The Further Adventures of Sir Hurl-A-Lot and His Sidekick Pukey Boy

Okay, I'm not actually going to regale you with a play-by-play of the last three weeks. I think the name says it all. We have been in stomach flu hell here at the Vandeputte residence. But I have learned some valuable lessons for survival in a household vomitorium and thought I would share them with you.

#1 - When sending your husband on an emergency Gatorade run, it is important to specify the gatorade flavor whose artificial coloring best matches your carpets. Fruit punch red + light beige carpet = lots of scrubbing in the middle of the night.

#2 - Medicines that the doctor promises will melt immediately on the tongue, not only do not melt on the tongue, but maintain their shape and general consistency when spit across the room onto the dog.

#3 - Even a deathly sick toddler, too bleary-eyed to see straight, will spot the crushed up medicine in the bottom of his sippy cup.

#4 - Your husband takes on Mr. Universe/Sexiest Man of the Year/Ghandi status after standing outside in hurricane remnants hosing down bedsheets at 3am.

#5 - But you take on Miss America/Sexiest Woman of the Year/Mother Theresa status after volunteering to collect the stool sample.

#6 - If all else fails, large doses of probiotics are a godsend.

Addendum

I do want to add, for the record, that despite the events of yesterday afternoon, my carpets are spotlessly clean. There isn't a trace of any of it left behind. No stains at all.

What is my secret?

A carpet solution made of 1 c Water, 1 T white vinegar, and 1 t Dreft. I am hardly Holly Homemaker, but I decided to try this in a fit of desperation a few months ago (a difficult stain in the middle of the living room and everything else was bleaching out the carpet scrap I had on hand). I found this recipe online, my test patch didn't fade, so I thought "Why not?"

It is the stuff of miracles. You just soak the carpet, scrub away any surface "dirt," then soak up the remaining liquid with a towel or paper towels, and if the stain is still visible repeat again. Name a noxious bodily fluid, and it's removed it from my carpet without so much as a hint it was there.

Another secret cleaning tip I recently came across is oxygen bleach. It's like OxyClean on steriods, without the bleaching factor. I won't use OxyClean. Hate it. But real oxygen bleach is another miracle product that no one knows about. It cleaned our ceramic tile grout when nothing else would. Even soaked in red gatorade that had turned the grout pink. I got it here http://askthebuilder.pinnaclecart.com/catalog/Stain_Solver-1-1.html. I met Tim Carter of Ask the Builder fame when we lived in Cincinnati, and tried it based on his recommendation. It does everything he claims it does.

So everything is clean and squared away, for now. Let's see how long it lasts.

Reoccuring Themes

Here's one of those things they don't tell you about at those parenting classes you sign up for when you're pregnant and think your unborn child is going to be this clean, pink, cooing thing.

The minute they come forth (and for some of us, the minutes before they comes forth) you will find yourself the unfortunate frequent resident of SHITTYSNOTTYPUKEYVILLE, and you will, on a regular basis, find yourself cleaning your child's noxious bodily fluids out of your brand new carpet, the stiching on your (also brand new) leather sofas, the covers of books, your hair, the wheels of favorite Thomas the Tank Engines, baseboards, door frames, sheets, and pillowcases.

And I seem to have had the misfortune of becoming a permanent resident of this horrible horrible place.

My friend Miranda observed once that bodily fluid stories are rapidly becoming a sad reoccuring theme in my life. Well, here's one more...

Sam and I had a miserable stomach bug over the weekend that forced me to scrap my long-anticipated Halloween cookout on Saturday and my girl's afternoon out viewing This is It on Sunday. Instead, I had my head in a bucket wishing for death and Tom spent the weekend alternating between Gatorade runs and hosing down Sam's bedding in the driveway. Fun was had by all.

Sam seemed better by Sunday afternoon, and I kept him home from school Monday where he was so well I thought he'd been possessed by a maurading pirate. Tuesday he went to school and successfully convinced his teacher he was near death, but once he got home, he was totally fine. A 10+ on the pirate pain-in-the-ass scale. (I have a $30-child-broke-a-library-DVD-bill to prove it.)But last night he picked at dinner, and didn't eat any breakfast. Or lunch--even though it was a Fuddruckers hotdog and he normally wolfs those down. He fell asleep in the car on the ride home and I put him straight to bed when we got home.

