nudle

Years ago in graduate school I did a project with a guy who became my friend. His name was (and is still) Martin. He was German, so I called him Mah-tin. On the project we did together, he mulled and turned things over in his mind for a long time. He twisted the front of his hair as he thought. I was so impatient. Desperate to get to the answer, I talked and fidgeted and paced and wrote stuff down. I guessed and researched and argued. I wanted to finish the first draft so I could start the second draft so I could make it perfect AND get to sleep, too. Mah-tin sat and twisted his hair between his fingers and thumb.

"Carol," he said. "It's okay to take some time to get it right. Really. It's okay." He smiled and bobbed his head.

Now I want to rush the end of my book. I want to finish the second draft so I can get to the third so I can rewrite it and maybe once more, then start my second book. But I hear Martin in my head.

"Carol. You need to follow the children. Go with them to Bainbridge Island and take the time to see what they find there. Is it a pile of debris? A silver dollar? It's okay to take time. Maybe they smell smoke there and have to find out what still smolders under the grass clippings thrown on top to conceal recent burning."

Sit and watch and write it. Go home with the children. Sit in the dark beside Eleanor's bed and listen to her close her eyes and think. Hear Sam's feet pad down the hallway to her room because he is afraid of something he doesn't understand. His mother is not home. Twist hair and hit the keys and move a pen. The darkness-listening and hallway-padding and island-hopping are probably necessary. Dammit.

What do I know that I could write about, that would be different from what other people write about? I know motherhood. I know what it feels like to be an unpublished, unknown author, but that sounds sad. Like a sad sack wrote it. No one likes a sad sack. Cry, and you cry alone and all that. Oh. It's weep, and you weep alone. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1883. So I know how to look stuff up on the internet, but that's not different from anyone, these days.

I know adoption. There is much mixed up in the wondrous, miraculous, gruesome sausage that is adoption. I'm not sure I have the courage to write about it. But thank you, Ella Wheeler W. for your headsticker of a platitude, because not having the courage to write about our adoption sounds sad-sacky too. It sounds worse. It sounds pussyish.

I can't write words like pussyish in a public blog though, because I want to be a children's book author. I wonder if there is a way to separate my identities, and I wonder if this is just another way I am torpedoing my new chosen career. By the way, part of the seventh definition of pussy in the Urban Dictionary reads "incapable of the capabilities." This cracks me up a little. I'd give the rest of that whole Urban Dictionary site a miss, if I were you, if you don't like a lot of crass profanity. If you do, I recommend you pick up a Chuck Palahniuk book. He's much better.

I need to write something besides this infernal middle grade novel that I cannot finish. (I WILL finish it.) (Hi, Sybil.) My training-wheels book.

I'm thinking about starting an adoption blog. I hope I can remember stuff to write about from the last six years, and was it really six years ago that we started thinking about adopting? Maybe five.

What else do I know besides being a mother (there are a lot of those mothers out there) and some fading knowledge of design research, and rusty-as-hell print design expertise, and what it's like to grow up in the suburbs and move to the city, only end up in a suburban part of the city? Heh. Never actually thought about that truth until now.

What else do I know, anyway?