Time

A recent post on Beyond Friendship Gate prompted me to reflect on how motherhood has affected my creative life.

Being a mother is definitely getting easier. Over our long Christmas vacation (in which we drove over a thousand miles), we discovered that swaddling is the key to getting Amelia to nap. At this moment she has been napping for almost two hours (so she will almost certainly wake up before I finish this post). Still, sometimes I feel just like Caroline: when I have time, I don't know what to do with it.

I used the first part of A's nap to do a little yoga. Then I ate an early lunch. Then I read for a bit and opened some Word documents, trying to get into a poem. Perhaps because I forgot to put on any music, I just couldn't get going. Part of it is that I sort of feel finished with my thesis. I am, theoretically, trying to turn it into a book. However, I am not sure I am still in the same "place" anymore. Since I wrote the poems for my thesis, I have been through the greater part of a pregnancy and the first 12 weeks with a baby. I have a few new ideas for poems that don't seem to fit into the content of my thesis.

So, I looked around the internet for awhile, toying with the idea of just sending the thesis off as a manuscript now. I don't have enough pages to do that, really. I could send it off as a chapbook. I don't know.

The problem with time as a mother at home is that you never know. I always did my best writing when I knew I had at least a couple of hours to work. Even if I didn't work the whole time, having the time there was key. Now in hindsight I know that if I had sat down the moment A went to sleep I would have had at least 2 hours to write. Sigh.

And now I am kind of obsessed with the idea that she is going to wake up any second.
Oh well. Maybe I should just use the little time I have left to try to work on something...