On Being a Woman With Stuff To Do While Children Are Underfoot

It's spring break week here. At a playdate today, my friend asked how I was going to have the time to get out today's #365StrongStories installment. While we spoke at three this afternoon, I had absolutely no idea. I  just knew or would happen somehow. This yearlong writing project has forced me to get even more vigilant about carving out for "me time." But trying to make time to work and create isn't a new problem - it's as old as the concept of women with stuff to do even with kids underfoot.

This story is excepted from last year's post on the trials and tribulations of meeting writing deadlines even during spring break:

My stepmom kindly recommended I take off my coat and get some work done while she took the kids for a walk.

Clearly I was exuding deadline stress, and I risked infecting everyone around me.

How could I be surprised that I couldn’t get clear on my writing and I felt choked with “bad mom” guilt? I wasn’t asking for the dedicated creative time I needed and so I was spreading myself too thin as I tried (and failed) to dot it all. 

I felt like a fraud, offering advice from and “I’ve got this” blogging pulpit when I was actually just being a terrible, distracted house guest with a couple of needy dependents.

Gratefully, I took that gift of thirty minutes free of mom responsibilities to check back in with my real message, my lived experience, my own imbalance.

I think I found a story worth telling and I drafted a new container to tell it. And then I discovered the space to walk to the beach with my girls – twice.

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“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?”

“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?” It was hard to make out the words because she was burying her face in my belly, but I understood exactly what she meant.

It seems impossible that we could love something that awoke our darkest fears and left us in a weeping puddle. It seems like madness that we would subject our children to such pain. But, like countless parents since the beginning of humanity, I’d merrily offered up some entertainment that would terrify as much as it delighted.

Within thirty seconds I figured out the basic plot of The Song of the Sea, the fantastical animated Irish film about the silkies - those seals who came to shore and became human women for a time. This is another mystery of story - why would we devote so much time and lavish so much emotion on something so predictable?

Well, I could predict that the pregnant mother singing so sweetly to her young son wasn’t going to make it into scene two. What I couldn’t predict was that wondrous journey and the magical images that would pull us along for the next hour and more.

These tales of otherworldly parents and children on a quest for happiness in the real world pretty much always end up the same. When I kept reassuring my six year-old that it was all going to end well I was pretty sure I was telling enough of the truth. After all, everyone was smiling in a sweet family tableau at the end. But my daughter couldn’t see all that through her tears.

While the credits rolled I reminded her of how much she’d loved the rest of the movie. I told her to think of how the children were so happy with their daddy even if their mama was off with the other fairyfolk in the sea. Most challenging of all, I tried to make her understand that the best stories are those that open our hearts to experience something powerful and meaningful. Considering that now, two days after that initial viewing, she wants to see it again, I can only assume she heard me. More likely, it’s just a testament to our devotion to stories that transform our everyday view of the world and make us feel.

Writing prompt: Defend what you hold sacred

I came across this cartoon in The New Yorker. Though I don't have much experience with reflexology, I think there's something to the acupuncture points that correspond to the overall health of the body. I felt the usual "there they go, judging the healers, the ancient wisdom keepers, and the 'airy fairy' contingent" and just kept reading the Annie Proulx short story that had my interest.

This is something I'm used to. And I bet you are too. If you're a vaguely interesting human you hold opinions that will be ridiculed by the mainstream press, the intelligentsia, macho culture, you name it.

Today, I invite you to write into a time you had to defend something you hold sacred. Perhaps it's a story about a time you didn't speak up and you still regret it. 

Tell me about the writing process in the comments, share your story and tag me, or submit you quick piece for publication in a future #365StrongStories guest storyteller post.

I’ve got a creative problem for you, Liz Gilbert, but I am almost too afraid to ask for help

Elizabeth Gilbert, the magical creature behind Big Magic and Eat, Pray, Love is inviting us all to come to her with our creative aches and pains. (See her Facebook post here.) As we prepare for house guests to arrive - scrubbing just enough to make the place look decent before our families destroy the place again - I’ve been writing and rewriting my 100-word submission in my head.

You can read what I'm sending below, but first, an admission: I’m afraid to admit I have a creative problem.

So much of creating and manifesting a livelihood and leading a life seems like a head game. “Your thoughts create your reality” and “Where the mind goes, the energy flows” and all that… If I spend a day thinking up all the ways I’m a pathetic creative lost in the woods who needs a brilliant best selling writer to save me am I giving up whatever creative power I have? Thing is, being afraid to ask for help, of course is by far more isolating and disempowering. This crafting a business and doing the creative work is hard enough. Let’s all hold hands and ask for guidance and healing when it’s offered.

My Magic Lessons Submission

As a “creative entrepreneur,” I try to make the writing I love to do serve the work I have to do as a writing coach.

I launched my #365StrongStories project to give myself a creative outlet and to show potential clients that it’s possible to “create content” (Ie. tell stories) every day. Most of the time, however, I seem to end up in a no man’s land trapped between the stories I want to write and the stories that I hope will help me build a business.

Entrepreneurship is a necessary creative act, but it threatens my true creativity.

What to do when content you loved writing doesn't get read

Even though every creative entrepreneur and every thought leader looking to make a difference has been there, it still hurts. It's hard when content that you poured your heart into does not connect. This morning after St. Patrick's Day, I woke up with a different kind of hangover than might be considered the traditional type you often experience "the morning after the night before." I had something of a "creativity hangover" because I was disappointed the content I had loving crafted in honor of one of my favorite days of the year didn't get read.

Today's #365StrongStories post is a video that explores that tension between the need to create from your core and the need to connect with an audience.

When you take the risk of exploring your passion and focus on telling the story that is important to you, you are almost guaranteed to take your eye off the marketing ball (at least for a little while). You have to do that from time to time if you want to grow new, provocative ideas that will make into someone worth listening to.

Here's to understanding that not everything you write or produce is going to have the luck o' the Irish - even when you post it on March 17! Here's to valuing the comments more than the numbers of retweets. Here's to recognizing that this happens to all of us from time to time.

Created something that you loved that just didn't get seen? Post the link in the comments and I promise to visit and respond!