Last night I couldn’t sleep. I was fretting and my mind was running in circles. A poem from my high school years tapped at the edges of my consciousness but I couldn’t remember the exact words and it was annoying. I got up and searched a few quotation websites, entered a few of the key words that seemed right- time, sun, death. Got no joy. Emailed my mother who is a fount of classical literary wisdom. Crawled back into bed. What was all the frenzy about you may ask? Why was I obsessing about a line in a poem? I was trying to pinpoint a sense of vague unease. It was about feeling as if I don’t have time to sit in front of my computer once I’ve finished with all the futzing around online, checking my emails, reading Neil Gaiman’s latest journal entry (and wishing that I had his life)- all those necessary things which help prepare my brain for work. I know this is time that I could spend with head down writing furiously but it’s a writer thing. I do not run hot and cold inspiration on demand.
Unfortunately the way things are right now with the Lucy Factor I basically only have time for the futzing around part because, almost psychically, she knows the exact moment when my brain has finally turned to the serious business at hand, and that is when she all of a sudden ceases to be enthralled with her ball or empty yogurt cup or Baby Einstein video and comes crawling over to my legs, demanding to be picked up. And I do pick her up (and if you could see her little piquant face you’d do whatever she asked too), even though I know she won’t sit calmly in my lap while I dash out a few, crucial sentences that will help me move my plot forward. No, she’ll start grabbing papers off the desk and reaching for my coffee cup and I’ll end up scrambling to save the very important sheaf of notes she is threatening to spill all over the floor as she somehow turns from baby into a manic octopus.I was just falling asleep last night mumbling to myself: Shakespeare, no, Dylan Thomas when I remembered in a flash of synapses firing as if a mule had just kicked some dead part of my brain alive- that it was that Mistress poem and the line I was hunting was:Thus, though we cannot make our sun, Stand still, yet we will make him run. And there are some other great lines in there too cause it’s all about life and death and therefore about sex- for instance I am particularly fond of ‘like amorous birds of prey’ which is actually kind of eccchh. Entirely by coincidence I saw a turkey vulture this morning on my walk.
Anyway the poem and its author Andrew Marvell are all by the way because what I realized is that all my anxiety and irritation are actually about something else entirely. How can I write and this is with full admission that I need to waste a little time preparing (or goofing off- and why not?) when I need to stop and change a diaper or mash bananas or meet the school bus or make dinner and lunch and snacks? Now I’m going to make a sweeping generalization and please contact me if you know this is untrue, and perhaps there are women novelists out there who have husbands who take care of the household so the women can devote their time to perfecting their art but I haven’t heard of them. Maybe they’re ashamed and the men are too because it’s not masculine behavior. You do hear stories however of so and so who locked himself up in his writing room with a supply of his favorite stimulant and didn’t come out for years, in the process churning out all kinds of books and short stories. Boy, do I envy those people. Those men. The women writers I know usually work at some kind of paying job in addition to writing and they have families as well. Or they waited until their children were grown before they put pen to paper. Hey, I don’t regret having kids and my husband works hard to support us but I know that if I wasn’t home right now looking after the baby and trying to finish a couple of books- I’d be working full-time at some job, looking after the kids and trying to finish a couple of books.
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