It Is Too Late, I'm Too Old

Or.....it is never too late.

Another part of my struggle with just about everything I want to do is that I was a child prodigy. When a child prodigy grows up, she's just a really smart and (slightly?) annoying adult with the whispered memory of having been special and held apart for admiration. A 14 year old surgeon is amazing, but that same kid grows up and a 40 year old surgeon is not notable. The same goes for a child poet. I had talent, it was a gift, but that success is talent nurtured and matured and I did not do that, I walked away.

It is not too late for me to pick the pen back up. I may have to back track a bit and practice, but I can do it. Too often we are told that if you don't start something when you are a child, then it is too late. Guess what folks.....an adult CAN learn a second language, can learn to read music and play an instrument, can learn new skills. It will still take 10,000 hours to get good at it. That's the same as a child, but as an adult we are more mindful of those hours. As an adult we are more critical of mistakes, more sensitive to humiliation. 

10,000 hours is a lot of dedication. 20,000 hours and you can be amazing. It is easier to dedicate the hours if you are immersed in it, like a language in a new place you are living. It is easier to dedicate the hours if your parents are paying for lessons. It is like breathing if you really, really love what you are doing.

Find that thing. Start logging in the hours. If you are 36 (like me) and say you might live to 85......That's a whole lotta good years to master something.

My Aunt Deedle is my inspiration for this. She never let anyone tell her she couldn't do something. At 35 she bought a farm, not previous experience. Soon after she became a Realtor. She was a wife and partner to my uncle, who needed a quiet bit of care physically when he wasn't being amazing. When he got really sick, they packed up and moved across country and bought a rural plantation in Virginia. When he died, she packed up again and moved to Texas, bought a bed and breakfast, and took an African safari cruise and tour to South Africa. She was a gun totin', State Fair baking, Renaissance crafting, amazing woman. She's in her 70's and still running at it.

In fact, the happiest women I know are much older than me, always trying new things, learning new skills, and running at the target of life. From that I have learned, it is never too late. In fact, my 30's are just waiting in line for that ultimate push into really living fully.

Go. Get some of that cake. If there is no cake in the house, it is time to learn to bake.

Why I Stopped Writing- Scooping the Guts Out

Recently, there has been a really public feud between two of the leaders in the unschooling movement. It is really quite yucky what one of them is doing to the other publicly, namely, starting a facebook page to collect and categorise any failing there might be of the other.

I don't care how ugly the mistake one made, creating a facebook page to stir hatred and "collect" failings eclipses that by hundreds of millions of times. While I had been disappointed and sad for one, now my view of the other is forever ruined- not because of her work or home life, but because of how creating and managing a facebook hate page speaks of her core being. Yucky.

*Dayna, rock on. People make mistakes. I am so sorry that folks have been targeting you for public humiliation and I hope that you and your family come through this strong and beautiful.

The whole situation got me thinking about how risky going public is. My blog, the facebook pages, even my profile are now public. I have made mistakes. I can't even claim that they are all in my past. I have projects that failed too. Restore-o-Rama 2005 comes to mind. Huge horrible expensive failure. Simply Food the blog is another, personality clashes led to that shutting down. Maybe I could have saved it, maybe I could reboot it, maybes haunt me. That was a huge failing. A project not seen to its end, poorly handled. Will that come back to haunt me? Even though apologies have been made for my part directly to those actually involved?

I am not perfect. I burn dinner. I yell at my kids when they fight all day, though less and less now that I know that it leads to more days of constant fighting. I forget to email folks back. I turn off my phone. I cry. I dislike people. I say the wrong thing. I say the truth at the wrong time. I say nothing when I should be throwing punches. I am not perfect. I am not always happy.

I fake it.

When all of my failings start weighing so heavy on me that I can't get up off the floor, I fake it. I get up, get dressed, I list out things I am grateful for. I send out love messages to friends and strangers. *Love messages are encouragements, what I love about you notes. I turn up the music and I dance while doing dishes. I make my kids laugh. I eat two desserts before breakfast. I put extra maple syrup in my coffee. I go through the motions of what I would be doing happy, and soon enough the day turns to real happy. Smiles are contagious.

Think about that. I have been criticised as being a phoney, which cuts to my core because I start out each day faking it. Am I a fake? I am genuinely trying to move towards joy, create a joyful beautiful life for my children. I don't lie, they know that I am sad or angry, they know I am trying hard to cross that gorge to the other side.

