Step away from the drama
(Started this yesterday; finishing it today)
So err, yes, I flipped out about my book on Saturday. I think now that I overreacted quite a bit; it may be problematic or it may just not matter or it may as Briar said work to the book’s advantage. But I don’t think it is killing my book.
I took some time yesterday to try to think (while cleaning, and driving) about why the high dramatics in my head and heart and I came up with a few things. I do feel fragile as a writer right now, partly because I keep missing my own self-imposed deadlines and partly because I’m just nearing actually finishing and that is scary to me. Because then it will be revising and sending out and what next? and not the familiar turf of wading through this book’s world.
Also because I’m 35 going on 36, and I am starting to feel silly about being an “emerging” writer. Of fiction anyway.
But also this weekend was just very bad and today is and the week will be until Thursday. Because not only do I have work deadlines, but my father in law is in town Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and he is not the easiest houseguest. Well, he is in that he doesn’t wreck things or anything. But he is critical and a few other adjectives I don’t care to post about him in public and he stresses me out. Add onto that that Carl’s been a) working or b) sleeping much of the time so I haven’t had a lot of baby-less time and you get a stressed out me…
… and oh yes, Hallowe’en is tomorrow, anniversary of the day that I was raped in my late teens. I wrote it up once in the old d-x journal and I was considering reconstituting that here, but really, that’s all that needs to be said. It’s a rough day. I like Hallowe’en okay; other people in the system really like it a lot. But it’s still that weight of anniversary stuff that comes into play: as the season changes and the clocks go back and the slutty costumes appear, I start to jump at shadows.
(today)
I still feel a bit dramatic, but it’s coming out in the OMG 20millionthingstodo! stuff around here. (Cleaning, dinner prep - yay crockpot stews - airport pickups, Hallowe’en distribution, and oh yes, 4 articles due tomorrow which are fortunately mostly done.)
I will still not get the lawn mown. That is the drama because we will be on a minutes watch to see how long it takes my FIL to mention it to me or to Carl. I’ll let you know. :)
I love people who answer their email
My mid-list writer mentor says don’t worry, it’s okay, (and she’s actually read one of the latest drafts) and if it isn’t, there will be another book out there to pin it on.
She’s right. God I love her!
Will think more on it tomorrow anyway.
A plan
I cried to sympathetic looks from Carl, took a shower and bemoaned that I can’t just go out and get drunk (although I am seriously thinking of figuring out how to go out and dance tonight), and got myself a nice bowl of panner makhani as comfort food (I wish I had palak paneer, but you know, you could practically have ’shit paneer’ and it would be good and this is why I keep those little vaccuum pouches around my house).
First, why this news is bad, high drama stuff: consider that on the scale of marketability where Dan Brown is a hundred, my book was at about 10. But now it probably just fell to a 2. And no, selling it is not the WHOLE point but it is a point. I didn’t expect fame and fortune but I might like it, you know, in print. That is the point of writing. To be read.
(Also the movie trailer would seem to indicate they fucked up BtT which is even worse. But I digress back into my MASSIVE FIT I AM HAVING. Ahem.)
I have no idea how to really evaluate it anyway, but I do know in my head, where I am, it is the deluge of evil fate raining upon my parade. I have all these statements running through my mind that start “and to think.” “And to think that I stayed up until 11 on Thursday working on Scene X!” “And to think that I was just talking happily on Wednesday about being close to finishing!”
But I have a plan. It is not a grand plan, it is a survival plan. At least I excel at those. (The irony being that this novel was almost dead when it became the survival plan for making it past Emily’s death.)
There is only one way past creative angst, real or imagined, and that is to create.
So I will set the book aside for one month. (I’d thought of rushing to finish it before this movie comes out, but it is really too late for that despite the agent’s name in hand, etc. It wouldn’t even be through editorial before this movie comes out if it were accepted tomorrow. Any sensible editor would kill it, or ask for a major rewrite. Which I will think about later.)
During that time I will participate in NaNoWriMo, a project that I have not really thought much of because although I see the value in throwing up a draft, I don’t really entirely see the value of throwing up a draft under that kind of - lack of time to let things percolate and be organic. Until now. Right now it seems like a brilliant idea to just keep writing.
