Starting Again

One time my mother asked, “how’s that novel coming along?” and I felt angry. 

“If I could ever find some time for myself,” I said, “it would come along just fine.”

“You can’t find any time to write? I’m waiting for those royalties to start rolling in.”

My mood shifted. My mother was the only one who believed I’d ever write anything of value. “I’m writing. It’s just not going anywhere,” I told her. “Guess you need to hang around a little longer if you want to share in the payday.”

That was ten years ago and now, time is running out for my mother. As if to honor that incessantly ticking clock, I stopped writing altogether. This past year, moving her from her own home into first one assisted living arrangement, and then to another, the most I’ve managed is a daily scribbled page in a pen and ink journal. Mundane and trivial. No substance. Like my life these days, my writing feels like pencil stokes on cardboard. 

I have not a thing to complain about and this makes it even harder. Not a reason in the world for depression or upset, yet I manage to schlep around in it. Depression mostly. That glue-like muck that makes every step, every action feel monumental. I see the image of a tar-baby cartoon, each foot and hand stuck and pulling against the resistance of some black, sticky substance. I move through my days, trying to get free of the gunk, paradoxically efforting to move more lightly in this world. It is grim and senseless.

And so in honor of my mother, sweet soul, who faces the swagger of advanced age with a wry humor I do not think I could muster, I dust off the MacBook, fire it up, face a blank screen, and write a minimum three hundred words. It is a start. Don’t die yet, Mother.