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There Were No Children in the Garden of Eden

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The Man and I went on a date recently. It was very refreshing.

But the night before our date was rambunctious. We went out to a burrito restaurant. That excursion was an exercise in incessant ear drum busting. The 22 month old girl had a fit of the wails which we endured at the restaurant and on the ride back home.  It was way past her bedtime, and I was already exhausted from undergoing The Marathon of Motherhood (aka, fourteen straight hours of care giving). Being the responsive and attentive mother that I am, I blasted my favorite Alicia Keys album in the car to try to appease her. Didn’t work. (However, I thoroughly enjoyed singing along to Girl on Fire while my little girl experienced her own fire of a tantrum.)

I digress. Date night was a lovely dream. No children and just the two of us. Felt like the first 7 years of our marriage prior to children: QUIET. We even cracked a few jokes. And I got to talk with The Man about my writing in a bleeding heart artsy fartsy kind of way (instead of my usual stressed out and panicked “Oh my God, how am I going to get this story done with all the other stuff I have to do in my already overloaded life kind of way.”)

The time we spent together was well worth the money we paid to the babysitter, and the money we shelled out for dinner, and the money we shelled out for after dinner Starbucks coffee. I have to remember to make up for all the food and coffee I inhaled, but that was worth it too…in a way.

This date reminded me of what my pastor and mentor said to us ten years ago during pre-marital counseling: “After you say ‘I do,’ you are a new family unit. Before any children, the two of you are a family. Remember that.”

It also reminded me of what I read in a Preparation for Parenting course I took before we had our first child. The teacher of the course made a poignant statement: there were no children in the Garden of Eden. In God’s original design for a family, he had one man and one woman in mind, a husband and a wife. They were the foundation.

Yay! I now have biblical license to let the children run amuck while I watch Redbox movies all day with The Man. Okay, I stretched scripture a bit, but I do have to keep my family relationships in right perspective. Marriage first. Children second.

A lot of times, I become so child-centered I forget that The Man and I are the foundation. It’s easy to do, especially when children are small and require a lot of physical care and attention. I’ve heard lots of stories of well-meaning parents who pour everything into their children, and so they have nothing to give to their spouses. By the time the children have grown up and left, the marriage has shriveled up. I don’t want to be that person.

I’ll carve out that extra time and expense to have those date nights. I’ll take the time to talk to The Man each day when he gets home from work instead of bombarding him with my Honey-Do list. Because a strong marriage is the foundation from which our children are built.

Becoming at Peace with my Pantsing Ways

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I have come to peace with the fact that I am a panster when it comes to writing fiction. With non-fiction, I can do the whole organize and plan in advance thing. When putting together a story, I like to start writing with an idea in mind and go from there. It’s both refreshing and nerve wracking to write this way. A lot of times it feels like I’m trying to grasp a handful of air.

I tried to fight my seat of the pants tendencies, but I can’t. It’ll only continue to frustrate me and cause me angst if I try to put myself in the plotter-box.

Now, when I’ve come to the final stages of a story, I pull out the index cards and scene trackers to make sure that I’ve included all the elements: romance arc, scene and sequel elements, character development, spiritual threads, etc. But when I’m first writing a draft (or two, or three) I like to discover the story as I write it.

With this seat of the pants method, I have to do more rewrites so I give myself a lot of lead time before I’m ready to shop a story around.

How did I come to peace with my seat of the pants madness? I recently read a blog by Tess Gerritsen, one of my favorite thriller writers, where she writes that she’s a pantser. She writes four pages by hand each day in her first draft stage, and it takes her about five drafts before a story is done. But she only starts with a character in a predicament. And she’s written over twenty books that way. If she can do it, I can do it too 😉

For me it took a lot more than five drafts to get my first story where I wanted it, but I’ll chalk that up to my huge learning curve which I needed to overcome when I first started writing fiction in 2008. Hopefully, I won’t need to go through 30-plus drafts of a story in the future, or if I do go through 30-plus drafts (which is highly likely due to my Type-A tendencies), I’ll go through them quicker…I hope.

Right now, I’m in the middle of editing another story that I’ve written and I’ve starting my pantsing on a new story. So part of my day is spent editing one story and another part is spent writing new pages for another. Kind of schizophrenic because I’m shifting between two different story worlds, and so I have to put on two different hats.

However, once I reach the final stages for the story which I’m currently editing, it will demand my full energy which for me is similar to when a woman reaches the transition period of labor. I block out everything else and….push.

A crazy, but exhilarating way to live.

🙂

 

 

 

Mom’s Mortality

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Since becoming a mother..or maybe since hitting the big 3-0, I’ve been pondering death…not in a morbid way but in an “Oh my gosh, I’m getting older and before I know it I’ll be thinking about things like menopause and osteoperosis and wrinkles and then my body will hit the dirt…my spirit will rest in Jesus..and sometime after that I’ll stand before God to give an account for what I’ve done with the time He’s alloted me” sort of way.

I can be intense sometimes.

To deal with my not quite mid life crisis, I’ve started recording my life. I take pictures. I track my activities in journals: food I eat, times I exercise, pages I write, prayers I send to The Man Upstairs. With journaling, I can get all that mental intensity out of my brain and onto the page. After a few months of this however, it became too cumbersome and disorganized. I’d have pages written in one notebook, more pages written in another notebook. My notebooks haphazardly covered multiple topics: motherhood, prayers, writing exercises etc. Journaling became a messy exercise for me.

So after accepting the fact I’m a left brained, creative person (go figure), I started searching for a journal that’s quick, easy and organized. Last November, I found a way to systemically keep track of all this…life…that passes through my fingers via seconds, minutes, hours, and days. I want to know if I’m growing. Or if I’m still struggling with the same tendencies I had as a flighty teenager…or as a flighty twenty nine year old.

