Love & Blunder

I have some friends who get together on Thursday mornings to work on each others’ gardens as a team. Our group consists of my old friend, Colleen, and two newer friends, Sara and Laurie. We have met since late spring, and I know for sure that my yard has been thankful for the attention. But more than just my yard has gotten the attention it needs, my creative brain has as well. These three women are all creative and hard working, great for bouncing around ideas, writing or otherwise. Today, for instance, we blueprinted the workings of how we could share a goat and chickens to graze our micro urban lawns.

When we get together we slather the kids in sun screen and turn them loose in the yard. Between us there are 9 kids, from 1 to 8 years in age. The older kids wrangle the younger kids or help pull weeds or complain that they are bored and they hate garden club and they want to go home. The younger kids walk under our feet and trip us or play unpredictably nicely or run off down the street preventing any real work from being done. All in all, it’s the exact right amount of chaos.

One day it rained when we had planned to weed my strawberry patch. I offered to make everyone lunch and mojitos and take the day off, but my team mates insisted on working on cleaning my kitchen– scrubbing the stove, cleaning the tops of the cabinets, washing the walls and organizing the pantry. I even felt energized enough to clean my oven after they left because we made so much progress. Since it went so well at my house we decided to continue through the school year, working on projects in our homes and shoveling driveways in the winter.

Getting this group started was a piece of cake. Sara just sent out a little facebook note and we picked a day and off we went. If you’re the kind of person who finds themselves just sitting there in the morning, clicking on the interwebs wishing something interesting would happen or that your house would magically get clean– start a group! Pick your people carefully, they should all be consistent and have the same general lifestyle so the work load ends up being even. But most importantly they should be people you already love, or people you really want to get to know better.

Garden club is just my most recent impromtu collective. I was in a mommy group when some moms I knew all had infants. Then I started a running club with a couple of moms to train for the akron marathon after that. I’ve been in a few crafting night clubs, as well as babysitting trade offs which have turned into planned weekly get togethers for just an hour or two to eat lunch and chat while we fold laundry or sweep. Not many of these groups have lasted for longer than a year, but some of them have been going on three years. All of the people I’ve met or gotten to know better have remained my friends even after the group ended.

I am rarely lonely.

About six months ago I asked a local writer acquaintance to meet me for coffee. I wanted to get to the bottom of a problem I have had for a few years. As many of you know, I’ve been writing a “book” off and on for quite a while. And I’ve “submitted” articles for publication to some local magazines. All of this has resulted in nada. I thought perhaps I was out of the loop on some publishers’ preference for submissions and so I was being overlooked for that reason alone. You know, like I was submitting my resume for an interview typed in Comic Sans.

We sat down together– my friend, my toddler, my toddler’s chocolate tort, and myself– and I tried to articulate my question. What I actually communicated was a more adult version of, “Nobody likes me. wah! They like you! How do I become likable like you?!” I explained everything I’ve tried and hoped for the golden nugget of wisdom that would get me published… And my friend replied, “It seems like you’re doing everything right. It’s hard to get published the first time.” Honesty is discouraging.

So, I stopped trying to submit things for publication for a while while I tried to figure out what I was trying to say anyways. And the more I tried to pin it down, the more limiting myself became suffocating. I want to say something about everything. I love many things, and I love them all the same! How can I position myself as a sewing writer in a sewing magazine or on a crafting blog when I am going to want to write something about the birth I attended last month? How can I write about my feminist views when I will turn around and want to write about my garden and girl scout troop too? I have subject ADHD, so I needed a different goal. I waited a little longer while I tried to come up with a new goal.

Then something great happened. I finally discovered what I wanted to do for a living and it wasn’t write for a magazine. I want to be a Lamaze teacher and doula so I could help women have the safe, secure and healthy birth they were made to have. I began working towards that end…. but just three months into training and a few measly blog posts about birth advocacy later and I wanted to write a post about the what it’s like to have a traveling husband….. That does not fit into the theme “to brave birth.” Again I was discouraged.

On Saturday we took a family trip to the Main Branch of the Library. I searched Google for “top books for women business owners” and in the article I clicked was listed Bird by Bird, the book on writing by Anne Lamott. I picked it up. In the chapter “Getting Started” the question I asked my writer friend was staring back at me…. How do I get published? What’s the trick? Am I missing something, do I need an agent or something? Some inroad to the club?

“The problem that comes up over and over again is these people want to be published. They kind of wasn’t to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them. There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.” -Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird.

I have had the wrong goal. I wanted to start a business of writing, without letting myself say all the things I really wanted to say. I have to just let myself write the things I have in my head. Blogs are nice because I can click “publish” and it’s published, so I’m going to cheat on that part and use this web domain I own to publish my voice. But I am going to work on changing from someone who kind of wants to write, to someone who writes. Even if no one is listening but me.

I started to make the coffee this morning while Rob is still getting himself out of bed after a trans-pacific flight home from Australia. This is an annual trip for us and we’re finally getting used to it. Anyway, I am trying to decide whether to make our normal aero-press coffee or the “flat white” coffee that Rob showed me after he got home yesterday.

The whole thing reminds me of the scene in Lost in Translation when Bill Murray is drunk in the tub and he calls his wife, “We should eat more like the people in Japan. I don’t want all that pasta.” Rob always comes home from the other side of the world with all these different ways to do things.

This is the first trip I’m aware of that Rob actually got to enjoy being in a big city. He wandered around Sydney and ate food and went to the beach (even though it was winter). This is also the first time we managed to have a ton of fun while he was out of town. We went to Ocean Isle with his parents and enjoyed being beach bums for a few days. I would love to share pictures from the trip, but my inlaws have them all.

Hopefully the fun we’re having now is investing in a future where I don’t have to overnight carpet samples passive-agressively to him while he drinks vodka in hotel bars and spends a pseudo-romantic weekend with someone half his age.

Somehow that’s still one of my favorite movies….