Not dirty t-shirts

Since I started blogging again, my friends and family and Facebook pals have been enormously generous with their praise and kindness.  Finding my writing voice again has been immensely gratifying for me, especially since people are now continually giving voice to my dearest dream—“when are you going to write a book”?  The inverse of this, of course, is the question that would keep me up at night if I weren’t so exhausted by this family and my for-pay job all the time—“Why haven’t you written a book already?”

Today, I stumbled across a life size illustration of why I have never actually sat down and tried to write a book.  You may be expecting me to say something precious about how, as women and mothers, we tend to put everyone else’s needs first and the sweep of days flies by so quickly.  Or maybe you might expect me to quote one of my favorite novels when the heroine was asked why she hadn’t yet written her memoirs.  “Who has time to write memoirs?  I’m still living my memoirs.” (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood).  Or perhaps you would expect me to become all humble and awkward and explain how, in spite of my bluster and bravado, I’ve never quite had the confidence and courage to actually step out onto that limb.  Or maybe you’d think I would say something about how unqualified I am, having achieved a degree associated with this skill more than two decades ago and having since summarily stuffed it under a bushel basket and gone onto spend years of my life in the service of an entirely unrelated career.

While every one of these reasons is completely true, valid, and undeniable, the real reason I have never written a book is this:

You see the blue and orange striped t-shirt in the hamper at the top left of the photo?  I bought that t-shirt last Saturday when I had traveled to an out of town basketball practice for my middle daughter.  We shopped for a few hours after her practice and she convinced me to buy her this t-shirt. She wore it a few times last weekend, and on Thursday, I pulled it out of this same hamper and washed, folded, dried, and delivered it back to her.  She pulled it out of her drawer this morning and wore it to church.  She showered before church.  It is sixty degrees and rainy here today, and our church is clean and the parking lot is paved.  She ate one donut while wearing this shirt, and changed into her more customary hoodie and sweatpants immediately upon returning home.  She was not injured during Mass or in the process of getting there or home.  She did not undertake any auto maintenance, home repairs, or artistic endeavors between finishing church and going upstairs to change.  Consequently, there is no blood, sweat, mud, grease, paint, oil, dirt, condiment, saliva or any other stain-producing solid or liquid on this shirt.  What makes it dirty, you ask?  I have no idea.  The jeans on the floor next to the hamper suffered a similar fate.  (Note:  this daughter is a brilliant basketball player.  Her shooting percentage from the field is exceptional, especially at short range.  Irony duly noted).

Now obviously, I won’t be laundering this shirt again.  I will either yell at her to put it away at which point she will either completely ignore me or roll her eyes, roll it up in a ball, and shove it into her drawer (at which time it will wrinkle so completely that I will be forced to wash it again in order to manage the wrinkles).  Or, I will fold it myself and put it back in her drawer.  Either way, I will be dealing with nonsense that keeps me away from my keyboard and my own artistic endeavors.  (And OF COURSE I understand that I can make her handle all of this herself.  But anyone who thinks that will take LESS time than just doing it myself has never actually parented a teenager).

I would also like to point out the beautiful flowered bag on the floor at the bottom right of the photo.  This was also purchased last weekend.  It is a travel bag, very similar to one owned by her older sister and purchased for her to take to out of town tournaments for the basketball team she will compete with this fall and winter.  This is a name brand bag (note—my own suitcase that will travel to these same tournaments was purchased at Wal-Mart).  I have no idea what neuroses compels me to buy such luxuries for my children (working mom guilt?  Eagerness to get out of the mall and a lingering default shopping response of “Whatever, just get it and LET’S GO”) but it is not the kind of thing I would likely buy for myself, or the kind of thing I could probably afford on a starving artist’s salary.

Are any one of these explanations (excuses?) reason to postpone a lifelong dream year after year after endless year?  Of course not.  And yet... one by one they pile up into day after day of shopping and folding, traveling and coordinating, driving and drying.  My child is not any more or less self centered or sloppy than any other child (I vividly recall shoving clean and folded laundry under my own bed when I was a teenager, and then blithely pulling it out and throwing it back in the laundry for my own mother the next week.  I have the children I deserve, and I doubt this particular distasteful pattern makes me or my children all that unique).

When I started this post, I intended for it to be humorous and light, but, as is often the case in my writing (and life?) it has turned a bit wistful.  Thanks to a dear friend and an emerging recognition of the rapid passage of time, I’m seeking to reconcile what has been a lifetime of dealing with nonsense—much of it other people’s, plenty of it my own—to the detriment of personal goals.  It turns out, if I put my mind to it, I can deal with both the drudgery and the dreams in the course of any given day.  It just takes a little discipline and a little courage (you can’t imagine how many of these posts I’m afraid to publish).  Will it end with a book deal or anything worth reading at the end of the day?  It’s hard to say.  I have suddenly looked around and realized that I am  almost old.  If I’m not careful, while I will  have plenty to show for my adult life, I won’t likely realize my dearest and most unlikely dream.  It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world—I won’t shame the choices that younger Dawn made.  She brought me a life about which there is so much to be proud of and love.  It is no less a reflection of me than the writing I’ve tucked tidily into my figurative “someday” basket, buried beneath a bushel of actual baskets full of dirty (ish) laundry.

As I type, my oldest son is pacing the hallway waiting for me to wrap up so I can take him to pick up his car.  My husband just got an earful when he popped his head in to give me (another) assignment to complete on this rainy Sunday.  My “office” where I do much of my blogging is actually my (second) laundry room where the dryer hums rhythmically—ever more reliable than my fingers ever manage to type.  While I may wax dreamy and poetic in other posts about not allowing the drift of my life to sweep me to what appears to be a foregone conclusion, the grind of the daily swim against that current can get a bit daunting.  Were it not for the inherent “rightness” I feel in these moments—and the encouragement from so many and such surprising corners—I’m sure I’d surrender again to the drift of this more or less happy life.  Somehow, this time, I’ll figure out how to keep writing AND deal with the mountains of laundry and the carpools and the day job.  And that one stupid, not dirty t-shirt.