Then, just when I started getting my energy back, Ami started staying awake more and more, and spending, as it turned out, the majority of her waking time crying. She started wailing when we tried to lay her down in her crib. To increase my milk supply, she started eating more and more frequently—sometimes as often as every hour, which meant I sometimes spent most of the day and night with her attached to one breast or the other. That free time of the first two weeks, which I had wasted sleeping or staring blankly at some crappy Netflix reality TV show or other, was gone, and I resigned myself to the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to write, probably, for several months.
But I’m happy to say that finally at about two months old, my Amalita started fussing less and less. Her prolonged nighttime fussiness—called unhappy hour or the witching hour, depending on which book you read—pretty much went away altogether, and when she does fuss, now, we sort of know what to do most of the time. On top of that, her sleeping habits have gotten more predictable. She still refuses to sleep in her crib (from talking to other parents, I’m beginning to think that no baby in the history of babies has ever willingly slept in his or her crib), but she’ll go down for a good five hours at the beginning of the night and then wake regularly ever three hours after that for a little nighttime snack. I’m actually getting a reasonable amount of sleep again . . . and having dreams! Oh, sweet dreams. Even when they’re nightmares it feels so good to wake up and know that I was sleeping deeply enough to have them.
And though she’s awake and alert most of the day now, which means she needs almost constant attention, the time to write is there if I take it. Damien and I have both started to get the hang of this whole parenting thing, enough, anyway, that we’re not convinced we’re doing everything wrong and damaging her in some irreparable way. As a result, he can take her when I need to get something done, and vice versa. Still, I haven’t really been writing. It would be a lie to say I haven’t written at all since she was born, but still, I haven’t written more than maybe a total of a couple pages, not counting blog posts and a book review. The time is there, in other words, but just like that first two weeks after Amalie’s birth, I’m not using it to write.
But I do have plans to slowly get back into the writing game during the winter break. I’ll tell you all about it next week.
Ashley,
ReplyDeleteI am very interested in this post as I, too, have trouble remembering that the time is there for me to write. Sometimes I sit around for an hour or so at a time playing video games, watching dumb stuff on Netflix (like you), or just relaxing on the couch. All of that time really adds up to time that I could be writing. It got me thinking that realizing that you have the time to write shouldn't make you feel guilty, but should actually make you happy that you have those zone-out activities in your life to help you wind down. When I can use these zone-out activities enough, they help me get to that relaxed state that I need to be in to be able to finally write something worthwhile down. Writing is no fun if I have to make myself feel guilty about it. Your life has been crazy, it sounds like, and really, winding down is probably exactly what you need.
I also wanted to point out that you are selling yourself short on your blog writing and your book review! Writing is writing, I think, and writing a weekly blog must be very difficult. I know a ton of writers (myself included) who rarely produce anything for weeks at a time. I think that you writing at least once per week, helps you, at the very least, remember sentence structure and pacing (which you are quite good at). When I sit down to write after a long stretch, I have to not only remember how to be a poet, but how to remember how to pace a sentence without being completely rusty. Knocking off a little dust from time to time is fine, but having to do it every time I try to write again is ridiculous. Your blog is preventing you from this.
Your book review is an even better form of writing because you know (and I believe that you've mentioned this in a blog post before) that reading is a huge part of being a writer. Not only that, but because you are writing a review, you are reading it critically, dissecting how the writer pulls off various tactics, and deciding what is effective and ineffective from a craft standpoint. Most of the time when I read something it is for pure pleasure (another way of winding down!). Though I gain as a writer, I'm not necessarily gaining the way that you are when you do a review.
My point is, while you are keeping your chin up, you should keep it a bit higher, because you may be in a better place as a writer than you know.
Thanks for this post.
Thank you, Ray. Thank you so much! Words cannot describe how much your comment has helped me. I agree with you completely, and you've helped me to look at the issue in a new way.
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