So I will write the chintzy thriller I’ve thought of writing for the last couple of years, and see if I can’t write a lot of it in a month, despite the idiocy of doing this right now in the midst of night feedings and working 20 hrs a week and my father in law’s visit and everything else. Maybe that craziness will work in my favour, because I won’t notice how bad the writing is in the fog of tired.
And the at the end of that time I will have some clarity about where to go next, I think.
The only good thing is that I do know what my next literary book will be about but I don’t yet know any of the people involved, etc. But I can see that if the decision is to put this one aside (oh god! no! my baaaaaby!) then I will at least know what to write next.
But god. It does not take a shrink to point out that this hits my Emily buttons. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, again!
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
So I’ve spent what? 6 or 7 years - on and off - working on this first (second, but for all purposes first) novel, which has evolved and all this shit and I am really really close to finishing it.
And one of the major plot points (in the past/flashbacky part of the book) revolves around, I do not mind telling you, how my protagonists put on Bridge to Terabithia as a play, and that choice is quite critical in that it is YA where there is a death and it is just that - out of a girl and a boy who are deep friends, the girl dies, dead, is not brought back to life, dead dead dead and it is about the best description of the death of a friend in YA that I know of. And BtT has themes I exploit and play with visibly and have you know, in my 80,000 words that are already plotted out and written and blah blah blah.
And I thought it was a good choice in being a relatively well known book without being you know, Harry Potter. It’s like they both like - Edith Wharton’s Age of Mirth or something, a book people may have had contact with but isn’t massive. (Despite the BtT TV movie.)
So this morning someone who knows I love the book points me at this gem. That’s right, a blockbuster coming to you next year.
I am seriously not sure how to get past this. I feel like my novel was just killed by the universe. I seriously would like to have vapours and take to my bed for a year. My only hope is that this movie does terribly and no one ever sees it. (At least as I see it in this moment.)
P.S. Don’t procrastinate.
Time, and time
I have to make a confession before relating today’s events: sleep around here has sucked, lately. Noah’s been sleeping the 7 pm - 12:30 am batch fine, although getting him down at 7 has been increasingly difficult with his usual routine going fine until the second song I sing to him at which point for the last week or so he has started to scream and claw at The Boobs until he gets to nurse himself down.
So I have let him and then his sleep from 12:30 am - 6 or 7 am went completely wonky too, with him getting up every two hours to nurse for an hour (leaving an hour of sleep in the middle). So I have been getting tired, and fretting a bit that nursing Noah down (which I defend as a choice! err, until it’s a problem) has been un-training him to go back to sleep on his own and that I have created a toddler-boob-sleep issue. I try to avoid power struggles unless it’s something critical (like oh, wearing your seat belt in the car seat) and since he’s really not a toddler yet that has mostly worked.
But this clawing at boob after he’d given up the go-to-sleep nurse sort of bothered me. I was saying that after my father-in-law visits next week Carl and I might have to do some kind of night weaning involving wailing and such.
But since he’s also been teething and getting babysat and things, I’ve just tried to bluster through it. Fearing for the health of his teeth and everything all the way, since having milk in his mouth for 3 hrs in the night while he does that one hour nurse-down can’t be the best thing for them even if we then brush them in the morning.
So tonight we did the routine and then Carl coming home sort of interrupted it and then we finished the book and he asked to nurse and I nursed him. And then he caught sight of his sippy cup and asked for “cup milk” in signs, so I filled it up with about 2 oz of milk (I mean, he doesn’t like milk, much, right?) and gave it to him.
The boy nuzzled it and patted it and rolled it over his tongue and then drank it all down and asked more.
Repeat twice. 6 oz! And he was clearly loving on his sippy cup.
Then I walked around with him for his songs and he couldn’t get comfortable so he pointed at his crib so I put him in. And he rolled over and went to sleep.
!!! The hell?? I mean it’s only one night. God knows what the next night will bring. But err… this would be more or less the routine I would choose? (Except for where teeth brushing occurs.) And he just - did it?
