Onward!

I had dinner with an old friend last night (hi Justin!  Look!  I'm writing!) - someone who came to know me just as I was getting to know myself.  Without meaning to, he shamed  me a bit about how I've neglected this here little old blog of mine.  And I have.  It's been thrown up into my virtual attic and lost amongst my mental cobwebs with old stories and memories and last night I realized that I'm not really sure why as I can't blame the arrival of my son for my lack of entries.  I have been successfully making time for writing since caring for Dylan has become a little bit easier and have entries littering my desktop that still need "polishing" or "editing" which is what I told Justin last night.

But why?

As I lay in bed last night with Dylan snoring on one side of me and Marc on the other (we were in London - and now Paris!  I know!  my life is really hard! - hence the cramped sleeping quarters) it occurred to me that I haven't been posting with my usual regularity out of fear.  Motherhood, while wondrous in every single way, has made my head somewhat two dimensional.  Days are full of feedings and are we going to get home in time for the next nap? and is there enough formula in the house and look at this new noise he is making now, isn't it darling?  And while I relish each moment, there is some concern that perhaps I don't have anything left  to say that hasn't been said before.  I've mentioned this - this worry that parenting would knock the creativity out of me and that time would be so occupied with keeping Dylan alive and well that there would be no room for other thoughts to take root. 

Thankfully, this hasn't been the case.  In those quiet moments when my mind isn't making mental lists of what I need to get done on any given day, idea come to me and I find myself writing good sentences on scraps of paper that litter the inside of my diaper bag and purse.  My wits seem to be knocking about up there, but are those wits as amusing as they were in the past or are they harder to recognize under the thin veneer of snot and poo?  It's really just a small and silly identity crisis that is probably born out of too much navel gazing and not enough just getting on with it.  Which is essentially what Justin said to me last night even though I hadn't confessed all of this to him over my chicken shawarma.

Justin and I met when we were both the American equivalent of juniors at University of St. Andrews.  If I look at my life as a time line, certain moments stand out in perfect bas relief, so important were they in forming who I am today.  That year carved out entire portions of my soul.  On the day that Justin and I met, I had just taken a long walk on the St. Andrews pier and stood at the edge looking out over the North Sea wondering if I would be able to figure myself out in this rough and windy place and perhaps learn to live without fear and accept just exactly who I was.  We met later that afternoon and over coffee he confessed his love for the woman he is about to marry in a few weeks and I think that might be the moment that I first said, out loud, "I want to be a writer".  I was shocked that I wasn't smote down as I made this declaration (such fanciful thinking was verboten - I was supposed to become a doctor, you see) and it was the first tiny step I ever took in becoming my honest self.

But one cannot be a writer unless one writes, no?  And so here I am, somewhat mired down by anxiety, but promising myself that I will indeed just get on with it despite my internal jitters and dread that whatever I produce might just be complete and utter crap.  Because really, who cares?  I mean, I obviously do, but I'm trying to get over that and just keep moving forward.  So off I go.  Promise.