And then, two hours later, he woke up from his nap and there was literally a river of diarrhea in his diaper, that flooded his jeans legs, filled up his socks, and made a puddle on the (of course) brand new carpet in his bedroom. Which John tried to walk through. Wailing baby goes back in crib. Wailing toddler goes in shower. Wailing mommy goes and gets the cleaning supplies and spends a half an hour scrubbing nasty festering ick from between the carpet fibers. I get wailing baby out of crib. I get not-so-wailing toddler from the shower. I pajama him. And tell him he's sick and needs to go to bed. And fits are pitched and he says he wants to play, so I give him an anti-diarrheal and *I* go to bed (to watch Oprah and embroider).

My butt had literally just made contact with the mattress when I hear *cough cough* "Mommy!" *splat*

And now there is a gigantic orange chunky spot in the hallway on the *damn! damn!* brand new carpet! Followed by another orange spot and another and another and I just stand there debating my options. Could I kill myself with Calgon? Would it take me away enough from the vomit encrusted toddler standing in the hall, the bright puddles of I-don't-even-want-to-go-there on my once-new-looking carpet, and the baby re-enacting Singing in the Rain in the middle of it? Good God! There are puke splatters all over the walls. Can I just stand in the street and let someone hit me with their car? It would be infinitely preferable to what I'm about to have to do...

Seriously? Have I not paid my dues yet?

Remedial NANOWRIMO

I've never been so proud of doing so little.

When I signed up for NANOWRIMO this year (in my head--I did not sign up officially for obvious reasons) I only had a vague notion of how things were going to work. I was not going to kill myself in my writing frenzy and lose my mind. I was going to dabble. I was going to write as the inspiration hit and if that meant I wrote a paragraph a day, so be it. I have never been such a slack ass about anything in my life. But surprisingly, it feels delicious. Much like summer vacation once did, where getting out of bed and dressed sometime before lunchtime felt like a major accomplishment.

I've been working on descriptions lately, because I really suck at them. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you focus on a single task. Since I'm only writing descriptions, and don't have dialogue or plot progression issues to worry with, I've amazed myself at what is pouring forth from my head.

A couple of examples:

As his eyes adjusted to the little light let off by the fireplace, he could just make out the shape of Mrs. Whitaker lying in her bed, and the figure of a young woman bending over her. The young woman’s hair was loosely tied in a braid down her back, and several long strands obstructed her face.
John longed to coil one of those strands around his finger just to examine the color more closely. In the glow of the fire, it shone like a new wheat penny, but as she turned at the sound of his footsteps, in the sunlight streaming through the open door, the copper melted into honey.

The young woman brushed the hair out of her eyes and as they connected with his, John felt an odd jolt of energy between them. He had seen that color only once before, the morning he had hiked up Grandfather Mountain and seen the Blue Ridge for the first time. A quilt of green and blue patchworked into one another, stiched by sunlight, then covered by a blanket of mist.

As a writer, you always fear you're a one-trick pony--that you have one voice, and one style, and can't write your way through a different world. Even as I grew sick of it, I always thought my style was that sarcastic self-deprecating voice of the chic lit narrator, but I'm proving to myself that not only is it possible for me to write more serious literary fiction, it's coming across much better. And I'm actually having fun writing for a change.

Working At It

I should be in the garage sanding quarter round right now, but I thought I'd take a minute to update my blog before I get swept up in the tidal wave that is autumn around here.

I know most people get very busy this time of year with the holidays approaching and whatnot, but for me, autumn equals that plus an insane burst of creative mojo that doesn't peter out until February. I have a feeling my blogs will become sparser this month, since I have halfway commited myself to NANOWRIMO. This year, I have no immediate goals per se. I'm certainly not going to kill myself in an attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. What I am going to do is devote my blog-writing time to writing some descriptions of the setting in my mountain romance novel, and flex some of my writing muscles more regularly. I am becoming increasingly cranky as I withdraw from the writing world, so obviously abstaining from it completely is not a good idea.

Plus, I'm still committed to spending more time with the boys and less time on the computer and this time of year is full of fun holiday entertainment for them. Here are pictures we took of them in their costumes at the Enchanted Tracks at The Pavillion in Taylors. It's quickly becoming my favorite park in all of Greenville. This was a great little event for kids--night time train rides, trick-or-treating with story book characters in the woods, a petting zoo, bounce houses. They had a blast.