The weird thing about this is that - instead of feeling glad, although I do a bit, I feel sad and a bit odd. This is the first time pretty much ever that Noah has chosen cow’s milk over a boob and although I doubt it’s the end of our nursing relationship, it definitely is the first really clear start of it. One day that will be it; he will be loving his solid food and not be nursing. And that’s a good thing. Independence! Blah blah! And wine for me!
Still. Sniff. I fleetingly had one of those irrational thoughts, that because I was a tad frustrated at 5 this morning (which I was, and I did say “oh god” at Noah, not meanly, but frustratedly, when he got up after getting up at 2:50 and going back to sleep at 3:45, before I took him to cuddle and nurse) that he decided I don’t like him nursing to sleep and rejected me. Isn’t that weird?
Today was sort of a day like that. Noah chose a doll at the mega-mall I took my parents to, and hugged it for half an hour, nuzzling it and cooing to it. He sat in a booster seat and ate a grilled cheese (I guess we did okay on calcium today!) He asked for water and crackers when he wanted them; he looked for the diaper bag when I said it was time for a change; he washed his hands at the sink in the public washroom (held on my knee).
He’s only 14 months old! But he’s not a little baby any more!
Of course he didn’t take off walking. That would have killed me. Tomorrow, maybe.
~~~
Jody’s comment to my post on cleaning stuff is bang on: it is a matter of time helping to move from one stage to another, and I forget that. Especially with cleaning, since that’s not exactly how it worked for us growing up. Partly it just didn’t - my mother would take the day after each birthday to explain what the new chore was. 6 -vaccuuming; 7 - clean bathroom; 9 - do laundry (I don’t remember 8). And partly that is how our group memory is sometimes divided up. That’s probably true for everyone to some extent but for me I know things just jump from A to H without the letters in between, sometimes.
Maybe that’s one reason Noah’s leap today is freaking me out a bit.
Academics and baby stories
Today I did something Completely Different!
One of the mothers on an attachment parenting list for locals here is doing some research around Life’s Birth Stories - a show I avoided while pregnant with Emily but watched obsessively while pregnant with Noah - and how there is a very set narrative that normalizes medical intervention, blah blah blah feminist/midwifery focus blah blah blah (those are not bad blahs, I just don’t want to try to present her research here.)
For me it was like manna from heaven - a place to bring your kids (because AP stuff you can almost always bring your kids) and eat almonds and dates (vegan, natural, whole foods) and hang out and talk and think about how stories were presented a particular way and perhaps why and share actual stories, but also talk about how those are also constructed and there is a set vocabulary and drink decaff espresso during the whole thing and - man. Everyone turned out to be a writer too.
All this in a tiny apartment (tiny for three people) in Kensington, which is sort of like you think Greenwich village was at some idealized point in time. Adjacent to U of T and Chinatown; oddball second hand shops mixed in with places to get free trade coffee.
Although I think I probably would have issues adjusting to the apartment sharing with a baby thing, it was stacked with books and hung with art and just had a really nice feel. And I’m babbling, because it was just that nice. I think I need to start a writing group or something.
To get there I chose to park near my parents’ and then take Noah on the streetcar in the Ergo; I didn’t really want to pay to park in Kensington, or fight around parking, but I also just wanted to take Noah on his first streetcar ride. Using the carrier instead of a stroller was great (streetcars are hard, with strollers, ’cause they’re high) and Noah was a dream. He sat on my lap and was intrigued by the people getting on and off; the doors opening and closing; the ’stop requested’ sign lighting up and turning off; dogs and trucks and cats outside, and oh my all those urban things. And I really enjoyed sitting with him rather than being up in front driving.
He was also great at the meeting and the little scamp was walking back and forth between a chalk/metal board and a box of magnets, in a little alcove behind a futon. If I looked at him, he’d sit down. You see, around Carl and I, the boy cannot walk, nor in wide open space (unless he wants to run holding a ball), nor if one is holding onto his hand. But if you aren’t looking at him and he has something interesting to do in a secure feeling and confined space, he walks around doing it.
Coming back he nestled into me and slept the whole way.
It was a great day. I miss downtown, a little, but surprise! It’s still there! And it actually is getting easier to get there.
