Mommy, I Don't Want You to be a Writer

The title of this blog almost sounds like a bad Country Western song. However, you know you are spending a lot of time on-line or writing when your seven-year old son looks at you one night and says: "I want you to come outside and stop working on the computer all the time!" (This is a month, I should point out, that has been the wettest, coldest May on record in New England--that said, there have been a few good "outdoor" days...I've just chosen to avoid them.) So I answered Henry in more of an attempt at justification than anything else: "I know I spend a lot of time in my office but I'm writing a lot or trying to."

"I don't want you to be a writer."

He does have a point. The gardens and empty pots are waiting for something to be put in them. Memorial Day Weekend looms as do the ever-present laundry piles. But I felt what he said more deeply. I do need to regulate my time writing and balance it with things like household stuff and gardening and more quality time with my children. This is the season to be outside and I should embrace it. Besides, have laptop will travel. I've been wanting to plug it in out on our patio while the kids play outside...but that will have to wait until the tomatoes are planted and garden beds tended and mulched and black flies have gone again.

Unfortunately, I am not the kind of mother or writer who can schedule things very well and then regiment myself. I can work around a school schedule, which I often do with our kids, but my ideas and inspirations are not limited to 9am-1pm. So, like Emily Dickinson and her pantry poems (see EMILY'S DICKINSON's PANTRY, in April 2005 Archives, at right), I write snippets of things here and there when I'm doing other things, like working in the kitchen. Call it "domestic multi-tasking".