My Office Became Your Nursery

I am sitting upstairs at my desk for the first time in a long time, humid gray air leaking in through the windows and the sound of you bouncing in the exersaucer leaking up from downstairs. Daddy is talking in a quick and lilting tone and you are responding with fussy bursts.

Anjali left this morning after a piece of toast and mango tea. It was hard for Mommy to see her go. While she was here I felt on the cusp of being a writer again. We exchanged stories and offered criticisms, we drank beer and brainstormed inappropriate titles for bestselling books, we walked around the lake and talked about dialogue assignments and short stories that deal with violence. She was kind and loving to you, but most of all, took you in stride, like it was perfectly normal for you to exist at the periphery of all our discussions.

Downstairs, you just fell and bumped your head. So I left this writing and took you in my arms and brought you upstairs (singing the Nap Time for Thisbe song) and set you down gently in your crib and administered kisses via Mr. Meow. Now I am back at the desk and you are shrieking and I can barely concentrate on writing these words and I am feeling huge levels of impatience grow within me, fill me up, not just impatience but real rage that you won't stop so that I can focus--and now, now that you have quieted a little--a real sense of sadness that for me, the real work of writing--the creating and revising--can never be done, really done, in your presence. Maybe some parent-artists can successfully manage this, but I can't, and it makes me feel a little desperate that these two passions, these two small planets of work, have to exist in separate orbits. Of course, when I am with you I am gathering material for writing, I am honing my observation skills, I am paying attention to the way that language develops, etc. But I cannot write, really write, with you near me.

Last night, re-reading Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," I marveled at the length of her sentences. I am thankful for the permission she granted women to find a space of our own, room enough to let images proceed until their own ending, not the ending created for us by a cluttered house, a ringing phone, a wailing baby.