I think I will have to set up some kind of monthly reason to go down and explore.
Odds and ends
I’ve been sitting with a couple of family-ish things on my mind lately, picked up from about the net.
One was that over at Ask Moxie there was a discussion about how to have a happy childhood. It’s a great topic because after all, next to raising responsible adults, having happy kids is probably the number one thing you want to do as a parent.
But I had such a visceral reaction to it that I had to slow down and take a look.
I do have friends who had what they would qualify as happy childhoods and with them, maybe because I knew some of them in their/our childhood, I mostly can see it. Mostly, I say, because of course each family has its hardships and foilbles. But I also have some friends and many acquaintances whose childhoods were decidedly unhappy and I suppose on some level that has become more of a standard in my mind.
When body-language-less people on the Internet say they had a happy childhood, my first (and unfair) reaction is often to think: well, obviously you’re still in denial.
When I think of making a good home for Noah I can come up with a zillion ways that I think we can make it - positive, healthy, all these good words. But I also am aware that some things may not be as positive. There will always be the imprint of his missing sister. Perhaps when he’s at a particularly vulnerable age one of my books will take off and someone will track down this blog in some archive and my parents will flip out, or maybe Carl’s workaholism will lead to a heart attack at an early age and that will be scary at the least. And those are just a few of the oh, ten thousand things I can think of.
To shoot for “a happy” childhood, something sort of foreign to me, seems like a labyrinthine task in the face of reality.
(And I suppose I am also saying that my/our childhood was unhappy… but that’s not quite right either. It had depths of despair that also resulted in living with a lot of fear a lot of the time. But there were also good times, quite a lot of them. I suppose though, on the whole, where I am on it now is that it’s sort of like a white can of paint. You can throw in a little black and not really notice it greying, but after you throw in a certain amount it definitely starts to cease being white. It wasn’t a black, bleak, horrid childhood at all. But it was in those shades of grey, because even when bad things were not actually happening, the taint of it coloured our perceptions.)
~~
Another similar moment was when people were talking about making their kids do chores on another blog. I am all for everyone in a household pitching in - I think it empowers kids (despite the inevitable disgruntlement) to accomplish a chore; it’s instant gratification, and they learn the skill. I also think it’s just a part of living together and being socialized. The summers I was at camp as camper and counsellor both there was something very healthy about the way everyone took care of their space, and the way clearing the table or making the campfire was rotated.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, “making kids do chores” sets off a lot of screaming and throwing of things and scrubbing the bathtub crying in fear that because it wasn’t cleaned right the first time my mother would leave.
In the idealized-future-family-world in my head, I see Noah and I cleaning together with good music on, and none of this: go away and do the chore! thing. I know it won’t actually go down that way, but I hope for something that feels, underneath, collaborative - even if it’s enforced collaboration.
If I’m going to err on either side of the equation, it will probably be to let Noah off chores a bit too often. I just can’t see the make.
~~
Carl ended up having to work a lot this weekend: 7 pm - 4 am last night, 11 am - 3 pm and 6 pm to… whenever he stops, tonight. (He slept 4 am - 11 am, of course.) I was glad for having gotten a break Saturday morning before the madness began, because I do need breaks. I was hoping to get another today and it was a little disappointing that I didn’t.
At the same time something has shifted the last little while: although there’s lots I need to do and can’t when I’m on baby-duty, and that part is frustrating, I no longer have that perhaps new parent feeling that I need a break so that I can be me, or so that I can have regular time. It’s a shades-of-grey difference inside me, but it is just kind of that - I am me, when Noah’s around. The mom hat, for the most part, fits well enough. It’s my every day wear. I still need time to do other things, wear other hats and get back to some other things gradually.
But I don’t need that break to feel myself, if that makes sense. It was a nice realization, even if I’m having trouble putting it into words.
A realization
Schadenfreude is to drama as methadone is to heroin. Not -quite- as bad for you; more institutionally sanctioned.
Augh! Augh!
My baby is out with a babysitter alone!