I'm still working on Christmas presents, too. My goal is to be finished by Thanksgiving. Yesterday while checking my spam email account, I stumbled across an offer from shutterfly.com for a free photo book, and while web surfing, I found another offer from kodakgallery.com for a free ($15 worth) photo gift. Thanks to my friend Amy, who let me borrow her computer (ours does not have working flashplayer), I cranked out two more Christmas gifts last night. Tom was pleasantly surprised when I told him what I'd done and how much it ended up costing me (I had to pay the shipping costs... big whoopee doo).

And speaking of which, those of you who have been following our home improvement saga for the last seven years will appreciate this:

Tom laid a bazillion square feet of ceramic tile in our house, and has recently begun installing quarter round to finish off the edges (hence my need to go sand it). However, he decided that due to our nightmarish experiences caulking our house in Ohio, he was not going to bother caulking the joints between the wood pieces and was just going to let them be. The naked joints really bothered me, probably in the same way that naked table legs bothered the Victorians. So yesterday, against Tom's wishes, I took matters into my own hands. A few weeks back, I'd bought a cool looking tool for caulking--a silicone seam smoother-thingy--which Tom immediately declared a colossal waste of money and refused to use. Yesterday, I opened it, grabbed a tube of kitchen and bathroom caulk that was shoved in the furthest reaches of the garage, and went to work plugging up the seams between the quarter round pieces. That tool was a revelation. I made some of the loveliest caulk lines you've ever seen.

So Tom comes home from lunch. I show him my handiwork. And being Tom, he said, "While you were at it, why didn't you caulk the seam between the quarter round and the baseboard, too?"

Typical. I'm guessing he thought it turned out well. :-)

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. My life has suddenly become very Prufrockian. A couple of weeks ago I was measuring out my life in coffee spoons, now I want to disturb the universe.

We always have interesting conversations on Creative Construction (now called Studio Mothers), but lately the topics have hit very close to home for me and have inspired a lot of soul searching.

It started when Miranda asked me: "Brittany, I know that you’ve sort of sworn off a commitment to writing, just for while the boys are so little. But clearly, your work is not that far from your mind. How are you able to navigate this landscape? Do you tell yourself, well, I’m not going to try to schedule anything or set up any specific goals, BUT, if opportunity strikes, I’ll take it?"

My reply: How am I able to navigate this landscape?

Good question, Miranda, and something I haven’t thought about consciously (if at all).

What happened was I came to the conclusion that if I continued to persue writing in tandem with motherhood I was always going to feel like I was in a horse race with my children–constantly trying to get away from them, leave them in my dust, and create further and further distance from them so I could gain writing ground. And when I thought about it from their perspective, I knew that they were not going to have the happy childhoods I wanted for them if I was constantly trying to distance myself from them in favor of this abstract activity that meant absolutely nothing to them. (For a while there, I’m pretty sure they thought my laptop was actually an extension of my lap.)

And when I thought about the type of mother I wanted to be, I didn’t want to be inaccessible and angry–which unfortunately had become the norm as I tried to finish my novel. I reached a breaking point one day when I found myself screaming at Sam (who wanted me to stop writing and dance with him) “Just go away and leave me alone! I’m busy!” And a little voice in my head piped up and asked, “Is this really worth it? Do you care so little about your child that you’re willing to ruin your relationship with him and his childhood over some dumb words on a page?” And of course, the answer was “no.”

And I asked myself, “What did I have these kids for anyway?”

The answer was simple. I wanted to mother them. I wanted to play with them, and explore the world with them, and dance to the Wiggles with them, and take them to the park to feed fries to squirrels. And I wasn’t doing any of that. I was being selfish and self-absorbed, giving my best to my laptop and leaving none of it for them.

So I just said, “Enough,” and I put the writing away.

And yes, the writing still percolates, because I’m not dead and ideas have always percolated–it’s who I am. It’s what I choose to do with them that matters right now, and right now, I choose to let them sit.

But it's a choice that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. And as the conversations continued, I found myself growing angrier and angrier at a world that tells me I shouldn't have to sacrifice one thing for the other. That I can have it all, if only I become more disciplined and new age-y in my thinking. Here were my thoughts on the suggestion that I carve out a piece of my morning (when it's quiet) and treat my writing as a rock that everything else flows around.

Exactly what part of my morning should I carve out? The five am wake up call from the other room, the time spent nursing one while the other climbs on me demanding videos and bathroom trips and potty treats and breakfast. And should I just allow all the drool and the crumbs and the poopy diapers to flow around the house while I sit serenely at my computer so I can really be with myself?

