Summary, with Snow

It's gloriously snowy outside, big fat flakes still falling and about 4-5 inches on the ground now. It's the second snowfall this week and I have the feeling we're going to be dumped on for the rest of the day. We went for a walk this morning up to our neighborhood coffee shop two blocks away, which was so full of laughing, wet, fleeced families that the windows were completely steamed over. B is home from work with a cold, so unfortunately he's not enjoying his day as much as I am, but it's still so nice to just have him here. Cora has been very clingy and cuddly lately with me, latching onto my legs so fiercely that I can hardly move about the house. But when B is here, she is happy to play by herself. She'll wander by to show us something, or just hang in her room, all cool and independent with her sippy cup and a book.

She's starting to talk, which is awesome and strange. Yesterday she pointed across the room and loudly requested WATER, and she shakes her head and says no, very softly so that it comes out sort of more like nao. She looked out the window during lunch yesterday and pointed to the trees while blowing through pursed lips, showing me that they were blowing in the wind. She says hi and bye-bye and turtle, and sometimes she says book and milk. We were at the Zoomazium the other day (this very cool play area at our local zoo), and she pointed up at the wall and roared at the picture of the lion. We have little conversations like this, a funny mix of sign language and animal noises and gesticulation. This morning she wandered around the kitchen making fish faces followed by the sign for fish, then giggled loudly whenever I responded with sucky noises.

It's officially been a month since I quit my job, which is hard to believe. There are a few major things that mark this month, which are:

I am writing every day.

I am nearing the end of a short story, about 10 single spaced pages into it... Actually, I'm not sure how many more pages I have to go, so maybe I'm not nearing the end. But still. :)

I have been hesitating to announce this because it is so gigantically monumental, but it appears that Cora takes two-hour naps. Who knew? Who in their wildest imaginations would ever think my 25-minute wonder of a daughter could sleep that long? But she has been doing it this week and it makes for much more enjoyable and productive writing sessions.

We are cooking whole foods dinners every evening, things like black bean enchiladas and potato leek or mushroom barley soups, homemade pizza (even homemade wheat-free dough, by golly), turkey chili made with homemade beans, roast chicken with gravy and potatoes... I am by no means a well-versed chef, uh, at all, but I am really enjoying the thought and preparation that goes into cooking. I've also made a couple of really disastrous meals which aren't so fun to wade through, including a bad Thai curry experiment with soggy vegetables and no flavor.

I feel like some long, gaping creative chasm is being crossed much more smoothly than I imagined when I started this journey. I am so glad I'm not hanging off the cliff without an extra Caribeaner, or lost among the tundra just looking for the other side. The divide feels less serious, is all.

Lest you read this and get one of those saccharine tastes in your mouth like after reading an overly-exultant holiday form letter, I should mention that there have been some low points, some questioning and wondering. For example, there was this night recently when I was out with some friends at a loud, busy, fun restaurant downtown. I hadn't been out on my own with a group of semi-strangers in, oh about a year. At one point, I looked around and everyone was holding their cell phones, showing each other their Facebook page. I am the most lame Facebook user ever. I created a page on a whim a year ago and have never updated it. I think I have 14 friends and no photo, I never write on any one's wall or send growing plants or winks or fabulousness of any kind. We were downtown and when I hurried away from the evening in order to get home by 8 to nurse Cora, I was driving our old car because I left the one with the car seat at home, the one I'm used to driving. I was looking around at all the BMWs and Porsches and lovely, shiny black Audis, and as I tried to exit my parking space, I wasn't used to the clutch so I stalled the car in the middle of the intersection. The light turned green for oncoming traffic, and there I was. All the writerly wisdom blew out of me. I was a stay-at-home mom in an old car, trying to figure out how to use a stick shift, cursing and yelling out the window, "I'm trying, damn it!" until I finally got the car started and lurched around the corner. I felt about two feet tall.

I was talking to B about it later, and he told me he thinks I am scrappy, sometimes too much so. That there's this thing in me that wants to tell everyone I could do it, too: I could work in a fancy building and wear fancy clothes and drive a pretty car. There's a weakness in there, a thing that wants to prove something. But then I get home and I put on my comfy jeans and pull my hair into a big mess on my head and nurse Cora and sit down to read. And I think, you know, that other me isn't as happy.

What I realize again and again is that sometimes your true self gets used to whispering, and the other world outside--the one filled with shiny cars and slick new coats, vacations to tropical places and fancy dinners out--talks much more loudly. It can even shout. There are a hundred things that, if you pause long enough to look at them, will seem much more tangible and attractive than pawing away at a story. Oddly, as soon as I get just a few blocks away from that me that wants to be another me, I want to bundle the real me up and take her to our dream house on the island. Feed her a homemade meal and a cup of tea and cover her in a scratchy wool sweater and a pair of slippers, and tuck her next to a fire. Don't get lost out there, I want to say sternly. Don't let the fire die.

So here I am, on my way over my little chasm, drinking decaf tea and looking at the snow covering everything in silence while my daughter sleeps.