Seeking Samadhi

So I'm still pregnant (as far as I know) and the symptoms are ramping up just the tiniest bit.  My boobs have been incredibly sore, though in a different way from when I was pregnant with Tai.  The tiredness is more like exhaustion.  I spent a couple of days last week just lounging in bed until almost 11, and then went to bed by 10:30.  On Thursday I dozed off for a 45 minute nap in the afternoon - and I was all by myself!  I napped with Tai both days this weekend.  The nausea has been coming around a little more.  Not too horribly, yet, and not constant, but more frequent.  Especially if I get hungry.  And the eating thing is weird, too.  I feel starving, so I eat like usual, then I'm so stuffed I can barely stand it for a couple of hours - lather, rinse, repeat.  I am a little glad though, because I keep hoping that symptoms mean the pregnancy is hanging in there.

I will be 8 weeks tomorrow, which is still so early.  

The symptom that's driving me the most nuts, though, is the anxiety.  I was hoping that it just happened last time because it was my first pregnancy and I found myself wondering whether I was really going to be a good mom.  Now I *am* a mom, so what's one more kid in the mix?  But my anxiety has been heightened, especially the last two weeks.  Part of that is this horrible stomach flu going around Tai's school. Kids were getting sent home like, three in a day.  I spent my days waiting for the phone call that would tell me Tai had thrown up and I needed to come get him.   I spent my evenings waiting for him to call me because he'd thrown up in bed.  I think I've worn myself out a little, with all of the waiting.  It sucks because it makes me short tempered, and wanting to hide out.  I have spent a lot of time reading during the past two weeks, and very little time writing.  I just can't concentrate on the writing.  When I'm reading, it takes me out of myself.  I'm pretty sure a lot of this anxiety is hormone related.  I know I had more of a hair-trigger with my anxiety during my first trimester last time, too.  Fortunately, the second and third trimesters were much easier.  Hopefully that will stay true this time, too.

It's funny - I went over the anxiety with Wendy during my therapy session last week, and at the end of the session I said, "I am just so *bored* of this anxiety.  It's boring, and it makes me boring."  Suddenly I thought, hey - if I'm bored by it... maybe I can just stop.  I'm not sure how, yet.  I'm working some relaxation techniques.  But maybe if I can hold to that thought - that this is *boring*, rehashing the same thing over and over and over and over, ad nauseum (ha ha) - then I can change my mind.

The novel-writing has trickled to a near-stop.   I was reading over what I've written so far, trying to figure out what I need to do to pull the pieces together before I move on to the next section... and I just got so fed up.  It wasn't bad writing.  I just bored myself.  I was like, 'yeah yeah, whatever.  No one cares.'  I'm hoping that this is anxiety related, too.  Because it's going to suck sitting with a novel that bores me.  I need to finish it, though... at least a draft.  I've been working on it so long and I want to know how it ends.  Right now, though?  Yawn.

I need a vacation.

Tonight was the last meeting of my novel-writing class. It was a long class - 6 months, though we only met once every four weeks. In between the meetings, we were to share 10 pages of our writing with an assigned partner, and update our teacher on how our week went, writing wise. It was a mixed bag - while I enjoyed the in-class discussions and writing, I was disappointed that my partner was mostly absent and dropped the class without even letting me know. Neither she nor I were very good at pushing each other - when we missed our weekly pages, neither of us gave the other one grief about it. In fact - for the first month or so, I sent her pages, but she didn't send any in return. I felt awkward about that - as though she was doing more work than I was and I found it harder to send pages. In fact, she only ever sent me two weekly updates.

I liked most of my classmates, though there were a couple of people who tended to hold forth in the discussions - giving long winded responses that seemed more about them than the writer. But that happens in just about every group, so I'm not too bothered about that. But going three weeks in between classes made it difficult for me to form any friendships, or writing relationships. Part of that is my social anxiety - I had to re-acclimate in every session... but I think part of it is we didn't get a chance to get momentum together. There is a possibility that I can take a class with the same teacher that meets every other week for 6 months.

The other good things about that class are - we would submit more writing, 25 pages three times for a total of 75 pages - and the critiques would be real critiques, rather than simply a discussion of what we liked.

I found that helpful - it's encouraging to have other people (especially other writers, and ones who don't know me) tell me that they enjoy what I'm working on. Every time I've had a class, I come home completely energized and feeling good about my novel and the possibilities. This is not a small thing, especially since I pretty much stopped writing for a couple of years after some especially harsh critiques from a college professor. Not something I need in the middle of a first draft. But I'm feeling thicker skinned than I was in college. (Thank god for that!) I also think my writing has improved. (Which, I should certainly hope!) And sometimes I feel like I need more depth to the critique than I was getting here.

