Sablogital

I'm taking a break from blogging to discern what I should do with writing, to make sure what I am doing is not a pursuit of the ego.  Time is the one commodity a stay at home mom has, so I need to spend it well.  It has become harder and harder both to carve out time for words and to find words worth pulling out of the air.  Dry spells in writing happen, but they mean something.

The rule in writing is to write through the writer's block. This isn't writer's block. I do have that, but this feels different. This is a moment to breathe and figure out, what is the purpose of this blog?

It long since stopped being a humor place though I can occasionally spin out a funny bit.   It isn't helping me write my second book or promote the first.  It isn't helping me submit columns to places that pay.  Now a days, it isn't even helping me make sure I write. 

So what is it?  It has been a means of keeping the stories of what happens here in our home, but even that is limited.  My teens have a right not to have their adolescence preserved beyond momentary snapshots and stories.  More of my children are children than toddlers these days, so the stories have grown more personal, more complex, and I do not want my family as a reality television show.  

Is that putting your family under a bushel basket?  With ten? Not possible to be discreet in anything.  Any story I write reveals the reality.   Any errand we run reveals the reality.  Anyone who sees our car, knows the reality. 

So I'm not giving a date when the blog will return, because I don't know the answer.  I'll just say, thanks for reading.  Thanks for being here.  Check back, say "Hi." and thanks. 

Reflections on my Sablogital*

Sablogital: (n) def: brief break from blogging, designed to encourage other forms of creativity, regenerate writing juices, engage in actual self reflection without posting it as if it is relevant to anyone else.  (origin: Larry D of acts of the apostasy).

Today, I testified in an annulment over the phone.
The taxes are due.
The bills are due.
My oldest is out all day so I've lost my driver.
A middle child has a low grade fever and is thus home.

I picked a stupid day to start a diet, i.e. no self medication by chocolate. ...sigh.

Happy New Year to all of you. I'm back.   There are scads of stories to share. 

First, I joined Small Stones, a private writing community where you write poetry every day for 3o days.  Poetry and I have never been friends, but it turned out to be a fun exercise.  I do however wince a bit because to me, a lot of time, the moments I tried to capture came out feeling a touch on the precious side. 

Here are a few of the pieces:



Day 1
Keeping Christmas

Every morning when she rises, she takes my hand. She leads me past the kitchen. She will not eat. She does not want television. She walks to the tree. "Lights. Turn the tree. On." she commands. Only then, can ordinary needs be met. She is not yet two. She understands the season better than us. Her eyes are awake to beauty. Now, she can have breakfast.

Day 2
Butterfly

At 15, she cannot see what she will become, she resents what she has been. She does not believe those who love her and does not believe others can or will. Even her favorite song betrays her longing and her fear. She only knows the cocoon and cannot dream beyond it. We are waiting, knowlingly, for her Spring.

Day 8
Trying to Read Joyce

I've decided reading Ulysses
is like going to the coffee shop.
I love the smell
I love the hearthy atmosphere
I want to be this wordy intellectual.
So I open the book and take a sip
and then I remember,
I have never acquired a taste for coffee.

Day 9
The crush of time
the rush of the morning
to find a shoe, a sock, a lunch
to stop a fight, load the car and put on coats
all ended in an instant
as an amber sleek fox loped across the back yard.
"If we'd been on time, we would have missed it." my daughter said.
and the day would have been duller and harder for it.

Second, as it is the new year, I am trying once again to get back into shape.  I joined a blogging round robin group, Writing to lose, 12 writers all seeking to shed a few by keeping each other honest.   So far, it has meant I've done 90 push ups and not eaten pizza or chocolate...and believe me, I wanted the chocolate.   We will go on a blog tour in this process and thus I will get to visit other blogs and have them visit me.  

Third, a story from daily life.

We all know the parable Jesus tells about the master giving three of his servants varying amounts of talents, ten, five, one. I always both love and find troubling this story. Am I burying my talents or growing them?  I would stipulate, when I spend hours on the internet, I am digging a hole for my talents to bury them.

When I surrender my desire to do things in favor of them, it is investing. I know how much a temptation vigilant sloth (checking the emails/facebook/blogs) and hyper sloth (reading reading reading) encourage digging that hole. The hardest part of trying to live an authentic Catholic life is knowing, if I want to do God's will, I need only look at my choices. Whichever one demands more of me, demands I surrender more, demands I serve others more, (and is thus probably harder), that's God's will. It is the humor of embracing the cross like a lover. Joy comes through sacrifice, but we have to chose to sacrifice joyfully.

