On not having it all

I have a lot of writer friends - some more experienced than I, and others less. My less experienced friends, the ones who've just decided to try typing out the stories in their heads, or who have loved the idea of writing for a while but haven't quite gotten to it, will often ask me how I find the time to write. This is something I've struggled with for years. I've never met a writer who doesn't.

Like many of my author friends, I'm a die-hard perfectionist who wants to do things right, who spends a lot of time wondering whether I am. When I first started writing daily, in 2005, I hadn't yet decided to make fiction writing a career goal (I thought, for some reason, that I couldn't do that until I was in my 30s or 40s). By 2006 I'd realized I didn't really have a choice; I'd become addicted to writing and it wasn't an addiction I was interested in quitting. So... how to make it work?

At time time, my sister was in college and was going through a bored, single phase and wanted to talk on the phone a lot. I was working as the world's worst secretary, for a lawyer. I had a big, fancy desk in the front of his office, and I liked to stay after business hours and work on Stained. Inevitably, my sister would always call while I was working, and I would always have to tell her I was busy. After a while, she started getting irritated. You never make time for me. I don't care if you're writing. When are we going to talk?! It was a normal reaction, and so was my reaction to her: I had no idea what to tell her, and it wasn't long before I had turned my phone off, but was seriously stewing over how to handle her. And all my other non-writing demands.

At that time, my life was mostly non-writing, and I was desperate to write. I was willing to give up anything to do it. Except the many things I couldn't give up. Like my boyfriend (now my husband). And my sister. And paying bills. And going to work. And showering.

It's surprisingly sweet, remembering those days. But like with any new love, there are details to work out and things to learn. And over the last six years, I've learned them.

Here's the most important thing I've learned about making time for writing: There is no easy way to do it. I'm sure you've heard that before, but I want to tell you what that really means.

It means that unless you have a clone, you will never be able to do everything you want need to do.
It means that there will be phone calls you can't answer. Not that annoying call from the cable  salesperson, but the fun one from your sister.
It means that there will be parties you can't go to. Good parties. Parties with that friend you LOVED in college...when she's in town for the first time in four years and maybe the only time for four more years.
It means your car will not always be vacuumed and your shelves may not always be dusted.
It means your family will eat a lot of take-out.
It means different things for different writers, depending on priorities and personalities, but for me it means the floors in my house are perpetually in need of a good sweep-and-mop.
It means my big, white dog, who lives inside, doesn't get a weekly bath and pretty much never gets brushed.
It means the mirrors in my bathrooms usually have splatter-marks.
It means if you want your clothes folded, you get them out of the drier and fold them yourself.
It means I cook a lot of crockpot meals and buy a lot of organic, thin-crust pizza and try not to think about my cholesterol.
It means that although I was once a daily runner, I run only three times a week, and only for 30 minutes when I do.
It means my size medium running shorts are being donated to my sister in law, and I'm wearing a large. And I'm petite. And I value being in shape. But not as much as I value my writing.
It means I only have one pair of earrings right now and no eyebrow tweesers, and I'll get more earrings next time I go to a wedding or a party (which may be YEARS), and I'll get the tweezers when I start looking like a woolly mammoth, because I don't make random runs out to the store for things like tweezers.
It means if I run out of diet coke and want caffeine, I wait until I'm going out for other errands and get more then. Because I can't go on an errand run more than once a day. I don't have time.
It means I go clothes shopping once or twice a year and not once or twice a month, regardless of how much money I have to spend.
It means instead of going to the mall with my friends, we go on lunch dates that don't ever run longer than two hours. And I worry sometimes that they won't know how much I value them because I don't spend the day at the mall, or the day at the park. But I don't because I can't.
For me, being a writer means that if your kid has a party, I'm not going unless you are my sister and that kid is my nephew. And if you have people over to watch the Superbowl, I will never be there. Not even if you make my favorite brownies and invite my favorite people.
It means I don't have that many close friends - just two or three - and sometimes that doesn't feel like enough. But I don't have time for more. And I don't want to be a lousy friend, so I don't make more in-town friends than I can keep.
And when my son has his birthday party, I don't invite that many people, because I know we won't have time to go to their kids' party, and I think that's not nice.
It means that although I am a friendly person who loves to meet new people, I never usually know my neighbors very well. And it drives me crazy to just wave and smile, because I'm a chatty Southern girl and I love talking. But I can't. I just can't.
Sometimes writing means that I miss my husband, even though I live with him. Even though I do make time for him. I want more time. But I can't.
It means I break a promise I made as a little girl, that when I had a baby, I wouldn't be a mom who worked all the time. I'd be a mom who played with my baby all the time.
And I am a mom who works...a lot. And my husband is amazing, because he does more than I ever thought I would ask a husband to do, and he does it so I can work. I didn't think I'd be that mom, but I am.
I didn't think I'd be a 20-something-year-old mom and wife who had the water in her house turned off one month because I was so busy with my characters, trying to scramble up enough time for my writing and my immediate family, that I totally forgot I had a water bill. (In my previous town, it had been lumped in with the power bill, but STILL).
I would like to have a dozen close friends that live in my town. I'd love to run every day and talk to my family on the phone a lot. I would feel a lot better about myself if I never forgot a utility bill and managed to cook more than two or three nights per week. If there was even a smidgen of a chance that I might get to know one of my neighbors, and somehow, on a whim, get roped into a day at the zoo or a door-to-door fundraiser for kids with cancer. These things I cannot do, these impossible possibilities - and the sacrifice of them - is so difficult, it feels too personal to blog about.
I want to be that wife who can cook at least one or two things really well. That stay-at-home mom who plays with her child all day long. That mom who planned the birthday party just right, with every detail matching.
I want these things because I'm a perfectionist, because I'm driven. But I have to scale it back. I have to narrow down.
I have to pick something. Just one thing. Because I have learned that if I want to be a writer, I can't be much else.
For a long time, it felt like a gamble. And I struggled with it. How much I was giving up... and what if - What if it didn't work. And then I decided that I wouldn't let it not work. So now I feel a little better about things.
When I go to the mall and see a group of female friends with a morning's worth of shopping bags... When I see a friend's kid's birthday party...how her outfit matches the cake, which matches the balloons... When I look at my unplucked eyebrows five minutes before I'm supposed to go out to eat with my inlaws - and I think why didn't I remember tweezers - I know the answer: It's because I was thinking about a book.
And while a book is not a husband, or a son, and it will never be as dear to me as they are, it can be 'up there'. It can be kind of close. It can be what I need. And I can try to let it be enough.
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Published on August 03, 2012 21:24
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