I purchased a five year journal to track my motherhood journey and a ten year journal to track other aspects of my life. Each journal is only four lines so I can record something in a few minutes. The cool thing about multi year journals is when I return to that day’s page next year, I can reread what I wrote in the prior years. For my motherhood journal, I have a five year Mom’s One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book For the other aspects of my life, I have a Journal 10+ for my ten year journal.

When I’m feeling more verbose and need to write for more than four lines, I use the following:

*A Family Gratitide Journal

*Personal Prayer Journal

*Writing Journal

What type(s) of journal do you keep? How do you record your sojourning on this earth?

Art & Life: Quantity or Quality?

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 “I believe that eventually quantity will make up for quality. How so? Michelangelo’s, da Vinci’s, Tintoretto’s billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty. Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can come quality.”

(Ray Bradbury)

I agree with this. When I first had the inkling to write, I was as far from an artistic bent as you can get. I worked  as a Defense Analyst for the U.S. Government Accountability Office. During that time, the real joy of my life came in the hour or so in the morning before I left for work when I would write my Morning Pages, a la Julia Cameron. Morning Pages are three pages of your brain spilled onto paper. I loved this, and I loved that I could do something for myself for three pages a day.

No one will ever read it. (I don’t even want to read it.) But it was a great exercise in learning how to sit down and produce something from my heart (or brain mush) each day, whether “good writing” or “bad writing”—mostly “bad”(if you’re the type that likes to qualify things.) If it weren’t for that daily exercise in producing mush, I wouldn’t have gotten over my grade school fear of just putting something down on the page.

My 18 month old is a writer. She loves to grab a crayon and scribble on a piece of construction paper…or the wall. My 3 year old is a writer too. He loves to grab the crayon from his sister’s hand, watch her scream bloody murder and write on paper napkins or notebooks or wherever.

I love watching them scribble. The scribbles are the thing.

What about you? Do you agree with this quote from Ray Bradbury?

Courage

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“And the LORD your God, he shall expel them from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the LORD your God hath promised unto you. Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left; That ye come not among these nations, these that remain among you; neither make mention of the name of their gods, nor cause to swear by them, neither serve them, nor bow yourselves unto them” (Joshua 23:5-7, KJV)

It takes courage to follow after God, especially when we want to follow our on path!  I remember having to make some tough decisions over the past few years regarding my career choices, how I spend my time and money and even what activities I should focus on at different times in my life. My choices were always easier and foolproof. The choices I felt God leading me to make didn’t make any sense at all. Sometimes, I ignored Him and I felt the repercussions in extra stress and headache. Other times, following His patth has called on me to develop courage – but it resulted in peace!

There are a lot of things in this world to pull us in many different directions. If we aren’t courageous to follow God’s path, the road less traveled, we may feel the world’s instant gratification but it’ll eventually turn to dust.

Have you had to make any difficult choices between what you wanted and what you felt God wanted? What did you do about it?

A Reponse to A Dream Deferred

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A Dream Deferred

By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

A response:

This young girl comes from a long line of dreamers.

Many of whom held vaporized dreams.

They blamed manmade ills or the sun or the rain.

Dreams shriveled up like Langston’s raisins.

Shriveled up for fear.

Not fear of what could not be, but fear of what could.

The truth is they could have been their truest self, if they followed their truest self.

They chose the wide road instead.

And like Langston said, exploded.

Open Spaces of Time

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For the past seven months or so, my life has been way too full. I haven’t devoted my time to things that keep me sane: reading good books and writing drivel in my journal.

I’m a natural introvert which means I derive my energy from being alone. Interacting with people ALL. THE. TIME. can drain me. This is a considerable challenge since I have small children at home. However, I can honestly say God has graced me with an inordinate amount of patience and staying power when the house feels a little to crazy for my introverted ways.

He’s also recently opened up space in my time to do those things I love, things I crave. What did I do with this freed up space in my schedule? I hopped on over to the library and checked out a bazillion books to read. I spent more time at the computer wrestling with nouns and verbs. I hung out at the park and slid down the slide with my two year old. I read “Curious George Takes A Job” with my four year old a thousand times!

I’d like to spend less time feeding my Facebook addiction and spend more time in literary/writerly pursuits. I also want to spend more time with my kids. You may think it odd I say this because I spend all day with them already, but I haven’t been intentional about my interactions. I haven’t taken the time to see the world as they see it, or really listen.

As spring approaches, I am also approaching a new season in my life. A season where I’m learning to embrace what God has already placed in my hands, instead of fretting and worrying over what I don’t have. (The grass may not always be greener.) A season where I’m accepting of how He has created me and the experiences, both good and bad, which He has allowed in my life.

In this new season, I want to learn how to live life as it happens, moment by moment. I don’t want to look back with regret on what could have been or worry about what could be in the future.

A daunting task, but a worthy one.

IT HAD TO BE YOU $100 Visa Giveaway from @SusanMayWarren!

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Susan May Warren is celebrating the release of her newest Christiansen Family novel, It Had To Be You, with a $100 Visa cash card giveaway and offering readers a free book club kit.

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One winner will receive:

  • $100 Visa cash card
  • Take a Chance on Me and It Had to Be You by Susan May Warren

Enter today by clicking one of the icons below. But hurry, the giveaway ends on March 29th. Winner will be announced April 1st on Susan’s blog. Also, visit her website to learn more about the It Had To Be You backstory and Susan’s free book club kit.


Don’t miss a moment of the fun; enter today and be sure to stop by Susan’s blog on April 1st to see if you won.

My Review

Love. Love. Love. This story. Susan May Warren writes emotion like no other.