Go Team!

I've lately been comparing my role in this wild hootenanny we call life to a juggler. It's not an old analogy: people, especially mothers, are constantly talking about trying to juggle the demands of home and career. Some people make it look easy.

It ain't easy. And I honestly think it isn't easy for the perfect people either--perhaps they just look better in public.

These days--to stick with the juggler analogy--I look like a clown in mid-fall, all my juggling balls in the air. So far, I've been catching them on the way down. But surely this will not remain the case. Certainly, they will all come crashing down. My goal is not to let them all crash down at the same time.

In my brand new Team USA Sochi 2014 sweatshirt. I love a good sweatshirt.

Tonight is the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. I LOVE the Olympics, but I especially love the Winter Olympics. Chalk it up to being a Southerner who's dreamt of snow most her life, but winter sports have always appealed to me. Some day, I'm going to write a novel about a biathlete. Because imagine the body and brain power it takes to cross country ski your brains out--an exercise involving all the large muscles and quite a bit of adrenaline--and then to stop, focus like a laser and engage the small muscles and the intellect enough to shoot and hit a tiny target. Astounding.

The Olympics, of course, are all about teamwork. From the arenas and their building and upkeep, the food, the travel arrangements, the planning to the athletes from each individual country relying on each other in a myriad of ways we never see as spectators. And then, as the TV commercials remind us, of course, there are the athletes' families: those people who have been cheering them on since birth, driving them places and providing them with the upkeep of whatever their sport entails, supporting them in innumerable ways and making sacrifices to do so.

All of it: teamwork.

What I have to remember, as I juggle these many-colored balls in the air--husband, daughters, home, grad school, career, writing--is that I never have to go it alone. I am part of a team. My husband is my key team member, and I'm incredibly lucky to have him in my corner. His sacrifices--from handling the girls alone at least twice a week so I can go in early and stay late after my night classes to study and write, to putting up with the inevitable monthly breakdown that comes screaming out of me like a train off its tracks when my graduate packet is due--allow me to do all these things.

Let me stop you here, lest you think feeding, bathing, and getting a 4 year-old and a 9 month-old to bed is an easy job. A job that anyone could do. Well, perhaps so. But it's a whole different ballgame when you're playing man on man than when you're the only one covering. When it's you alone, it's like running the gauntlet. Except instead of medieval crazy people coming at you from both sides with swords and rocks and spikes, it's naked screaming children with honey in their hair and poo poo on their hands.

But back to teamwork.

It's my job to use my time wisely. If ever a phrase were so over-used ... and so daggum true. It's also my job to finally accept that I may not do all these things well, not all the time.
Here goes....

And Go USA!

Friday Show & Tell: the Forgive Me Edition

Hi, folks.

I'm on a major deadline for Monday, and my 4 year-old's preschool was let out early one day this week and cancelled for three days due to snow and ice. Less than two inches of it (it's the South). I'm basically a basket case, because the time I needed to spend working on those deadlines was spent teaching and at home corralling my precious little scamps.

Okay, so I went sledding with my 4 year-old. And my dog.

And we walked downtown for bakery items and to make snow angels with friends.

And I watched DVRed reruns of The Newsroom. Which is going off the air after it's 3rd season. Sigh. Nobody writes for television better than Aaron Sorkin. Come on!

So this is partly my fault. But still: three and a half days of no preschool does make a couple of writing deadlines tough to meet. You try to get anything done with a 4 year-old and an 8 month-old in the house. I dare you.

P.S.

I do actually have one thing to share, for those folks in Brevard, NC and nearby: Native Eyewear is hosting the Locals Only Project Award Party at The Lumberyard in Brevard on Saturday, Feb. 8th from 6 - 10 p.m. The new catalog, complete with shots from all around our fair town, will be handed out. I have heard that it's absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait to celebrate my adopted hometown!

Making the Leap

I have entered once again the abyss, and now I'm free-falling, like one of those cave jumpers who dive screaming into the murk until on a whoosh comes a wide, white parachute and a waking dream of the dark and dank and cool.

Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic. All I've done, like so many others, is make the decision to attempt to go back to school. It's a Master of Fine Arts in writing (fiction) I'm trying for, because--at least at this point in time--the MFA is still considered the terminal degree for creative writers who also want to be professors. I actually started the application process in late summer 2008, and then the life-changing happened that Fall (see the photo above). And the graduate school dream was put on indefinite hold while I navigated pregnancy and hormones and the wonders and stresses and waking dream that is new motherhood.

It's not the first time I've done this: I earned a MA in English in 2004, and I've been slaving away at various colleges and community/technical colleges since then, thoroughly enjoying my job but wanting to find something more permanent and, ahem... monetarily feasible. I know I'm not alone here; there are thousands of us--lowly adjuncts--teaching across the country, working for pittance and wondering why we got the advanced degree in the first place. (This could be a whole other blog, and it's been done, so I'm not going there.)

But I'm not one of those people. I earned my Master's degree in English for two reasons: to work towards a terminal degree (I thought at the time, a PhD), and to acquaint (and reacquaint) myself with the great writers, in order to become a better writer. I never regret school; I feel that education is a beauty "worthwhile in itself." But now that I'm starting the process all over again--and with a toddler, husband, and part-time job in tow--and though I know that it's the right and best thing for me, I wonder if I'm not a little nuts?

What am I thinking? I barely have time for myself now, and I have one child. One. My "free" time is not spent writing, but catching up on school work and bills and laundry and all the sundry and annoyingly wonderful things that come with being a wife and mother in the modern word. I poop out, exhausted, at about 10:30 every night. I'm nuts, I know it.

The thing is, I know that I can do this. I can figure out how to earn (another) degree, be a good mama, a loving partner, a healthy person. I'd just like a magic potion. A pill, perhaps (are you listening, Phizer?). I'll make my best go of it. I just wish it were a wee bit--just a wee bit--easier.

Any advice, you writers-with-children? Students-with-children?

Disclaimer: This post was a result of one week of cancelled preschool due to snow, and three days (so far) of delayed preschool. A bomb filled with toys, magazines, stuffed animals and thermal coffee mugs (don't ask) has exploded in my house, and I just let my toddler wade through it at will. I rock.