Words today: 3,351

Total Words: 19,651

It’s gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) reinforced that the space I need to write goes well beyond physical space. I need to give myself permission to be a writer, to be in my head and on the page and be for myself and the words. When the kids are around, I cannot fully sink into that amusement park section of my brain. This morning, perhaps due to wanting to write, perhaps as a lingering effect of the time change, I was awake by 5. My littlest woke with me. I moved my computer to the couch so she could nuzzle under a few blankets while I wrote. She was mostly quiet, occasionally rubbing her little feet up against my leg or my arm, but she was there. She needed me to be, at least partly, present. To be hers. To be available. Even in her silence, I couldn’t escape. I felt like I was holding my breath for the 45 minutes we were there together.

As a corollary to this, I find I cannot fully “write ugly” when the kids are around. It doesn’t matter if they can read the screen or not, their presence pulls me to their side of the pool. I am Mom. There is decorum. There is consciousness. There is modeling, even in creative thought.

If nothing else, it’s a form of procrastination that at least I can feel sanctimonious about.

(Ever try to write when feeling sanctimonious? It results in something slightly less entertaining and readable than a Sunday sermon delivered by a Puritan in comfortable shoes.)

Baby girl went back to sleep miraculously, but her trip back to bed woke good ol Bat Ears, one of her older brothers. It started again. And now he’s got sniffles, so every three seconds I was begging him to blow his nose.

(Ever try to write when someone is snarfing up snot and then blowing it out? It results in something slightly less entertaining and readable than, well this blog.)

The gunshots…no matter your opinion on guns, one would be hard pressed to say that the sound of intermittant and irregular gunshots (or even regular and patterned) is soothing and invites a sustainable creative process.

And yet, I wrote. And cleaned. And wrote. And even enjoyed my children for a bit.

Fall may be the season of waning, of maturity, but it is surely also a time for growth.