Why I Stopped Writing

When I graduated college, degree in hand, I realised that knowing how to write was only part of the process. Living a life worth writing about, knowing about something well enough to write about it, and experiencing anything at all, learning a trade, creating a family, building a house.....anything at all was a critical part that was missing.

I didn't want to be a journalist. I didn't know how to write fiction. I was stuck. I dropped my pen and walked out into the world.

I went to graduate school for non-fiction writing, history, and architecture. I was going to learn a trade, know to inside and out. We were struggling with infertility, restoring a historic house, studying historic preservation made sense. We refinanced to build better inside the house, I worked at a museum, and I played the young professional sell your own portfolio of talents to the folks in charge game. I wore suits, curled my hair, lipstick charmed my way into meetings.

In the middle of it, I became pregnant with Lily.

Lily changed everything.

She changed the core of everything I was or lived or thought. Not overnight, but slowly. I had entered a foreign land and it took time to learn the language and customs. My days and nights became a blur, work became a daily exercise in futility and longing. Grad school drug at my heels. Daycare, pumping, diapers, crying (mine, not Lily's). It all spun around me in a brilliant vortex, tearing down to the core of who or what I thought I was. Not like some brilliant chrysalis, but like a hurricane. I survived.

I survived. I changed.

I quit my job and took up teaching at our local community college. I finished grad school, but put my book in a box and taped it shut. Driving through the Iowa landscape to and from the rural campus, the dreaming fog drifted in. Dreaming of leaving the city.....a dream I had held so close to my heart since I was ten years old and my family moved south of Chicago from rural Colorado, then to Des Moines, Iowa. The rolling hills, windows down so the country air could pull back my hair and take the tears away, the longing that was building in me. The dream I had of living on a farm, raising cows and chickens and dreaming under a million stars in a silky back night was coming alive again.

I could not put my finger on it though. It was just an ember. A needling.

In the months that followed the neighbour children set our fence on fire, there was a drive by on our block, and a man was murdered in our front yard. I became pregnant with Holly. The dream became a desperation, a longing, a need.  My mind was constantly wrapped around this irrational fear that if we stayed in the city, my girls would be harmed, shot, assaulted, or some other worse degradation. I distracted myself the best that I could with play dates, art classes, mommy meet ups. Nothing got my mind off this horrible fear, was it irrational? A man was murdered in my front yard, his junkie's head blown off by a mugger. That was the neighbourhood we lived in, in our magical beautiful house surrounded by a war zone of violence, drug use, and prostitution.

Then, Holly was born. She turned up the vortex again, sent our world spinning. At a berry farm when she was 3 weeks old, the summer breeze tickled her face and she smiled and then laughed for the first time. It was that day I knew. I came home with a basket of strawberries, my two beautiful daughters, and called the Realtor. I told Chad we'd move to a farm by the end of 2008. Maybe not sell our city house, but we'd be on the farm no matter what. I started packing.

I blogged.

Every single time I took up a pen to write a poem or a story, it fell out of my hand. A baby cried.

We moved to the farm.

Isaac was born.

I bought new notebooks that ended up being used for vet supply lists, grocery lists, doctors appointments and schedules. The vortex consumed me. Slowly, I also stopped really blogging. I wrote about farm stuff, posted cute pictures, once a month or so. Not everyday. I lost my spark, the need to write.

......to be continued.