More and more I feel real honest-to-God anger at other women who smugly assure me that it is possible to balance writing and motherhood. Who estatically exclaim, “I balance it all! I’m living the dream! You can do it, too!” I want to go feral and chew off their faces with rabid frothy-teeth-gnashing because I can’t. I’ve tried.

Then yesterday, Miranda posted an article written by a musician who considered giving up her musical life when her children were born. Her words really shook my core, even though there were the responses I expected--the enthusiastic bleating about writing, mothering, balancing, loving it--the responses that make me cross-eyed with frustration and blind rage--not at those other mothers, but at myself. Why have they found the holy grail that still proves illusive to me?

And so I wrote: What is expected of me as a mother is entirely incompatible right now with the creative life I want to pursue, and I’ve had to set aside my writerly aspirations just so I can dog paddle through my days , my head only just above water. Sadly, writing no longer feeds my soul. It consumes me, turning me into an angry, screaming harpy, because the more I write, the more I want to write, and the more conscious I am of what Diane said–that “As mothers, yes, we have a biological imperative to focus very deeply on our children, but there is little support for the mother who has a need to support her family financially through a career that requires elite preparation and singular focus,” and apparently I’m the only one who gives a shit about it.

I love my husband and children dearly, but in the priorities of the day, western civilization will end as we know it if I’m not available to heat up a can of Chef Boyardee, fill a sippy, and clean up after everybody afterwards. No one EVER says to me, “Damn Brittany, what a mess you’ve made of chapter 4. When you get a chance can you go straighten that out.” But God forbid nobody has clean socks or replenished groceries. I have to get on that immediately…

And I am bottling, bottling, bottling–surpressing all that simmering anger–knowing that even if I erupt and spew my anger forth for all to see, it still won’t make the slightest bit of difference to anyone else if I’m writing or not. It’s better to distance myself from it. Write stupid little blogs about toddler vomit and dog diarrhea, and expose my sad little maternal woes for all the Schadenfruedian world to see. Every time I read a post about another mother in a similar position who is happily struggling along, I grow just a tinier bit angrier and more resentful, and then distance myself a little more from writing so I can cope with a life without it.

After writing that, and then simmering for half the day in anger over my situation, I literally fled the house when Tom came home. And where did I flee? Barnes and Noble. Ironic, huh?

I bought *another* diet book, determined as I am to get some control over whatever I can. And while I grocery shopped at Walmart--which to a suburban mom is as close to a discipline as it gets--I pondered my situation.

The other Studio Mothers are signing up for NANOWRIMO right and left. I have a book idea. A re-write to do of my last book idea. I would *like* to be writing right now. I could possibly carve out the time if I was really disciplined and pushed myself like an olympic athlete. It might be good for me to try. I need to prove to myself that I can do something.

But I also need to clean the house and go to the gym and catch up on the sleep I miss at night and and and... somehow it all feels like excuses, but it's a lot of tedious minutae that turns into the giant barracade that jams up my life. If you could see inside this mother's head, it would look like the aftermath of the Johnstown Flood, ideas dammed up behind acres and acres of impenetrable debris.

Will my world collapse if I add something else to the pile? Will everything come crashing down around my head?

Do I dare disturb the universe?

Another Day in the Life...

Yesterday was one of those days that makes parents everywhere want to book the first flight to Bora Bora.

As most things develop around here, it started zanily. I wanted to go to the gym, but my desire to hit the eliptical machine coincided with the arrival of a large box of gifts to the boy from my mom, and they were much too interested in playing with their new toys and gorging themselves on the snacks she sent to humor me. Finally, I was able to convince them to go for a walk with me, so I piled them into the double stroller, tied on my awesome new walking shoes, and tried to head out. Tuendi tried to head out with us, but I shushed her back in the house. We had a nice stroll around the neighborhood, even though I spent much of that time cursing the hilly terrain and wishing our neighborhood was flatter. You don't realize how uphill you're going until you're pushing a bulky double stroller...

When we got home, my neighbor Amy was outside, and as I stood in the driveway catching up with her, the boys disappeared into the garage (and presumably the house). Moments later a blur of white went zipping by my feet, heading--of course--uphill. I yell for Amy to watch the boys and take off after Tuendi, who's surprisingly fleet on her feet for an almost-11-year-old. Thank God for the little stamina I've been building up because I was able to chase her up the street without passing out. But to add to the hilarity factor, it was 5:30pm, "rush hour" for the neighborhood, and Tuendi proceeded to cause a little traffic jam as she weaved from one side of the road to the other, totally oblivious to the line of cars stopped to watch her. Thankfully, I was put out of my misery by a neighbor (one I don't know), who opened up her car door, called to Tuendi, and then caught her for me.