This is K., the sitter who mostly can’t sit for us due to scheduling issues, but she could today and Mon afternoon and I was desperate enough to take it, even if it’s not regular. Not desperate deadline wise - I’m fine for this week and most of next although these hours will really help - but desperate in the moving-forward wise. I cannot keep juggling 17 hrs of work on evenings and weekends happily (I can, as it turns out, unhappily - something to keep in mind). So this means get ahead and have a bit of time this weekend to chill out, or at night to sleep or say - clean my office.
So she’s taken Noah out on a walk and augh! I am sure even in my gut that he’ll be physically fine with her (emotionally he’s in the midst of massive separation anxiety, so - urg but I think his psyche can handle this the way we transitioned it, etc.) but my fear is high high high anyway.
Just a little whine in the continued babysitting drama.
P.S. They are back and I can hear them and Noah is chatting up a storm, a sure sign that he’s okay (he goes quiet when upset-but-not-wailing). Chalk one up to security.
Baker’s dozen
A friend/coworker (note order of labels :)) and I were chatting about doom and gloom news and I thought I would share one of my favourite nice stories from the past.
I worked at a bakery for two summers before and after camp, and a couple of holiday seasons.
This was not a chocolate eclairs and bagels type bakery; it was owned by a Swiss baker who locked up the booze and the good chocolate he imported from Switzerland, but who left the day’s cash receipts (often on the order of $5,000) in one of the ovens (the bakery’s closed now, so I am not revealing anything to criminals:)). He would come out and yell at anyone who asked for a doughnut. And he charged $3 for a hand-dipped truffle (they were worth it).
I’d've asked for the doughnut, prior to working there. I learned a lot from him about tasting things. Also about craft and artistry, and how to mop a floor properly.
Even so, the first time I wrote out a receipt for a $1500 wedding cake I almost passed out.
So one busy Saturday I had a few people in line when a very disturbed looking guy wearing a t-shirt and tuxedo pants rushed in and paced until he was his turn.
“Do you do wedding cakes?” he asked.
“Yes we do. You can look at this catalogue…”
“No!” he shouted. I mean shouted. “I mean today!” I was a bit floored and said, “Well -no, not unless it’s only for a few people and we can use one of these cakes…”
At this point the owner came in, possibly due to the shouting. And got to the point much faster. “What’s the problem?”
The best man, for so he was, explained that he had been in charge of one wedding detail for a wedding to take place that evening. Transporting the cake. In a minivan. And then he led the owner out to the minivan (I followed; I couldn’t help myself) to witness… the top layer of a large wedding cake which had had something fall over on it. (I never saw what.)
C., the owner, went to get the only other person working on the weekend, the kitchen clean-up boy, and the two of them hauled all the boxes of this now bedraggled wedding cake upstairs. It was a frothy buttercream icing affair of the type that would never be allowed in our bakery.
And he instructed me to get the best man a coffee, and soon appeared with some of that precious locked up liquor to pour into it. He asked the best man when the cake had to be there, and after some consultation on the bakery phone (this was the pre-cell era), figured out that he had two hours to work.
He rebuilt the cake. He couldn’t match the bottom layers for whatever reason (I suspect blatant snobbery) so he took all the icing off the whole thing, filled in the top layer with the closest cake we had ready, and redecorated the entire cake. Mostly with marzipan, which is - to put it mildly - not cheap.
I’d seen C. work before but never on a wedding cake; he usually did those at home. He never stopped moving, or I think, thinking. He never made a step wrong that I saw. He just put his head down and worked in that way people do when they have mastery. It took him exactly 1 hour 58 minutes. It was beautiful - clean lines, and elegant, and the flowers trailing down over it the same shade as the ones that had come off the original cake.
And then he told the best man he’d follow him, in the bakery van, since it had all the right kind of shelving, etc., to carry cakes around.
The best man, who had not dared leave the store the whole time, put his hand to his wallet shakily (since he had by now seen that a chocolate truffle cost $2.50 in our store). “What do I owe you?” he said with that combination of relief and dread that comes of having a problem solved that Visa is going to have to cover.
“Nothing,” said C. “But you owe me a dollar and forty-five cents for the coffee.”
When I was married a few years later, he made my cake too, a white chocolate mousse cake with marzipan roses. I had to pay a discounted price for it, though. But then, no one dropped it.