As my time at the writing residency winds down, I’ve discovered two things I hadn’t expected to.  When I tell you the first, you’ll think I’m digging for compliments., but hear ye Fan Base, I’m not.  The truth is that after the long spring term (in which I taught a full load at the university), and the beginning of summer (in which I was overworked), I was questioning my ability to be a writer.  I felt, in other words, like a wannabe.  I spent the 6 weeks before my residency being a full-time mother to the kids, all day, every day.  It was draining in the way I had imagined it to be:  they were a constant presence in my life, with their constant requests and demands. 

A prime example was the simple issue of food.  Thing Two had decided to renounce his vegetarianism, while Thing One stuck militantly by hers.  Thing Three split the difference, noting that now she was a pescatarian*.  In essence, three children with three different dietary requirements.  I’m not a short order cook, so every meal was vegetarian and to hell with the meat eaters (me included). 

 Things Three, One and Two

Whidbey Island, 2006

The other aspect of their constant presence was, well, their constant presence.  Because there are three of them, the odds are that one of them will always be in a state of desiring my attention.  Often, this occurs when I am taking a shower or using the facilities, as it were.  The Things are 10, 8 and 6, long past the age where kids typically enter the bathroom while the parent is relieving or washing herself. 

But I’m relaxed about nudity around the house.  And we have one bathroom for four people, which often necessitates such lax laws, and which often means that more than one person is in the bathroom.  There have been times when all four of us are in the bathroom at once—Thing Three peeing, me in the shower, Thing Three brushing his teeth, and Thing One putting her earrings away.  More than once I’ve thought, This is not at all normal.  We are savages.  But faced with the prospect of civilizing the Trio in matters of the lavatory, I’m forced to reckon with the considerable time and effort it would take.  And I am a lazy cuss.   

Because of this, I always, always, choose the path of least resistance which, in this case, is the path that leads to all of us in the bathroom having a conversation.  If there is a reason why I should not be dating, this is it.  Because it would scare the bejeebus out of any man who made it that far into our insular little life.  And probably result in very bad gossip around the goodly town of Eugene.

But I digress.

The point is that I have little to no time by myself over the summer.  This is preferable to last summer, where I slaved away at the Crazy Factory and spent so much on child care that I had to go to a food bank and a soup kitchen.  But this is by no means easy.  And, a few days before I was to leave for this writing residency, I had a terrible realization:

I had not written much in months.

Oh sure, I’d knocked out some decent blog entries, and a few passable essays.  I’d outlined my book.  But real work?  Work that required me to search myself, to challenge my knowledge of craft in order to make a piece function?  That hadn’t happened in a long while, and I fell into the slippery slope of feeling like a fraud.  I’m convinced that all writers suffer from this feeling, this longing to be legitimate coupled with the sometimes overwhelming conviction that you are, well and truly, just a faker. 

People say writers should write every day because it keeps their minds limber, their abilities fine-tuned, and it does.  But I’ve realized that, perhaps more importantly, it’s a way to remind yourself that you are a writer.  The rejections and the peers’ success and the real life--with the real job and children--those things wear you down, make it appear your writing is nothing but a waste of time.  Unless you’re doing it daily, committed to the effort it takes, for its own sake, you slip into the faker category pretty damn fast.

Thirteen days in, I have written an essay that I have been contemplating for a year.  It was excruciating to write:  a terrible incident made more tragic by my acute understanding of it.  I laid out the narrative delicately, and then I forced myself to look at what had happened.  It hurt. I cried.  I revised, cut and edited.  On a third draft, I was able to see the essay take shape, I was able to carve out the story, the meaning.  I employed craft, layered metaphors.  I essentially took a painful incident and forced it under my hand, tamed it.  Made it my own.

And over three days, I made something I’m immensely proud of as a writer.  It has been a long time since I’ve felt that pleasure. 

What has been unexpected is that, as I’ve written more, gained back my ability to sit for long periods and spool out narrative, I’ve come to miss my children.  I’ve never been separated from them this long.  Previously, the longest I’d gone without them was 8 days, which allowed me to enjoy space and time to relax without missing them except for in quiet, non-specific ways.

Now I miss them in specific, tangible ways.  I want to wake up and find Thing Three next to me, having played hooky from her own bed.  I miss Thing One’s look of exquisite contempt and adoration when I tell her to wash her hair.  I want to hear Thing Two’s monotoned voice telling me, over and over, facts about the moon. 

Before I left for the Oregon Coast Range, I remember telling Friend Two, “I just want them to stop touching me.  They just have to stop touching me.”  The Things were always around me, fighting over who got to sit next to me on the couch, who sat next to me at dinner.  They’d fight over who held my hand as we walked to the grocery store.  Their sticky and stained palms grabbed my arms, my shoulders, touched my hair. 

I once told a good friend, Relaxed PhD Candidate, that my kids were my favorite people in the world.  I meant it not in the way soccer moms say it, as they justify the endless spinning out of their lives in service to an idea of maternal martyrdom.  I meant it genuinely.  These kids, they’re so smart and funny, so sarcastic and bright.  Thing One reading The Diary of Anne Frank and writing letters to Barack Obama about global warming; Thing Two with his handmade books concerning his created hero Super Cow (in my favorite one, Super Cow fights Darth Cow); Thing Three’s effortless ability to play a character, any character, to take on a role and go with it. 

My life as a single mother is so often a study of extremes: exhasution, poverty, desire, need, ability.  This writing residency has been no different.  Writing residencies in general are like this--all this time and space to write.  But I think, as I pack my suitcases and sweep my cabin, perhaps this is the kind of life I’ve carved out for myself, one in which extremes are the norm.  Right now, I don't regret it.  

*tm

*You have not lived, I swear, until you hear a 6-year old say "pescatarian."  It's the cats pajamas.