This paralyses my writing too. I sit in a room full of peers and feel like I don't belong. When I open my mouth, I sound like a fan girl. Then I go home and cry because I can't cut it. I am really having a hard time with this mental shift, the one from I am a crappy wanna be poet in freshman level comp classes to....I've been a college professor for 8 years, have a multi disciplinary masters degree, and published writing.

That is the muck I am stuck in. This is risky. The fear is palpable. Does this mean it is worth doing or is the fear cautionary to make me step back and re-evaluate?  What is the foot hold of this fear that keeps me sitting in the pasture making wildflower hair adornments instead of following the path that calls to me? These are the guts of the problem. This is what needs scooping out and fed to the chickens.

Why I Stopped Writing, Part Two

The spark was gone. My days were suddenly filled with the experiences I required, the expertise, the daily drama....but at the end of the day I collapsed exhausted over a pile of ungraded Composition papers, unpaid medical bills, and dirty dishes. The laundry piled up. The toys cluttered my mind. Every ounce of my creativity and joy was squeezed out of me and into my children's lives, their play, their health. There was nothing left for writing. I was full of joy, I didn't even notice it. I even thought to myself, if I could lose my soul churning need to write, maybe I am not a writer after all. Maybe I am something else.

More empty notebooks. I tried photography. I tried fiber arts. I learned how to cook. I taught myself how to sew, sort of. I distracted myself, ignoring, neglecting the thing inside of me that had shaped my identity for so long. Maybe I am something else.....

I would tell myself, if I can just get these dishes washed, then I can blog. Never happened. If I can get these papers graded, but then the baby cries. If I can just have 10 minutes, but then the work would go into draft folders and later deleted because the distracted ramblings of a failing wife and mother were uninteresting and horrible anyway. Maybe I am something else.....

I hired Jessica to help me dig my way out housework so I could climb out of the abyss. Slowly, slowly the whispers of encouragement from Chad and a handful of friends made it through the windstorm of doubt and insecurity that held me pinned in the darkness. Slowly the pin lights of the stars glimmered in the night sky.  Slowly, the country air dried my tears, set me on my feet, and I could see the miracle of everything that has happened. Isaac's diagnosis, the farm, the city house, my beautiful girls, my wonderful husband.....all of it....needs to be written about.

It is time. I am not something else. I am a writer.

I made a new rule. WRITE FIRST. Even if there are so many other things that need my attention. Unless there is blood or something is on fire, Mama gets 30 minutes every night.

Every time I sit down to grade papers I take 30 minutes and I write. Sometimes it ends up a blog post, sometimes, a poem, sometimes story notes. I write first, then work. Surprisingly, I am getting more of both done more efficiently. The need has returned. It is eating me up.

There is a problem though and it is really, really problematic. My skill has dulled. I thought that blogging wold keep my skills sharp and ready, but instead, just as I tell my students in beginning Composition.....what you read changes what you write, affects your style. My own writing began to diminish in skill, I started to pick up on the stylistics of other bloggers that I read. Fragmented sentences started to blight my work. Run-ons. Horrible grammar all in the name of writing style? This horrible new awareness of the lack of skill in my own writing started throwing my work into the virtual drawer of draft doom. Every single time I wrote a sentence that started with and, but, or and it wasn't just a clause it was just an hanging fragment, I would get sick to my stomach. I started seeing so many other bloggers do this too. This is so much worse of a plague than just killing the Oxford Comma. Facebook is one thing, a place where people type from their phones or just too fast to even pay attention to punctuation or spelling, but blogs are another creature. Here I stand trying to re-claim my title of writer and I can't even compose a decent sentence.

The self critic is the worst executioner of potential and creativity. I had to picture myself at the guillotine, head down on the block, suddenly side kicking the hooded executioner, freeing my own hands and making a grand dramatic escape, laughing at the crowd from the rooftops! Freedom!

With freedom comes responsibility and I know that metaphorically I will always be on the run from this hooded darkness, trying to bring me down. I must be agile, aware, and on the move.

I unpacked my old textbooks from undergrad and gradschool writing classes. Of course I kept them. I carry one with me at all times, even this is an exercise from Wild Mind. It is called what I want to tell you about......

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.