Breaking Through

So, a funny thing happened. One day we were in the thick of the tangle, lying on the train tracks getting run over by runaway trains, and the next day we broke through. 

The past three weeks haven’t been pretty. I’ve been avoiding my magazine work, feeling guilty, berating myself for being a slacker—the usual cycle of procrastination and self-loathing, with a lot of subliminal grieving thrown in for bad measure. Two-year-old P., meanwhile, has been hitting and smacking, refusing to nap at school, testing her limits, and pretty much driving me up a wall. Resistance is contagious. 

I finally got so tired of being so gripped, I knew I had to do something. I announced to Steve and this blog that I would submit three queries before the month is out—a paltry goal, but a goal nonetheless. I’d no sooner fired off my first pitch than I got an email from a different editor asking if I had time for a short assignment. Voila, the power of intention! 

The next morning I woke up and knew what I had to do for P. Put the parenting books away, let go of my fears for a few hours, and simply hang out with her. At school—in her environment. It wasn’t a dramatic lightning bolt, but more like a steady thrum of intuition. In the 30 minutes I was there, I watched her slap blobs of paint onto an easel—“the Moon,” she announced; to me they looked like giant yellow slugs—and mold gobs of slimy pink substance called Gak. I also saw one boy hit another boy and a boy stick his hand in my face and point it like a gun, and I helped P. go to the bathroom on a miniature toilet and said hi to all her friends. She seemed happy and well adjusted—thrilled, really, that I was there—but I was despondent. How could I have dropped her off in this classroom twice a week for the last year without so much as a backward glance? Certainly I was a terrible mother, perhaps one of the world’s very worst. I went home and had a good long cry. Separation anxiety was finally catching up to me.

At some point during my pathetic wallowing, I got an email from my editor at a glossy New York travel magazine. The story I’d reported last spring while 7 months pregnant had been killed. “What can I say,” my editor wrote with what struck me as cavalier cruelty, “it’s subjective.”

But here’s the good news about bad news. Some days motherhood can be so crushing to your ego that when your editor writes to tell you the story you labored on for months and had a panic attack while on assignment in a tent in the wilderness with your big, fat pregnant belly and rewrote twice will never see the light of day, you’re already so pulverized you almost don’t care. What’s one more blow? Parenthood is great for perspective. 

That afternoon when I picked up her at school, P greeted me with a joyous screech: “I napped!” To celebrate, we scrapped plans to run a boring errand and went out for frozen yogurt instead. Back at home, she stopped hitting her sister and started listening more. Our agreeable girl was back. And by week’s end, two more editors had emailed with two more writing assignments. 

Sometimes you have to take things back to zero before you can break through. I used to have huge expectations for writing important stories and raking in good money. Now I’ll settle for smaller assignments and a fraction of what I used to make if it means being in the flow of creativity, and staying present to my girls and my life. I used to think I had to be a great mother all the time. Now I’m just happy that I’m not the worst mother most of the time. What can I say? We broke through. At least for now.