Oh Hello, 2014 ...
Good god. It's been a while.
Welp! Today is the first day of the new semester. We're supposed to get a lot of snow tonight, too. So that should make the beginning of classes go smoothly.
At the very least, I can say that my family is 80% healthy. Maybe 75%. At least, healthy enough that my children can go to school and/or the babysitter and I can go teach.
I feel like I'm JUST beginning to get my life back from babyland. Vampire Baby, as of last week, is finally sleeping for most, if not all, of the night . . . AND if she wakes up around 5 or 6 in the morning, most of the time I can convince her to go back to sleep! IT ONLY TOOK 10 MONTHS. This means that last week, after realizing I'd slept for more than 5 hours, uninterrupted, I woke up early and managed to work on both my verse play and interview questions I'd been sent by the curator of a lovely blog about chapbooks, Speaking of Marvels.
It took me nearly two months to answer those questions -- no joke. And it wasn't because I was sitting around watching old episodes of Magnum P.I. (I held off watching Magnum P.I. until AFTER I'd finished the questions. And I only watched the first two episodes. Because really, even though I'm managing to write a wee bit in the mornings, I still don't have much time for things like TV.... I know, I know. Poor me. Boohoo freakin hoo.)
Anyway, if the blog's editor, William Kelley Woolfitt, isn't completely disgusted with me and my very slow turnaround time it'll be a miracle.
If I have any friends left after Baby #3, it'll be another miracle. I feel like I've been living in a hole for the past 10 months. A very frenetic, loud hole that's fun and full of adorable little people, but a hole nonetheless. It sounds so dramatic, perhaps overly so, but I've felt like the past year has been about survival. Not survival in the living-or-not-living sense, but survival in the endurance sense -- like, in order for my little family to endure, to maintain, I've had to kind of hunker down and be really myopic in my vision. I haven't had a lot of time for anything other than, do the next thing that must be done.
Hopefully, we're moving out of that phase now.
***
This is a two-part post because the baby woke up yesterday before I could finish it. She's up now, too, but yesterday's snow arrived as promised and as a result we don't have school today. So she's eating cheerios while I type.
I
just wanted to wrap things up by writing that it's nice to be in a the
position where I might be able to make plans or have goals again. Some
of those goals are tired and I'm sure you're very weary of reading about
them (i.e. Poetry of Witness article and Verse Play) . . . but I'm
thinking about taking another playwriting course over the summer (and
wondering whether it's possible for me to even think about earning a
second MFA in playwriting, which I could do through Stony Brook
Southampton) and possibly-maybe-if-I-have-time applying for a grant.
This
is stuff I couldn't even contemplate over the summer. I probably
SHOULDN'T be contemplating it right now, but it's nice to have something
to daydream about -- to have the brain power to daydream, actually.
It's kind of amazing how much having a baby is like having a lobotomy.
Thank goodness it's semi-reversible. I mean, I'm sure I'm not getting
all those brain cells back for good . . . but I'll return to some
semblance of my thinking-self eventually.
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