That said - tonight's critique went *very* well. I was especially pleased because this submission was entirely new writing. There were a bunch of good comments about how my scenes felt realistic and the dialogue was working well. My teenagers felt like teenagers. The characters were realistic, even though I'm not a gay guy myself.

My favorite comments, though, were these:

The teacher said my writing was spare and understated, which works well with the passions I'm exploring. (I'm over the moon about that, because my harshest criticism from the college professor was that I overwrote *everything*. Maybe it was an adolescent thing. I hope so.)

She said I should trust my instincts, my sense of story and character and ability with language. She wrote that once I finished a draft "the writing itself, I don't think, will need much fixing - it will be only a matter of shaping the material". (I am just so pleased that an objective observer thinks I can write. Woo!)

At the end of the class, she talked about how excited she is to get to read everyone's stories, and that she hopes to be able to buy them all in bookstores. She talked about how she can't think of anything better than for everyone to be able to share their stories with the rest of the world. I found it so refreshing that she comes from a place of fullness - that one of us getting published doesn't take away from her, but instead adds to the world. I think this is why I trust her as a teacher. She sees all of us as story-tellers, in this together. Minor issues aside, she made this a good class.

I've been feeling unsettled lately.  Like I'm in the midst of a transition and unable to land on either side of things.  I'm not sure why, maybe because I am still trying to figure out who the heck I am other than Tai's Momma (and I'm still discovering exactly what that means).  Maybe because I don't have a job other than being homemaker and I'm not sure how I feel about that.  Maybe because I haven't been writing that much lately.  Maybe because I've been feeling the need for more friendship in my life.  More community too - for instance, I'd like to find a spiritual community. Probably it's a mix of all of this stuff and other stuff too.

I am taking steps to work on this, though.  I've signed up for a 'finishing your novel' course.  I'll be meeting with my classmates in person once a month, then in between I'll share progress with the teacher and one other classmate online.  The class will last for six months and I'm hoping that I make some decent progress with more structure in my writing life.  I'm also hoping that I do better about making writer-friends this time.

I've been trying to do better about getting together with women from my Mom's Group.  I'm hosting a second meeting tomorrow, hoping that with our toddlers confined to the house, we'll actually be able to talk rather than just race after the kidlets.  I'm trying to figure out how to invite one or two over with their husbands some evening, too.  It would be good for Tom and I to have couple-with-kids friends.  Especially since they would have kids Tai's age.

I'm reading a lot of books about Buddhism lately.  Meditation would probably do me some good, especially working with the transitory nature of life.  I think I can be a better Momma when I get more deeply in touch with this.  In fact, I bet it would be good for me, as well, since my anxiety tends to make me think that I'm going to be stuck in a shitty position forever.  That's not so much a help community-wise, though I'm considering going to the Zen Center here.  

I feel like I've been spending so much of my life waiting, waiting to know what the right thing to do is... waiting for someone to give me permission.  I don't want to waste my life waiting.  I want to live.  I just have to figure out what that means.
 

I should be sleeping.  Everyone else in the house is sleeping.  Tai, Tom, the beasts, the in-laws.  But my brain is just humming with all of this stuff I want to do.  Some of it is lame and boring (like clean out some of my clothes, getting rid of the stuff I never wear or stuff I've gotten too fat to wear) other stuff is more exciting (like the fifty gazillion journal entries that I want to be writing, and ideas for a new book, and ideas for a different novel and ideas for the novel I already have going).

Maybe it's the wind.

Tai is sleeping restlessly tonight, too.  He was quietly sawing logs next to me, when suddenly he shifted and mumbled, and then pointed across the room, still with his eyes closed.  He pointed several times.  I wonder what he was dreaming about.

I think I'm going to see how long I stay awake and work on my novel.  Since the in-laws are here, they're more than happy to take care of Tai in the bright early morning - I can sleep in!

Tom's still home from work this week - he gets the week between Christmas and New Year's off, which is pretty cool.  It means we get to spend more time together, and he gets to spend more time with Tai.  Which also means I get to spend more time by myself.  I've actually spent a couple of hours writing, one yesterday and one today.

Unfortunately I'm having a really difficult time getting into it.  I haven't been able to get into the novel at all.  Instead, I've been working on my fanfiction.  I feel like it's at least making me practice writing.  I have an outline that I'm working from.  I have most of it plotted out and I'm over a hundred pages in.  It is a novel - just not one that I'll be able to publish unless I do some substantial reworking.  Even then, I'm not sure.  But it's fun - I enjoy playing with my versions of Tolkien's characters.  Creating my own back-story, filling in blanks he left when he wrote the Ring Quest.  He wrote an adventure story, and allegory.  I am working on something more character driven.  It's nothing like what he wrote, but it's still his world.