I trudged back down the hill with Tuendi under my arm. Amy had the boys, the garage door *and* the door to the house were both standing wide open, and one of our strictly indoor cats was poking his nose around the garage. By some miracle, Sammy was in the backyard, and Dove, the other cat, was upstairs. But don't think the mental image of me having to herd all four wayward pets home didn't cross my mind...

I *thought* that was it for daily excitement, but that's what I get for thinking...

Things were going along swimmingly. Tom came home. I fixed dinner. We all sat down to eat it. John, who not five minutes before, had been Mr. Happiness, suddenly began screaming. Tom lifted him from the highchair just in time for John to barf what seemed like gallons all over his shoulder. Sammy, our pure white dog, came over to investigate and round two was a direct hit that landed right on top of his head. And so began an evening full of vomiting, bathing, and dog baths...

I hoped it was a quick in-and-out bug, but John started running a fever this morning--right in time for Sam's long-anticipated first field trip ever-to the pumpkin patch. With so many horrible stories about the flu going around, I think it's better to err on the side of caution. Plus, if I stayed home with John and sent Sam to the field trip in some other parent's car, with my luck, the likelihood that he'd suddenly start violently barfing all over someone else's upholstery seemed pretty ridiculously high, so I just kept him home too.

I can already tell, it's going to be a very long day...

In A Holiday Mood

I know it's early, but the cooler weather has my mind buzzing about the holidays. I've been looking forward to them for almost half a decade. The last four Christmases have been challenging, to say the least.

Christmas 2005--I was about 7 weeks pregnant and my helacious morning sickness ramped itself up on the 12 hour drive to visit Tom's parents in Syracuse. Not the holliest jolliest holiday spent puking in my in-laws utility sink. :-(

Christmas 2006--Spent in Maryland, NJ, and NY with an infant who refused to sleep at night, but napped through nearly all of the Christmas festivities, and wailed whenever he went on a road trip.

Christmas 2007--Pregnant again. With a toddler. Spent a very quiet Christmas alone at the house. I missed the hustle and bustle of family around.

Christmas 2008--First of all, I was sick as a dog from before Halloween, straight through Thanksgiving, and was only just starting to feel better when the family developed a lovely case of pre-holiday Norovirus. We flew (with an infant, a toddler, all our luggage, and a carseat) to NY on Christmas Day--and proceeded to give my father-in-law and brother-in-law a nasty Christmas gift that they enjoyed the rest of our visit.

And yet Christmas is still my favorite holiday... Here's hoping this one goes a little better.

This is the very first Christmas where one of our children has a clue about Santa Claus, so I can't wait for that. I got Sam a gift from Santa that I'm certain will knock his little socks off. The in-laws will be here, and all my holiday hostessing senses have gone into overdrive (If you're as addicted to Honey Baked Ham as I am, you can go to www.honeybaked.com/holiday and print yourself a $10/off coupon). I'm already planning a sumptious holiday menu to go along with the aforementioned ham. It will be a holiday bonanza to end all holiday bonanzas.

I've been flooded with gift-giving inspiration this year--which has much to do with spending the last holiday season walking around the mall in a whooping-cough/pnuemonia-addled daze(Now I have two year's worth of inspiration to go on). And thanks to my extremely cooperative, and artistic children, I'm giddy for the big day to arrive and their inspired (if I do say so myself) presents to be unwrapped.

Tomorrow, while Sam's class takes a make-up field trip to the apple orchard (we're going on Thursday), we're heading back to The Glazing Pot in Greer for part #3 of our holiday gift making. Tom's grandmother mentioned to me how much she loves and can't get enough of Cheerios the last time we saw her, and since she's notoriously difficult to buy for (everything you give her comes back to you the following year), I decided months ago that we needed to buy her a Sam's-sized box of Cheerios for Christmas. But then I got to thinking that the icing on the cake would be a bowl to eat them in, painted for her by her great-grandsons. Surely that's something she'd enjoy (and keep). So that's our project for tomorrow...

Is This Thing On?

For lack of anything better to blog about, I'm going to shake things up a bit and turn the tables on you, my readers.

