Yesterday began week two of my neatly outlined and well-scheduled summer break. As regular readers of this blog know, my Mondays are the height of production and organization. It was a busy weekend, but I got to bed at a reasonable hour Sunday night, prepared to hit the ground running at 5 am on Monday morning. Well, I'm a mom, and life happens. I didn't get any sleep and I got a late start yesterday morning. No worries, right? Just dive right in! Well, it turns out it wasn't that simple.
Over the weekend I made a couple of simple mistakes. One was using money from the wrong account for a shopping trip. I still haven't figured out where I got the idea that toilet paper comes out of the food budget, but somehow I found myself with less money at the checkout than I'd thought. I had enough to cover my groceries, but I spent hours wondering how I'd lost $ 60. My husband was very understanding and confident that it was a simple error and we would find the money again, which it was, and we did. Still, I was angry at myself for doing it in the first place - I'm supposed to be very organized, right? The other "mistake" I made wasn't really a mistake. It was having an article turned down. Sigh. It's hard for me to even write it, but the simple fact is that writers have worse stats than baseball players, and the best baseball players fail 70% of the time. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise, and I certainly had no reason to take it personally. In fact, contrary to the horror stories you hear about cruel rejection letters, my editor in this case was quite polite and encouraging. Somehow, though, I let my mistakes compound and took them very personally indeed. By Monday, I was paralyzed with fear of making another mistake. I sat at the computer checking every email, chatting on Facebook, and surfing the internet. At one point, I almost considered balancing my checkbook.
Noon came and went and I finally took a break from my procrastination to feed my kids. The kids, oblivious to my great failures, were perfectly content to shake their tailfeathers with Ray Charles and the Blues Brothers between bites, laughing and dancing and pulling on my leg to join them. I knew I had to bite the bullet, write another article, and get on with my life, or I'd miss out on all the fun. I promised the kids I'd write for one more hour, then we could go play in the pool until dinner time. Then, I put myself in time-out. I set the old-fashioned kitchen timer for 60 minutes, pulled the office door closed and got to work.
My office door is actually a decorative screen, and there's another doorway to the living room that's only covered with drapes, so I wasn't really ensconced at all. I could still hear the kids clearly, and they could still get to me easily. So perhaps it was the constant tick-tick-tick of the fat, round dial behind me that kept me focused. Maybe that visual and audible reminder was the signal we all needed to declare that time as work time for mom. For whatever reason, it worked. At the end of an hour, I had an article. A few minutes of proofreading and final editing later, it was out of my hands, off for submission to my editor, done. Now, it could come right back to me for revision, or, worst case scenario, it could be turned down. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I'm here, writing again without fear, and my kids and I plan to hit the pool much earlier today.
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