Successes

I take out my woes on this new blog like I'm beating a dirty rug on my back patio. It's an unbalanced view of my writing, and a completely off-kilter view of my life. I write because I love it, because it drives me, because my brain gets a weird high from creating and pretending. I love pretending. I always have. When I was a teenager my social pseudonym was Brooke. Or Kate. It depended on my mood and on my earrings. Silver dangling daisies with a huge black center worn with a black bathing suit at a water park? (True story.) Brooke, all the way. Preppy pegged khakis and a rugby shirt with penny loafers (so hideously hot back in the day)? Kate fit the bill. It was the fake me, and I lived up to Brooke's flirty, sassy personality, her forwardness with the boys, her confident appeal. Kate was more reserved, shyly smiling from beneath a book or newspaper, biting her lip softly and sighing dramatically.

Oh, I was pathetic.

But it was fun to pretend, to fill another girl's shoes, to be someone else and create dialogue through her filter.

One of my faves of all time as a kid was to climb up into the weeping willow in our front yard and sit for hours, creating my own world where all the cute boys loved me despite my beaver teeth and all the girls thought I was uber cool. Or a world like Anne of Green Gables where I milked cows and served mice-laden plum pudding and currant wine to guests at a formally set table. Or a world with a secret, walled garden that only I had a key to and therein I'd rule the fairies. Oh, those were the days. I didn't need constant friends because I found them in books, read high in the comforting branches of the weeping willow. And where the books left off, my mind would continue.

Those characters and creations sometimes became darker, and I'd lie in bed literally weeping over a scene where a family member was in a fatal accident--the very details playing behind my eyes--from something outlandish, like falling from a train trestle or being cooked in molten lava from the dormant volcano outside my window. I could almost feel the fall, the whoosh of wind gathering speed, the cracking of bones on the rocks below. I could see the lava, red and smoking, melting the flesh of my loved one. Seriously? What was wrong with me?!

My mind is now muddled and fragmented by motherhood, but I still love to pretend. It's oh-so-easy to push those scenes and catchy lines that fly into my brain to the back of my head, where they get lost in the piles of laundry that demand my attention. Or in the continuous flow of dishes and crumbs that run through the kitchen. Or in the hours spent in carpools and on errands. But some voices shout above the din, demanding attention in my literal vortex of chaos, and sometimes they are beautiful, enchanting or plain hysterical.

And so, among all my frustrations, which are easy to complain about, there is a smattering of success. There is joy. There is real, emotional writing that fuels my need to keep at it, to write until the baby cries at 3 a.m., to finish my story and write another. Somewhere in my mind, there is a tale the world will enjoy. That is enough motivation to plug away...