Silver Lining

So, after a fantastic start to yesterday, the weather turned grumpy here. For some reason, I found myself in the shower, nearly crying over how much I DID NOT WANT to be the Mom any more. And I love being the Mom.

It was not an existential crisis so much as it was the utter boredom and hatred with which I view having to make dinner. What is the deal with this thing we call dinner? Why does it have to happen EVERY DAMN DAY? And why won't the people in my family just eat normal food? I was looking at a magazine at the dentist office the other day, and fully 3 out of 4 Quick and Easy Family Dinners they showed, my family would not eat, even on a deserted island where the alternative was coconuts. AGAIN.

So, I'm feeling bitchy about the fact that we have to keep eating, so I have to keep planning and shoppng for and cooking and setting the table and washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen for the DAMN DINNER...and things just kind of slid from there. Think mudslide kind of "slid." Think homes toppled over and buried under the unforgining slime of a mudslide, with irreplaceable photographs and Aunt Sadie's bone china and even the dog trapped inside while you Just Know the nice man from Allstate is NOT going to be Dennis Hastert and is NOT going to be terribly sympathetic because even if your house was architecturally unique, the median rate for replacement of houses in your area is only about 30% of what yours was worth, as measured by what you paid for it EIGHT YEARS AGO and WHY did ANYONE build a house on a damn denuded hillside where there are no more tree roots to hold the soil in place and at least the Oakies didn't have MUDSLIDES, their land just dried up and BLEW AWAY which meant that at least you didn't have to WASH everything you salvaged and all your CURTAINS and RUGS and BEDDING and CLOTHES weren't RUINED not to even mention the heirloom cuckoo clock from Dusseldorf...

It was that kind of an emotional day. The kind where the thing that is going to help you make it all the way to bedtime is a serious rum drink, and there is no rum in the house and you can't get any because the kid's sport playoff game goes until after the liquor stores close.

So, cursing my lack of preparation, and being disappointed in myself for letting things get this bad without speaking up to Mr. Sweetie to ask for the help I so clearly (to me) need, I finally went to bed.

And it was like a locked door opened and people started coming out of the cold storage and came out to talk to me. To tell me their stories. To say "Hell, if you think you really want to be a writer, then go write this stuff down." And the characters that I have been trying to capture onto paper for a long time suddenly were there: they showed me the structure of their emotional make up, they set the emotional tone--the language-- for me to capture their lives.

The tone was the biggest gift. It was like showing me where the vein of ore is inside the mountain, and my job is no longer to randomly dig up the mountain, but to follow the vein as best I can. Sure, there are still minor details, like--oh, I don't know, maybe PLOT?--that aren't clear to me at all. But surely that is less important to what I am trying to do than the tone and the language to tell these stories.

So, as I'm lying there in bed, twitchy and not ready for sleep, this avalanche of character development starts to fill up my head, and I ended up getting out of bed and coming here to the computer to get it all down before I forgot it all. When I finally went back to bed--at a unholy time in the early morning--I discovered the Pony was taking up my spot in the bed, and I had to go sleep in her room. So, now, this morning, I am really tired. Three hours is just Not Enough.

I've done my morning obligations: got the kids up and dressed, helped the Bunny clear up a backlog of Spanish homework that she had forgotten about until she was in bed last night, got the circus on its way. I'm now going back to bed. My bed. To sleep. Because now I'm no longer grumpy or twitchy, but those emotional states gave me a creative gift that I needed. So there is a silver lining to the grumpy clouds of yesterday.