THAT NOT SO great picture above shows the pot full of kale and broccoli the kids and I harvested tonight, after four inches of snow, our first snow to speak of this season, fell all over the garden and the rest of the farm. We were supposed to have a dinner party tonight, but I started running a fever late this morning, and fearful of flu, we cancelled. So it was just the five of us (kids, the H, my mom) home today, decorating our tree, hanging wreaths on the porch, and (the kids, not me) sliding down the snowy hill, over and over and over again. For an illness-addled day, it was perfection.
That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.
This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.
WELL, IT’S TAKEN a toll on my so-called free time, and my frequency of blogging (not that that was so great to begin with.)
But in every other way, the last 29 days of writing the first more or less complete piece fiction I’ve managed in, oh, more than 30 years, has been a great gift of solace and escape during a dark and difficult time.
I did it.
I wrote over 50,000 words in November (my word processor says 50,323; the official NaNoWriMo counting machine only gives me credit for 50,048, but I’m not going to quibble with victory.) This is over 150 pages of prose, the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my college thesis. (It’s possible that the final report I wrote for my graduate school field study was longer, but that was a group project and it was for business school, so it definitely.doesn’t.count.)
I ought to feel gleeful and exhilarated, but the last few weeks (outside of my little novel-writing bubble, that is) have been so painful and difficult that those particular words are not, at least for the moment, part of my personal lexicon. Even so, I am proud of myself for completing a task (a notoriously elusive accomplishment for me) and prouder still for synthesizing a million fragments of story into a semi-cohesive whole. I like the idea of my novel more than I like the draft itself at this point (and even the hard-to-please H genuinely liked the story, when I, in a moment of incredible and inexplicable vulnerability, pitched it to him a few weekends ago) but I think, I think, I can turn it into something that while not anywhere in the neighborhood of art might still be, for someone out there, a worthwhile read. I still have sections to excise, whole chapters that need to be conceived, the work is far, far, far from done. But still, I think I owe it to myself to say–
Congratulations to me.
Today was day 6 of the Year of Me Driving. (To catch everyone up: the H, because he had a seizure, may not be able to drive for a year. Deep breath in. Exhale.) All the moms who have kids in school instantly understand the horror of this, if they live outside of Manhattan, or any other comparable urban center. Deep breath in. Exhale. Total f’ing nightmare.
Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?
I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.
Dacos, I am pleased to report, is healing. The rest of us, not so much; we’re moving through doors we hadn’t expected to encounter.
The H was in L.A. for work last week, and without getting into too much gorey detail, had a seizure, something that has never happened before. He was driving at the time, and so wrecked his rental car and shook himself up quite badly. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt much and mercifully, neither was anyone else, for which we are both beyond grateful. Even so, it was a terrifying experience for both of us, and I was happy beyond happy to have him home, safe if not completely sound, on Friday night.
Until we know why this happened (and we suspect a reaction to some medication he’s been taking) he can’t drive. This means that I am back in the twice a day commuting gig, one which made me nearly insane when we first moved here. There’s nothing to be done about it, so I am trying to figure out how best to integrate the extra hour of commuting into my already packed days. My first sane step was to decline the opportunity to take on yet another volunteer responsibility at the kids’ school.
We’ll muddle through this, but it was a shock. Ah, the chaos of life.
