Better late than never. . .
I meant to write sooner, but I was picking tissue particles out of the clean laundry.
Once upon a time, a 44-year-old woman decided it was time to start writing again. She set up camp in a new space, became a morning person, and vowed to begin her day with writing. She would publish a post weekly, even if it was total crap! She didn’t care, because she was making a commitment to herself and her creativity. The woman was very skilled at instructing other women (especially mothers) to carve out time and space for themselves and practice (neurotic) self-care and ritual and other buzzwords, and she urged women in her writing community to just SIT DOWN AND WRITE.
But sadly, this woman, immediately after professing herself a new lover of the morning quiet, caught a pesky cold and instead used the hours after nudging her precious offspring out into the bleary eyed dawn for school, went back to sleep. She needed sleep, dammit, her immune system was sending her a message!
When she got better, she decided that, having fallen behind in work tasks and emails and appointment scheduling, she would use the morning hours for productivity. After all, she enjoyed her work and her dogs kept her company and the homemade latte was delicious (truly, you can’t beat it: two shots of espresso brewing over a healthy drizzle of honey in a mug, then oatmilk with a splash of cream in the milk frother with Vietnamese cinnamon—take that, Starbucks!) and so the work tasks still felt cozy and nurturing.
Then, realizing she needed to actually do something lovely and pointless first thing, she began to enjoy her latte with Wordle and the NYT Spelling Bee, which she now pays for because it is GODDAMN AWESOME, and one should begin one’s day with a soothing pleasure (I mean, after emptying one’s inbox because one isn’t a hedonistic neanderthal, of course!).
Periodically she would have a flash of “Dammit! I forgot to write today!” but even when she wrote “write” in her to-do list, sending emails and newsletters for music class and facilitating writing circles and creating three carefully curated Halloween playlists with oddly specific aesthetics, editing podcasts and taking every fucking family member, including the high-needs furry ones, both of them! to doctor and therapy and physical therapy and dental and . . . appointments, she just couldn’t make it happen.
She remembered a podcast guests who proclaimed that “play, fun, and creativity” were actually the *last* items on the list for many women, because self-care in the form of hunkering under a weighted blanket with a podcast, latte, or word puzzle usually makes the cut before being imaginative or whimsical.
I mean, she was still being creative—she was learning ukulele for god’s sake, and she loved recording and editing her podcast—but now it was like there was a legit psychological block between her and creative writing. It had been too long—six embarrassing weeks—so what was the point now?
She periodically emitted flashes of “Frazzled Mom Taking Care of Everyone Else’s Needs Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” vibes and then immersed herself in more internal contemplation, therapy, reflection, and journaling. She felt a touch of rage at how desperately and rigidly she fought for her alone time, ordered The Grind Culture Detox, and listened to that episode of Glennon’s We Can Do Hard Things podcast where a caller was like, “Ask for help? Who exactly are we supposed to ask, and also please don’t ask me for help because I’m drowning, too.”
After listening to this episode in her AirPods while shopping for organic producer at Sprouts and then stuffing handfuls of deli ham into her mouth in the parking lot, she came to the conclusion that “asking for help” mostly meant either “Pay for help,” or make sure you didn’t marry a useless bozo (thankfully, she married a man who scrubbed the elbow creases of the house she forgot existed and did 66% of the family laundry) and ask him for help (but not that help, this help!), or maybe every once in a while issue a desperate plea that your children join you in the kitchen to peel carrots and chop celery for a soup they are not excited to eat and then shrug with resignation, deciding that that was enough “asking for help” for the day because let’s be honest—asking for help is in and of itself yet one more fucking task.
She calmed her shit, played more word games, learned “Leaving on a Jet Plane” on the ukulele, trudged up the stairs with an overflowing basket of laundry she noticed had an almost lewd amount of shredded tissue clinging to it, put it in the closet for the evening, took a sleep aid, woke up the next morning, and decided to sit down and write. After she successfully completed her word games, of course—the “Genius” classification isn’t going to unlock itself.