For over one year, I frantically pushed groceries and children in and out of the car and house, trying to squeeze writing minutes out of each passing day. If someone asked me why we were out of milk, I counted to ten several times and promised sweetly to buy some tomorrow, all the while squinting my eyes and wanting to shout, “Go find a cow and get it yourself!”
When I could grab precious minutes and push children away from the computer, I literally hurled myself at the keyboard, pounding keys and making sentences, certain the flood of words tumbling out of my pent-up mind would call aloud as they inched out of the printer, bringing themselves to someone’s attention. Words pulsated on the page. I waited for a passerby to glance at one single word, for even one person to get caught in the literary genius of my imagination and grab every page strewn across the desk, devouring my brilliance. They didn’t. Instead, teenagers leaned from the hallway into the office. “Are you at the computer again? You’re always typing! Did you know we’re out of peanut butter, too?”
My one solace was my weekly writing group. Each Tuesday, I gathered all the hard-won pages and brought them to my friends for critiquing. Six pairs of experienced eyes poured over the stack of printed pages I passed around. They gave serious attention to all aspects of my writing: commas, topic sentences, allusions, and meaning. But it became clear as the year progressed that, while the paragraphs on one given page seemed to mostly hang together in an almost coherent idea, the pages from any particular week had absolutely no connection with the pages of the week before or the week to come. In the kindest, most optimistic critic’s mind, it would seem I was writing ten different novels, jumping from the introduction of a book on loneliness to the middle of a family memoir, to a devotional on gardening, and on to a ranting political treatise on the evolution of the modern world. Everyone around the critiquing table always smiled encouragingly at me, if only because the slightly manic sparks shooting from my eyes suggested I might blow up the western hemisphere if pushed too hard.
My writer friends preserved world peace by bolstering up my wilted psyche, my husband went to the grocery for milk and peanut butter, and my son learned to cook French toast, fried eggs, pancakes, toast, and cold cereal—depending on the contents of the refrigerator.
This was our average, normal life.
Slowly, as the school year played out, May began to loom large and threatening. As I tore April off the calendar and began to cross out the early days of May, I couldn’t help but notice the coming winds of a hurricane. Jamie was coming home from college on May 6th, moving all of her belongings, her clothes, an apartment fridge, stereo system, television, rolling plastic drawers, trunk and more clothes into her small 8 by 10 foot bedroom, right across the hall from the office and my writer’s desk.
And the hurricane settled in to stay. Vic’s sister and her two kids arrived from North Carolina. We stuffed the kitchen with food for family parties, one gathering after the next. We partied, ate, did laundry and packed the van. And finally, somewhere on highway 18, heading into the Rocky Mountains on our way to a wedding in Colorado, it dawned on me that I’d have to either murder my own family and all of their nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles, or I’d have to postpone writing the History of the World According to Jane. A small shrug settled it. I lifted my shoulders, looked up into the Colorado mountains, following their peaks into the clouds and said, “September.” And I let out a small sigh.
Small miracles do happen. Mom surrendered. And we survived. There is life after the end of writing.
In Colorado, we laughed and cried as two ‘youngsters’ promised to love and cherish each other until death, and then our entire extended family plus two more returned home to Arizona. Our house again filled with guests; I remembered I did know how to cook. My children were amazed when we had completely new and different home-cooked dinners five nights in a row. We stopped going to restaurants. And we didn’t starve. We never ran out of clean clothes, we learned how to talk and tell stories. Jamie found crayons in the bottom of the closet, and she drew pictures with cousin Katie at the dining room table. Justin and his cousin Shayne went swimming at the community pool. Vic and I actually saw two theater movies. Two. Both movies in the same year! I didn’t write one sentence. And the world survived.
Whenever my writer’s panic set in, whenever I looked too far ahead into the summer calendar, I closed my eyes. September. The syllables developed their own rhythm. Sept—em—ber, Sept, Sept, Sept—em—ber. If I repeated the mantra, it reminded me I was only responsible for one little thing each day. Each morning, I opened my eyes, rose from bed, and walked to the calendar. If today the calendar said, Party, then we partied. Tomorrow didn’t exist. Only today. And September. Sept—em—ber.
One day at a time, we made it from May to June to July. I taught a workshop in Tennessee. I visited Tennessee relatives and picked black-eyed peas. As I stepped off the returning airplane, Jamie grabbed my navy blue duffel bag on wheels for her travel to Spain. Justin spent July in Mississippi. I wrote checks to keep the water and utilities turned on. We never ran out of peanut butter, and we had a steady supply of three kinds of milk, providing for the various gradations of fat content required by our household crowd: people afraid of gaining weight if they say fat out loud and children who burn thousands of fat gram calories when poking each other in the ribs. And I continued to walk around several piles of college linens and one gargantuan cardboard box filled with college dorm decorations, all of them blocking the path to the computer.
As we moved into August, anticipating the return of school, an amazing thought occurred to me. No anxious editor had called me during the summer to plead that I get back to writing. Neither had Newsweek magazine cut its “My Turn” feature for lack of receiving Jane’s 1000 urgent words about world peace. Oprah Winfrey seemed to have a new show each day…without me…or my latest book. The Tribune newspaper called us 23 times during the summer begging us to renew our subscription. They didn’t call once to ask why I had stopped e-mailing them my incisive, to-the-point, letters and editorials. Marriages were breaking and healing, self-helped with John Gray and his Venus/Mars analysis. Not one bookstore cleared a spot on the shelf and set out a sign, “This spot is reserved for the upcoming best-selling book from the new and promising author, Jane Noesitawl.” President Clinton saved himself, and he didn’t follow one piece of advice I offered. Amazing.
September. It’s 14 days away,…and counting. The stock market leaps up and crashes down, Y2K is four months away, six Republican presidential candidates are slugging it out in Iowa, Al and Tipper Gore are working to convince us they have personalities and priorities, Christians are trying to rescue African children from the slave market, and the water heater is broken. I sit unmolested at the computer, but I can’t think of one way to prevent a worldwide financial meltdown on January 1, I won’t be able to vote for the President I want because my man will never make it through the political gauntlet for nomination, Jamie’s safety in Spain for the next year cannot be secured by Vic and me in Arizona, and even if I could buy one child out of slavery, it would only reward and encourage the evildoers to capture another.
What’s left for this writer to do? I do know the pork chops are thawed. That may be enough to save my own marriage, but it certainly won’t cut into the sales of Mars and Venus by Mr. John Gray, Ph.D. And I don’t really want to be on Oprah. More than anything, I appreciate knowing I can make a peanut butter and wash it down with a large glass of cold milk, full fat. This is certainly not the type of attitude that will fill a three-book contract and sell as a mini-series.
Time to close my eyes. Sept—em—ber.
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THE WRITER’S LIFE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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