Of Two Worlds

What is the matter with you people? Don’t you know whom you’re dealing with? What you’re dealing with? Doesn’t my history tell you what I’m like? You people are seriously leaving me in charge? With all these other….these other things…these lives, people, worlds I must, need, do deal with? Really?

You’re all depending on me? When half my brain is…working out other problems, for other people, in other places and…times? I wonder if you know what this ‘conflict’ is doing to me. —My Inner Voice

The first line of a poem by poet/mother, Laura Apol, to another poet and mother, Lucille Clifton says it best: Tell me again about the poems you lost and the babies you saved. I have lost poems and stories in the forests of motherhood and now, I’m surely losing them again in the wilderness of caring for my mother. Both, countries of my choosing.

And I knew going in with both I would lose poems and stories, but I would save children and my mother’s quality of life. (to paraphrase Apol) I never believed the lie that I could replace the writing lost. I only hoped the best would hang on, somehow.

I don’t know that that happened. What I do know, is sometimes, I’m completely disoriented, no matter what I’m doing. Writing and suddenly the panicked thought intrudes about mom’s medicine or an appointment I might have forgotten. Or I get a distressed phone call. Sometimes delegated help falls through or a sick day happens. Sometimes, I’m driving mom around and a scene rises up, clear, clean, and perfect for the story I’m working or a line for a poem. I’m never really completely here or there.

My kids knew. They labeled me eccentric, weird…just working in her head again. (This accompanied with a roll of their eyes and a long-suffering sigh) But how do you explain a sudden distraction in the middle of a shopping trip when for my mom remembering to buy OJ is the task for the day?

And the writing isn’t vital; no worlds hang on the work getting done. (Only the worlds I’ve made up and worrying too much about that can get a little hinky, if a writer gets too serious about it, right? I mean, this world only exists in my mind and …well, you see what I mean. Hinky. Going there could put into question the state of my mind, right?)

I’m clear on what’s truly important, I am, but that doesn’t stop the voices, the people, the scenes that co-occupy my mind, distract me and vie for attention. And sometimes, I feel like a computer asked to do too many tasks at once—frozen screen head.
Worse, writers need to silence their minds. It’s vital, but most often I’m of two minds, two trains of thoughts, two time periods. Silence is…impossible.

My prayer: I was writing—learning and growing along with the children—until eventually I was writing fiction worthy of publication. It might have happened sooner had I had a room of my own and fewer children, but somehow I doubt it. For as I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say. —Katherine Paterson, novelist