of your pants wet.

What I want to say is that I am doing well. I feel strong and hopeful, especially in comparison to where I was several months ago. I am healing. A work in progress. This month marks the time our baby would have been born, but it also signifies the official end of the six-month waiting period after the molar pregnancy. And so now, in December, I find myself balancing hope and fear, thankfulness for the health I've got and how far I've come with sadness over what I hoped would be, this time of the year.

From The Thick Of It

What, you think a writer's blog should include WORDS? Picky, picky.

I haven't been writing publicly much because what to say? The question I've mostly had from friends and family members is How are you doing? And the answer is it's complicated.

Elan has a book that I love reading him called My Many-Colored Days. It's all about moods, very appropriate for a toddler. Some days we feel "happy pink. It's great to jump and just not think." But then there are the brown days, the purple days, and, of course, the black days: "I howl, I growl, at every cloud." Lately my days encompass a rich variety of colors, tending more than I'd like toward the gray, brown, and black spectrum. The bright end of the rainbow is not so well represented, though I do have times where I feel quite fine, relatively energetic and able to deal with the little and big mishaps of life. And then there are the other times, when I feel like I'm barely holding it together, whatever *it* is.

We writers hope to write about a specific experience an essay that teases out the details, gleans the essence of the experience, and then knits it back together with some kind of universal truth or lesson at the end. In order to write this kind of essay, one needs some psychic distance from the experience. 

My blog posts are clearly NOT this kind of essay. I have no distance, emotional or physical, from the events that have recently turned my life upside-down. I am still dealing with the sometimes startling physical effects of the miscarriage and partial molar pregnancy. I am still going to the doctor for ultrasounds (tomorrow) and getting blood draws to check my hormone level (sometime this week). I am still in the thick of it, and it's difficult from this vantage point to even understand my own reactions and feelings, much less try to impart them to others. If you talk to me on the phone, depending on the moment, I either sound completely normal or like a total mess. Rarely am I somewhere in between, though sometimes I try to hold off the mess part until I get off the phone, or Elan goes to bed. It's just not always an appropriate time or place to break down into tears.

Writing that last sentence makes me laugh though, because I have been pushing the boundaries that my previous self would have respected when it comes to appropriate places to cry. On Saturday, it was at the gym: locker room, sauna, steam room, and most impressive of all - in the pool while doing laps. And yes, it was difficult to breathe. My goggles got all fogged up, but I figured no one could hear a sob underwater. I was subtle about it; no one seemed to notice, or at least they didn't look twice if they did. This is Berkeley, after all. But what choice do I have? Some days, thankfully not the majority, I just can't stop crying. But life has to go on. I have to get my exercise. There's a tiger inside me, and he has to be walked. When he doesn't get his walk, he starts clawing at his cage, and it's not pretty. (When I shared this thought with Mikhail, he wondered why the tiger was male. It just is.)

And so, I write to you from the thick of it. These blog posts will not be prettily finished-off. They will likely not impart universal truths or little jewels of wisdom. They will be ragged and raw, seams showing, hems with pins still sticking out of them. Just like my days. I move carefully, trying not to prick myself.