Poetic License

I’ve been unable to write very much in my blog lately. When I pick up the laptop, I either seize up, wordless, or I get distracted. Oftentimes I have multiple things going on at once, or the pressure to do more things sneaks up on me, and I get up and go do them. Those are bad traits for a writer to have. It’s hard to switch off 36 years of multitasking in the tech industry, during which I was also managing a couple of different marriages, sometimes homeschooling the kids, dealing with moves, commutes, and unrelenting pressure. I learned to squeeze writing in when I could. I wrote two engineering books, which were published, and a multitude of short stories, which were not. But I am finding time to write my new book. Not about engineering, this time. About the profound loss to addiction of someone you love.

Frustrated by a headache that lasted for nearly two weeks, I couldn’t pick up the laptop to write. After work, I was laid out on the couch or the bed, trying everything I could to manage the pain and distract myself from it. But when work was over at the end of the day, that was it for writing anything.

I’m on vacation until January 2nd, though, and yesterday, with the help of modern medicine, I was finally in a better situation. I thought, Oh yes, i’ll sleep now. Tomorrow I will get up and bake some cookies. Baking is something I love to do at the holidays, even when everything in my body hurts. This time, the recipients of my labor will be my neighbors and the girls who are helping take care of my son’s cats while he is visiting his dad.

But twenty minutes into tossing and turning, I had to pick up my phone and dictate a bit of writing, in the dark, in my bed. That is the life of a writer. When the inspiration hits, you can’t fight it. You don’t want to fight it. Though Siri didn’t take the dictation perfectly (“bereaved” became “brief” for example), when I read back through the note this morning, it’s damned near perfect and will be dropped into my book at the appropriate place.

Writing about all of this is taking time. A local woman just published a memoir about her childhood abuse and the life she has managed to find for herself through many years of therapy and healing. In the interview, she said it took her three years, because it was so hard to write about. I understand that. I have been working on this book in various forms since 2012. I keep letting things pull me away from it. But in the last year, I’ve made real progress. Once I take my other two MacBooks to the local Apple store to have the data pulled off of them, I will have recovered some of the rest of the writing. It’s quite frustrating to lose years of writing to a hardware issue or a lost cord or a long-forgotten password. Had I printed any of it out, it would still be here. (Yes, my backup drive failed, too.) But maybe that is another lesson about loss.

Some of the book will be put aside just for me, maybe just so I can understand some things. But the essential nature of it all will be there. Here is a small excerpt from what I wrote last night:

I entered the year of magical thinking, a term coined by the author Joan Didion in her book about the year that started the night her husband , the author John Dunne, died. She described the way she could not get rid of his shoes, because he would need them when he got home. But John wasn’t coming home. I felt this way going through Stephanie‘s things. I don’t know why I felt the need to do so, but I washed and folded all of her clothing. A few weeks later, I was wracked with remorse for having done so. I needed those clothes back in the condition in which they came to me. I need the long black hair that had fallen onto her jacket. I needed her scent. I needed her DNA. I needed her back.

Today I wish you a magical holiday season with your families. I’m thinking of Christmases past with my kids. I’m thinking of the looks on their sweet faces as they opened presents. I’m thinking of their bed-heads and Christmas pajamas, of their glee when they got just what they wanted. I’m thinking of the special gifts I received, not the least of which was the gift of just being their mom.

Peace, Jude