Time Flies
My last entry in this blog feels like it could have been written by a completely different person, in a lot of ways. The person who wrote that entry, for instance, had never had 200 mL of formula spat up all over her at three in the morning. She’d never gone six months with only five hours of sleep a night, or watched an entire season of a show before breakfast because the tiny, wonderful person she was taking care of would only sleep if she held him upright. She had never bought a house, or lived through a pandemic.
One strange thing about the early months of parenting is that, even in the most normal of situations (such as those are in the early months of parenting) you don’t really feel like yourself. You’re sleep-deprived, for one, but all the things that used to fill your time and your mind have been shoved aside for a new thing that takes up so very much of your time and mental energy. You also learn what makes you feel like yourself, and, if you’re going to survive, you find ways to fit those things in. My husband and I finally started to feel slightly normal when, in the first few days after our baby was born, we finally sat down after dinner and watched a little TV. It was like, “Oh, right, the world is still the same as it used to be in some ways.”
I knew I was going to be okay the first time I had a break from feeding and diapers and shushing and singing and what I did… was sit down and write. A new idea had been following me around, and I poured it out of myself in a rush. It’s not finished, not by a long stretch — my personal writing time nowadays is less frequent than it once was. But there’s a number of scenes written, and I’ve got a rough outline that I’m now fleshing out into something more detailed. I’m trying new methods that I hope will make me a more efficient writer, because goodness knows I could use being more efficient now.
I’d been working for my regular clients again for months, at that point. Hell, I’d even (somehow) attended a day-long editing conference and signed the most complicated paperwork of my life in the months since the baby was born. But that feeling of making something new that didn’t exist before… that was where something clicked. I’m still the same person I used to be. I’m also way more tired and more tightly scheduled, and I have to budget basically every minute of my life. But I have strengths I never knew before, too. And I’m going to make it, just as long as I can occasionally reach out and make something totally new out of words.