Thus it is that I get the "BINGO!" sign from God, as my 7th grade son calls me over for a quick reminder that I have forgotten more than I ever learned about math. I was reduced to being the reference guide who could look up things in the index to verify his information. I did learn a few things about scientific notation but that won't mean I'll remember tomorrow or that I could apply it.

God is laughing at me. My son reassured me that I probably won't need to use scientific notation in my daily life at any point soon. Humility. A fruit of the Holy Spirit. Probably good for a 7th grade son and his self esteem as well. He just jigged out of the room bemused at his ignorant mother.

God's Quirky Sense of Things, See you in 2013

Back before college at the beach, my favorite place in the world, sitting on the deck, patting my dog and talking with my dad, I prayed a big prayer, though I didn't know it at the time. College felt alien and I worried I would be as lonely there as I had been in high school and middle. The lurking...what if it's me? doubt wouldn't let me go. I asked for someone to love me...just for me.

I met the man I would marry three days into school.  I'd also prayed to have lots of people who would always love me.  I would argue ten kids equals a lot.   Now God knows I got the joke long before even kid five, but rest were His equivalent of a rim shot. 

The scripture "Ask and you shall receive" direct from Christ has always held great comfort to me.  I've also always known when a prayer has been answered, because it is accompanied by "laughter."
So when prayer is hard for me, usually, my sense of humor is off as well.   It is a good gut check for me.

There was a series of weeks when our family was running perpetually late...to everything. 

Frustrated after multiple missings of good things, I prayed to God to help me find a way to get us where we needed to go before we were expected. 

God knows I'm a writer. I'm always hoping/pitching/writing stories to get published.    God's not subtle with me, but then He knows absent blunt instruction, I'm clueless. So the week after my prayer, I got asked to write a humor piece on getting to mass on time.

I could hear God laughing as I typed.   We'll be there I promised.  And things got better.  You could say we paid more attention to the clock or I implemented the tips I'd written, but the reality is things got easier, and it wasn't fully us that made it so. 

This past two years, I've said a rosary, faithfully, every day.  Then, after Christmas, it became very difficult.  I'd get through a decade, two, forget which decade I was on, fall asleep during, start over, it has been a stumbling bumpy path of trying to will through the prayer. It wasn't because I was sad or angry or scared or frustrated or even busy.  It was simply the prayer muscles seemed to have become gimpy, distractable, undisciplined.  

Around the same point, writing became excruciating as well, a laborious task that lacked humor.  I thought it was merely the many tasks of Christmas and the fact that my laptop fried.  But all the stories seem dried up.  I know they are there, locked in a well of my brain somewhere and I can think of 16 different cute/amusing/sweet/crafty/clever type events that came from having all ten home over the holidays, but they don't coalesce into a coherent whole.  All the half and third and fifth decades don't equal a rosary and all the little quirks and cute moments don't equal a story.  Both the prayerful and the creative parts of my brain feel locked.  

I have two paths.  Beat my head against this wall. (It has always worked before, I'm remarkably oblivious to the pain when I set my self up this way but I've been doing that for about a month).   Stop and listen to what it is that God wants.  Since the prayer theme this year was "Be Still and Know I am Here" I'm guessing I should probably go with the later. I'm counting on God to be rather direct about this, big Neon sign can't miss it if you tried kind of notice. 

Immediately the panic bird of my brain says, "But Sherry, if you stop writing, you're not a writer. You've worked hard to craft a following of 133 people (Hi 133 followers), and have a modestly successful blog.  You've even got Google ads up to $40.00 --they don't pay until you get to $100.00, but last year you were at $14.75!  You have close to 200 hits a day.  If you don't put things up, that will stop! 

But I'm going to trust on this one. 

God gave me the talent, God gives me the will.  God will give me the words, or not.  It's that simple.  So I'm taking a two week break from the blog, I'm disciplining myself that it will be two weeks, which doesn't seem like a lot, but to a blogger, it is an eternity.  I'm also going to allow myself to try a simpler prayer like the Chaplet in the meantime, and hope the Rosary comes easier.