I guess this is the update

Writing amidst the void

I read that the eclipse was a black hole and that’s how my writing has been ever since. I’ve reached the midpoint of my manuscript and am unsure how it will end. This uncertainty has pushed me into a black hole of indecision and no writing. I’ve spent the better part of a month revising the opening pages and getting feedback from my Novel In a Year cohort and others. This isn’t time wasted. It’s important work. But it isn’t the forward momentum I want right now.

There are programs I want to apply to that require ten, fifteen, twenty-five pages of my best work to be submitted and I’ve decided the opening pages of this manuscript are what I want to submit. So I’m fine-tuning my main character’s background story and trying to get everything tightened up. Flushing out the filter words I love to lean on. Doing my best to make every line count.

Meanwhile the world continues on. Professors who are experts on facism are fleeing the country and I’m over here researching what country would be easiest and fastest for us to emigrate to just in case.

Everyday a new horror unfolds and I move the sentences around in my manuscript.

Build dread, create dread, the notes in the margin say. This is good! You can feel the dread.

I harness the dread I feel everyday and pour it into my words.

My daughter begs me for more screen time. For one more piece of candy. For me to open her bag of chips. She asks me if her friend can come over. If she can go to the park by herself. No, you are seven years old, and we exist in a society of weirdos, but I can’t tell her that so I say, Maybe when you are older.

I write in stolen time. In the cafe after my Barre class, in the car while my daughter is at an appointment. I try to clear my to-do list to create space. Agents asked you to send them this work when you are done, I remind myself, when I start to wonder if this manuscript is just another thing I’ll devote myself to that won’t work out.

I say no religiously. Can you help out on this committee? Can you come visit? Can you do this or do that or be this or be that? No. No. No. I’m trying to write. I’m trying to build a whole, fulfilling creative life amidst a void.

Do you want to come sit next to me now, Mama? My daughter asks from the other room, the one just beyond the wall where I type this now, once again on stolen time. Time I’m meant to be mothering. When the unmothering time is, I’m still yet to discover. Because even when she isn’t near me, the mental list that makes our life tick continues on. I need to make her a dentist appointment. Where did her raincoat go? What am I going to feed her for lunch?

Meanwhile I read another article that says the key to writing is to wake up early, written by someone who doesn’t have children, and who probably wakes up in the morning refreshed and ready to take on the day.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I woke up in the morning and felt clear-headed. That doesn’t come until one or two o’clock, and by then it’s nearly time to get my daughter from school. A sick, cruel replay.

Today, a social media post told me that 62% of parents who had children since 2019 said they didn’t think parenting would be this hard. We are meant to raise our children in a village, not siloed in our own houses. For me, the village was busy. The village meant well, but the village did not come.

I hate to complain, everyone goes around saying and I want to yell directly into their ears: please complain! Please talk about how hard it is. Please for the love of god stop pretending that any of this is normal.

They say the eclipse was a black hole and I’m still trying to drag myself out from it.

I guess this is the update.