Got any burning questions for me? Things you're dying to ask me about life in general? Motherhood? Writing?

How about topics you'd like to see me write a blog on?

I know a lot of people are reading my blog on Facebook, and that's great. But why don't you swing by the real blog (http://www.brittanyvandeputte.blogspot.com) and have a look at the pre-Facebook archives. And while you're at it, go ahead and sign up to follow me. It does my ego good to have "followers." :-P

Creative Journey

Today was a good day.

We all have runny noses around here, and since the weather is pouring-down-crappy and there've been confirmed cases of swine flu at the preschool, I decided that was reason enough to let Sam play hooky today. After John took his morning nap, the three of us went to paint pottery at a nearby studio, which has quickly become my go-to activity with Sam. The boy has some untapped artistic abilities, and he really seems to enjoy it. Sam and John worked in tandem on a Christmas gift (I can't say for who because they might read my blog on occasion) and I bounced back and forth between them, pouring more paint and encouraging them to go nuts.

When I pictured motherhood, this is not what I saw of myself, strangely enough. I know I probably come across as artsy fartsy and free-wheeling, but I really have a hard time with the whole "going nuts" aspect of life. If you think about it, all my hobbies have pretty stringent rules. There's writing, with enough rules regarding structure, grammar, and spelling to give anyone a migraine. Embroidery, with its color-only-in-the-lines patterns, as well as the edict from above that the back should look as seamless as the front. And although I've tried it a couple of times, I've never been able to pull off anything but a realistic-looking doll.

In my personal life, too, I can't look back on any period of my life and say "I was totally out of control then." I attempted, on a few rare occasions, to get drunk and throw caution to the wind, but my conscious, an internal-harping-elderly-kill-joy quickly badgered me into returning to the straight and narrow. I'm just not comfortable saying "Do whatever you like."

But I did it today.

The pottery the boys made today is going to look gorgeous after it's fired, and it is 100% their work. I have a strict "Mommy-Hands-Off" policy when it comes to their artwork. And that is why there are drool marks in the paint, handprints, finger-painted swirls, drips, streaks, brush strokes, sponged dabs, and streams of colors not found in nature.

There is a saying for teachers--"The one who's doing the work is doing the learning," which basically means that if you want someone to learn something, you as the teacher must facilitate the experience, but then take a step back, and let your students do it, explore it, internalize it and learn it for themselves.

In stepping back, I'm learning a lot from my boys. Little boys can make stunningly beautiful objects with minimal supervision. There are no bounds to their creativity. They know how to go nuts. And they do it spontaneously and joyfully, just like they do everything else in life when they are allowed to act freely.

It makes me happy watching all that joy pour out of them. They are overflowing with pleasure and satisfaction and a sense of "I did that" without feeling constrained by any pre-conceived notions. It's a lesson I should put to use in my own work. Lately, even though I have a new-and-improved plot for my novel, I have a pre-conceived idea in my head of what it should look and sound like, and I can't even get an outline written that will translate to the page. I wish I wasn't so overburdened with plans and could just let go and write.

But even though my own creative output has currently slowed to a trickle, I can feed my need to create, at least vicariously, by facilitating the boys' creativity. It gives me the same rush as if I'd done the art myself, because art is all about exploring possibilities, and wherever my boys go, my heart travels with them.

A Week Of New Possibilities

Mercury might be in retrograde, but you wouldn't know it from my vantage point. Things are coming together rather swimmingly for me over here.

For starters, there's my novel. Last I wrote, I had a first line and dueling protagonists clamoring for her novel to be written. It's a good problem to have when you're as prone to writer's block as I am.

Since my last post, Alex has been full of helpful suggestions.


“You know what your problem is?” she asked me this weekend while I was cleaning the bathroom. “You’ve got two different novels spliced together into some kind of weird Franken-fiction. Take out all the stuff about my teaching woes and stick to stories about the house.”

"I don’t have any more stories about the house,” I grumbled.

“Yes, you do,” she said. (Alex is turning into a really obstinate pain in the ass.)

She proceeded to point out that I watch a bazillion home improvement reality shows on tv, and said, “What if Alex applied to be on one of them so she and Will could afford to make the repairs on their new house?”

At this point, I sprinted to my office for a notebook.

