January 2021 was a dark month. Was it dark for you? My January was like one of those mock-inspiration calendars with formerly-hilarious captions like, “It’s always darkest just before it goes pitch black.”
There I shivered in an AutoZone parking lot long after twilight, refusing to turn on the engine in a nod to what was left of my concern for the world and humanity and all that. It was six days since I’d discovered my twenty-plus-year marriage was ending. My husband and I were taking turns living at the house with the kids, an arrangement called bird-nesting.
On my off-days, I drifted, unmoored, to the home/traveling van of my brother, my other brother, my ex-sister-in-law (the one who had divorced one of my brothers) and my friends two cities away—certainly not my neighbors. I still had a hope it would all go away. There’s knowing, and then there’s hoping—and when the two aren’t communicating, my advice is not to go digging pathways in your brain that your brain clearly thinks you have no business digging. Not six days out, anyway.
Before—the capitol-b Before, the Before that happened more than six days prior—I’d worn my mask, I swear. The household and I quarantined with the false alarms and with the real alarms—two of them. If you know me well, you know I’ve given birth to a bazillion children, give or take. One had Covid in August and another two in November.
Now it was January during Utah’s worst virus numbers. I had basically become a criminal vector, gathering whatever I would pick up from whoever would take me and, once home, dishing up the virus-soup to my kids, who’d lived with my husband, a man about to do the mixing and matching of germs himself on what were now his off-days.
Right or wrong, I had a head-start on putting quarantine behind me.
Because life required this off-and-on stay-at-home mom to have a profession—and because my emotions required immediate action—I found myself not only substitute teaching by mid-January, but vaccinated by early February. The hospital numbers dipped. Prom, orchestra concerts and dance recitals descended from the very heavens. I took the kids to Mexico on their first international travel because I wasn’t going to let them down. I wasn’t going to let them experience more loss than they were already experiencing—not then, not ever, not even if there was no preventing it. Not after the covid loss.
Everyone talked about life getting back to a “new normal.” Compared to everyone else’s, our life was a newer “new normal”—the newest “new normal” . . . and, you know, these days it sometimes actually feels normal, which brings me to the subject of this post.
I’m a writer, born and bred. Yeah, it’s a brave new world for me and, yeah, maybe my writing will always be sidelined by my other pursuits, carefully self-selected or otherwise.
I have a manuscript I was ready to release via a party that I was ready to plan when the world shut down in March 2020. Now it’s September 2021, and I still have a manuscript ready to release and still have dreams of a party I’m ready to plan.
Maybe you don’t know this, but there are ways to make money as an author. Really. I have friends. I’ll introduce you.
Authors don’t make money releasing work sporadically with parties. They understand book-distribution algorithms. They follow social media trends. They work every day at business and art. I may never have that life.
So what? I like writing. I like my other pursuits, too—the carefully self-selected ones and the surprise ones. I’m lucky that way.
Call it my style.
But I’m nothing if not fixated on dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Tell me this. Have I given this new stage my best if I’m not drenching it with the things I love? I don’t think so either.
So I am releasing that manuscript and having that party.
You are cordially invited. We’ll have popcorn and cotton candy, an art contest, and door prizes for kids and teens.
