Piece Work - backstitching a freelance job--Marcia

I miss my blog.

I woke up this morning craving a little time with her. She is a place where I can write whatever I want. I can be as good or bad, short or long, irrelevant or irreverent as I want.

I don't think anybody reads this. I certainly don't get paid. And maybe that's the beauty of it all. Maybe that's what I'm hankering for right now.

I've been in the writing trenches for over a month, and left my little bloggie alone to whither and die. I missed her, every Wednesday I'd think about crawling into her clean white space and filling it with fragments from my life.

Wednesday would come and go, I'd make a mental note of things i wanted to talk about: the birth of the Princess and Captain Morgan's baby Dutch, our foiled spring vacation, our neighborhood Easter, Erma Bombeck, teaching kids to read . . . But I knew I could not look up from my research, could not afford whatever time away from the manuscript I was working on, to play with my blog.

So many bitter thoughts went through my head. As time wore on with the museum job, I made less and less money. And yet, I couldn't stop. Facts needed to be checked, hypothesis iron-clad, writing pristine. There were nights it got later and later and later until it was morning and time to make coffee and wake the kids for school. All I wanted to do was cry, or quit.

I missed the day James' training wheels came off. I missed tennis practice, I missed baseball games, I missed hockey matches, I missed family dinners and bedtimes. Spring break was a grind, keeping my children at bay, trying to buy time, trying to work.

My family proved that they could do it. They could give me the time and space I needed to write. They were wonderful. James cried. He missed me. He wanted me to stop. But he didn't interrupt. My husband manned the dinner hour and helped occasionally by putting out clothes for school.

As the writing wore on and on, it started to make sense. Truths that I thought might be hidden in the quilts and needlework turned out to be so, it just took a while to prove it. I finally loved the quilts, loved the women who made them, and was impressed with the time they lived in. They taught me to shut up. Our lives are so easy. Our freedoms vast.

In the late 18th or early 19th Century I would have been a spinster who probably got burned at the stake. There is no way I could have kept my mouth shut, my corset cinched and my mind and body supine.

I am trying to be grateful for the schooling I've just been given--on so many levels. The most obvious: I learned a bucket load about how our country was founded, about women and their role in supporting our country, and about quilts. What do you want to know? I can tell you.

About writing? I learned that I am prone to wedding cakes instead of Hot Pockets. I am a rich detail girl not a pop-it in the micro fake meatball and cheeser. All I needed for this job was a Hot Pocket. I could not deliver. I had to make the four-tiered thing first and then scale it back down. Not good. Not cost effective--especially for my soul.

The money offered was less than an entry level school teacher makes in a week--it took me eight. And now they're holding the check. Do I feel insulted? Yes. Welcome to writing.

I have to look on the bright side. I did finish something. I was proud of it for a short period of time. I learned a ton. I got to work in a world-class museum. And, I have a really good manuscript in my hands. I do something with it, or I don't. It's all on me.