“The reality show will pay for all the repairs,” she continued, “but the catch is that they have to do all the work themselves, with no outside help whatsoever, they have no clue what they’re doing, Alex is still messy and laissez faire, Will’s still an obsessive-compulsive neatfreak, and now there’s a film crew following their every move…”

Here is where the heavens parted, and a choir of angels appeared, singing a heavenly chorus.

I really feel like I’m on to something here — that this is a huge breakthrough for me — and it is going to take my book off in a new, and better, direction. I just hate that it took so long for the inspiration to strike.

And in the meantime, I've spent a lot of time highly frustrated by my (lack of) output. Lack of taking-the-world-by-storm literary success. Lack of "purpose."

When Tom and I moved to Greenville, I really wanted to give the full-time-writer thing a try. But being at home hasn't contributed much to my output. Apparently there are limits to the amount of literary genius I can squeeze out of myself at a time, and it makes absolutely no difference how much free time I have to write--when I'm at capacity, I'm at capacity. And more and more my thoughts drift back to the classroom. I would love to be teaching again. I really miss it. And with my Master's degree in English, it wouldn't be that terrible of an ordeal to get alternative certification in Language Arts.

We'll see how things play out, but I'm excited that I'm discovering some new avenues to pursue.

This Is How It Works

Today I took my How Home Improvement Saved My Marriage manuscript up to the attic and stuck it in a box with other things I don't want cluttering up my life right now. Lately, I've been in a very foul mood toward my novel and my inability to get anywhere with it, and today I decided I just wasn't going to fool with it anymore.

My novel is flawed. Profoundly and maddeningly flawed. The beginning lacks momentum. It lacks bite. Alex, the narrator, doesn't sound like anybody I'd want to hang out with for 200 plus pages. Partly that is due to point of entry problems. The beginning of my book was once funny as hell, with snappy dialogue galore, but that was before I realized that while it was highly entertaining writing, the plot was languishing under all that talking. So I cut, and I cut, and I cut some more. I killed darlings right and left. And then I killed some more. And I reached what I thought was the perfect point of entry. But no matter what I did, the book could just not pick up any steam at that point. It went mwah mwah mwaaaaah from the get go. So I mulled, and I reconsidered. No, there was no other place to start. The book sucked. It would always suck. It was a stupid idea. I wasn't meant to write it. It was hopeless. I was done.

And then I fell in love with Nicholas Sparks. Well, sort of. In a purely platonic, writerly sense. The local news has been interviewing him a lot recently because he just released a new book and he once lived in Greenville--he was living right down the road, in fact, when he finished The Notebook. He was going on about how he had a soft spot for Greenville (he doesn't live here anymore) and talked some about his writing process, and it was interesting, and I listened to it, fascinated, and then promptly forgot the whole thing. And I was paying absolutely no attention whatsoever to my Netflix queue, and lo and behold, I got The Notebook the next day.

"Oh, shit," I remember thinking. "I am so not in the mood for a love story right now." But I watched it anyway. And I wept buckets and buckets of tears, just like everybody else has who's seen the movie. And then I watched his commentary in the special features, and then I google-stalked him all over the internet because of my
newfound writer-crush on him.

He said something interesting in one of his interviews. He has two novels, stashed in his attic that will NEVER see the light of day. They were the two he wrote before The Notebook, and by his own admission, they are flawed.

This is what I was thinking about when I hauled my gigantic white binder full of rough-draft novel up the attic stairs. And as I dumped it unceremoniously in a Rubbermaid container full of books, and jammed the lid on it, and then resolutely turned off the attic light, I was thinking to myself, "These are all appropriate metaphors for how I feel about you. You suck. It was nice while it lasted, but good-bye forever."

And I had not made it down even two rungs of the attic ladder before I was hearing Alex's voice (muffled by the Rubbermaid container lid, but clearly Alex, nonetheless) and she said, "You want to put an offer on this house?" I asked my husband Will, who up til now had always seemed like a perfectly rational individual. And suddenly, my whole novel was re-organizing itself in my head. Here was the perfect point of entry. Here was the set up for funny dialogue. Here was a girl I could spend an afternoon with.

"You bitch," I cursed, as I climbed down into the laundry room. "Where the hell have you been? It might have occurred to you to tell me this nine months ago when I was begging for your help."

"I just thought of it," said Alex. "And Will is going to respond, 'Sure. What's not to like?'"

And then Ivy Garren appeared. "What about me?" she said. "What about my book? You're going to go off with her, aren't you? You're going to re-write her book!"

*sigh*

I hate it when this happens.