Fifteen Minutes - Kerry

Apparently if I wait for the perfect moment to write that moment will never come, so I, like many other writers, compensate.

I have written entire magazine articles on airplane napkins. In desperate searches for something to write on, in short periods of time, I have used the back of my hand and also the back of my unopened mail. I understand graffiti on bathroom walls. Maybe that's all the writing time and space they had.

Tonight I am writing this blog (before I typed it) onto a piece of paper in my journal while I am laying on my stomach on the floor in my children's bedroom, wearing my pajamas. The dusk filters through the drawn blinds. I try to convince Max and Jillian, between sentences, that it really is time for bed. My nose is inches from a smelly wet towel in the laundry hamper. My feet rest on a Sponge Bob game. I long for a stretch of uninterrupted time, but I grudgingly take my fifteen minutes because this is where I can find them.

"The truth is, you can get a lot done in just fifteen minutes a day. We all have a least fifteen minutes somewhere," wrote Barbara DeMarco-Barrett in "Pen on Fire."

At least now Jillian was in the bed and not in a backpack on my back. I contemplated an entry in my journal I wrote three years ago:

The baby sat in a backpack on my back as I wrote on my laptop. I tried not to feel sorry for myself. Jillian, who was teething, started to drool down my neck, and all I wanted to do was sob. But I didn’t, only because that would have been too pathetic, particularly since I had four children downstairs playing with a Barbie house. Mommies shouldn’t cry when they’re using the laptop. Besides, as my mother would say, 'I really don’t have time for a nervous breakdown. They’re a luxury that you just don’t have.'

So I sat there and wrote. And again tonight, I laid there and wrote. It wasn't ideal, but it was enough.

"In fifteen minutes, you can write a page and at the end of the year have a novel," wrote Di-Marco Barrett. Maybe so.