Love Story

When people ask “How’s the writing going?” I smile.

Inside, I twirl and beam. “I’m in love with a wonderful guy!” from the musical South Pacific plays in my mind (for the uninitiated, there are four more “I’m in love”s in the actual lyric).

“Great!” I respond, “I learn something new every day.” I could talk about this for hours, but I suspect, like with any new passion, there’s a limit to others’ genuine interest.

Aha, but you are a captive audience! I’ll pour my heart out here so friendly conversation can continue apace with real world matters like fascism, perimenopause, and the ever-changing date of this year’s homecoming dance.

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The loser in this affair is my dog, Penny.

Photo by Tal Ben-Horin.

She knows it and she doesn’t: despite many days of postponed walks and not rubbing her belly for hours at a time, she still curls up nearby, waiting for a sign that I might put on sneakers and grab her leash. Or while I’m absorbed in this screen, she hones a counterproductive habit of sneaking shoes outside in singles, delaying and frazzling any subsequent departure that requires a matching pair. I never said she was smart.

“She’ll be fine,” I tell myself, like distracted people everywhere doing something thrilling instead of productive.

When I started writing for real last year, I thought I must be doing it wrong. Images of dark, tortured souls gripping a pen, surrounded by crumpled paper drafts didn’t match the bright exhale I felt as I settled in for a couple hours. One journal entry about my writing goes:

How to describe the Fall, my fall, for someone who isn’t a separate person. It is me, writing these words. Not just for me, for us.

Love the sounds of it – soft keys clicking when an idea grabs my fingertips and pulls them across the keyboard dance floor. Or the pen across this rink of blank paper.

Feel of it, heart bleeding onto the page, tears blurring my view. It’s ok. They carry nourishment for seeds of ideas, making space inside, feeding new connections outside. Shedding. Love is shedding, recycling, nurturing the new.

Exploding with possibility. I lose track of time . . . when I showered, did I pay enough attention to my kids, bank account, dog. I just want to sit in my garden of ideas, taking in the colors popping out of the ground - they love me, they love me not - nervous that it all might disappear if I take my eyes off for a moment.

Photo by Bodi Hallett, Sattva Photo.

I could tell you that this last one is from the early days, still starry-eyed and naïve, but I wrote it just last week. Rolled out of bed at 5am and gushed those words (and many others) into my bedside notebook. The honeymoon continues.

Yes, friends, this is why I’m behind on texts and band boosters and the cleverest protest signs.

Thanks to pros who write on writing, I’m assured that this vocation can and should include joy. They are the first people I interact with in the early morning hours with my coffee and a dark window. Ann Lamott, Mary Karr, Stephen King, and many others have encouraging things to say about living a literary life.

Could it be? Did I stumble on some midlife oasis, having gone through the crisis part early (see last month’s post)? Does forty-eight even qualify as a midpoint or is this just the onset of not caring anymore about things like showers or actual lovers?

About those showers: they are a font of creativity. Some days I dash from the bathroom, wet hair streaming, to jot down a thought before it swirls down the drain. The most accessible medium is the kitchen whiteboard, where notes like “falling down a well metaphor” float illegibly with “cancel HBO” (again) and “call eye doc?” The kids make a game out of guessing what my weekly to-do list includes, while seated ever-so-briefly at breakfast.

Some days I take a walk to let an idea with a good jawline find me.

Earbuds in, nothing playing, I fumble for my phone as though a long-awaited text has just come in. Respond before he finds someone else! Standing, all thumbs, by the side of the road, I tap tap tap my brainwaves into Apple Notes for later. A phrase or image may become an essay or poem.

Despair and divinity: 2 sides, 1 coin

We owe each other nothing and everything

Telling a mother to not take kid things personally = telling bull not to charge at red or take care in china shop . . . It’s what we do!

Owl hooting in daylight

Photo by Josue Michel on Unsplash

When the heat of inspiration lowers to a warmth of curiosity, I’m reminded how love grows up. How often it’s forced me to grow up.

Writing is more than the act of putting down words. It is reading, researching, wondering. It is talking, thinking, feeling, metabolizing, revising, and, oh lord, is it emailing. It is dignity and creativity, an outlet for that most human desire to hold someone’s attention, beheld and beloved.

For me right now, it is a fulltime job without compensation and the ultimate reward: a project that fills my cup while overflowing into others’. A leap of faith, a trust fall. Parenthood.

Minutes roll into hours when I’m staring at a sentence, knowing it’s off but not quite how to fix it. Is it just in the wrong place, maybe needs a nudge elsewhere, or does it require full relocation?

Sometimes I write for days around the thing I want to say, only to finally get there and realize it’s a bomb. It can’t unexplode but I can work with the mess if not distracted by regret or shame. And hope that readers can too.

Other times, prose that sang to me at first now feels cliched, even wrong. It must go. It’s called “killing your darlings” in industry terms, a difficult but necessary part of the discipline it takes to truly unpack persistent thoughts. Are they too obvious, too precious, or do they no longer work for what I’m trying to do? Come to that, what AM I trying to do?

Build something new. A work, a network, a way of being in the world that takes what I’ve learned so far, refurbishes the useful, leaves the rest, including some of those darlings, behind.

Maybe it’s restlessness, or my kids growing up, or that unpopular habit of overthinking (counterpoint: it beats underthinking), but change is in the air.

Maybe it’s metamorphosis.

Photo by Bodi Hallett, Sattva Photo.

Rather than try to figure it all out now, I am soothed by the circuitry laying itself down between my head and heart and typing fingers. It provides structure in the chaos of our times, new ideas pulsing rhythm into a day otherwise turned to confetti by false urgencies lighting up my phone.

The act of guarding several hours for complete focus on writing offers peace and freedom. I am more whole, more me, when I turn toward these basic human needs.

I think true love is a yin/yang thing of choice and magic. It’s a lesson hard-learned and I’m grateful for family and friends who kept my magic receptors working through the years. They may not have known it, but just showing up helped defog the windshield and wipe off the back-up camera I needed to navigate the difficult stretches.

Otherwise I might not have heard that owl in the daytime. Then again in a dream recently. Was I dreaming? I remember nothing but a soft hooting, almost a purr, earnest in its call.

Maybe it will turn into an essay on flight or a poem about fear. Maybe it was just a cool bird. I don’t need to know, only listen.

The poet Maggie Smith has a hundred terrific quotes, but this one jumped off the page recently:

When you stick with something out of love, you grow in it and with it. – from Dear Writer

Keepers are rare and wonderful, a partner for the long haul.

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So that’s how the writing is going. I would love to hear what has brought you unbridled joy over the years. Others probably would too: please write a Comment!

I’m working to build a platform for my book, whose current title is Life Changing (work smarter, not harder, right?) Please share this post, Restack, forward it to a friend, or otherwise talk it up and help me reach 500 subscribers. Thank you!

Photo by Sorin Basangeac on Unsplash