Even so, I just can't seem to get into the groove.  My words all seem off.  Stilted, boring, flat.  Not even melodramatic - that would need some bit of drama.  Instead I feel like I'm just plodding along.  I'm hoping that if I keep chipping away at it day by day I'll eventually find my way again.  I'll be able to rewrite, or throw away or just leave the bits I don't like.  But in the back of my mind all I can hear is the voices saying that I'm not really a writer.  Or I'm a crappy writer.  That I wont be published, that all of my hoping and dreaming is for nothing.  It's hard not to listen to those voices.  To keep going in the face of them.  It's frightening to think that writing, which I need to do as much as I need to breathe, might not be something that I'm good at, no matter how hard I try.  And being a bad writer is almost worse than not writing at all.

In other news, we took down the Christmas tree and packed away all of the ornaments.  I'm glad to have it down - now I don't have to spend my days thwarting Tai's desire to munch on glass.  Though I'm sure he's going to find the house much less exciting now.  No angels to point at.  No lights or snowmen.  At least he has new toys to keep him busy.  He still loves his drum and his doggy race car and everything else.  And Daddy will be home for the rest of the week so Mommy can steal away to chip away at the block.

Today I met with Judy who is both a Labor and Delivery Nurse in San Francisco, and also a nurse midwife.  I wanted to talk to her a little bit about nursing and midwifery.  I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life and I'm torn.  I want to be a stay-at-home Mom, but I miss having the schedule of a job, and the bit of economic freedom that a salary provides.  I do love being with Tai, though.  Most of the time.  Sometimes the day feels long and I'm not sure whether I'm as present to him as I would be if I didn't feel like we're together all the time.

I'm also feeling really crappy about my writing lately.  I don't feel like I'm writing enough either  quantitatively or qualitatively.  It's nearly impossible to find the mental and physical space to be creative.  I could get up before Tai, but that would be sometime before 6am.  I could write after he falls asleep at night, but by the end of the day (even if it happens to come at 7pm) my brain is fried.  Or maybe I'm just coming up with new excuses.  

For someone who wants to be a writer, I have a lot of excuses.  If I don't have a day job, I can spend all of my day writing.  But without structure, I spend most of my time procrastinating.  I can't get into the mindset of my characters when I'm so focused on parenting.  But I haven't sat down to write the novel about a new mother, either.  I feel like my writing is crap.  I feel like I'm not a contributing member of society.  That I don't make money so I don't have value.  Just that piece causes friction in my relationship with Tom because I put myself in a one-down power position.

I was talking about the situation with Mom and she says she doesn't have any opinion either way... but that I should take the time to make a fully thought out decision.  I can't know the right answer to whether I should be a nurse or a writer (or something else entirely), but I shouldn't decide to give up my writing passion on a whim.  I need to understand what I'd be giving up as well as what I'd be gaining.  I'm not there yet.  Like many places in my life, I feel in the middle.  I'm not comfortable here - I tend to swing from one thing to something else.  Especially if I am not good at it right away.

My thoughts are a bit all over the place about this - but I'm working it in the back of my mind.  In the mean time, I'm also gathering information about nursing programs in San Francisco.  One day I'll know what I want to be when I grow up.

In other news, I am a tired girl today.  I woke up at 3am to nurse Tai last night and noticed that he felt really warm.  After he finished eating I got the thermometer to take his temperature - it was 100.2.  Poor little dude.  He didn't seem to be feeling too badly, and his temp wasn't too high so I didn't give him any meds.  I was awake for awhile because I was worried about him, and then he slept restlessly, which meant I did too.  Fortunately his temp went down to 99 by the time he woke up and has gone down even more all day.  He still seems whiney and more tired than usual, but mostly on the mend.  I think he's teething since he didn't have any other symptoms.

Since my last writing workshop ended, I've been feeling the need to find a new community of writers to keep some level of motivation going.  Then I came across brigits_flame.  In order to play, we need to write an introduction post.  So, then, this is me.  (Or the closest I can come in words at the moment.  I reserve the right to change.  In fact, I hope to.)

I'm a 32 year old woman.  I live in San Francisco. I'm married to my high-school boyfriend, Tom (we've been together approximately forever).  I have one son, Tai. He's just 4.5 months old and I am crazy in love with him.  Being a mother is a whole new world, and it's both made me understand things in a whole new way and also caused me to spout cliches as though they were deep life truths.   

Labels:  Bisexual.  Polyamorous.  Spiritual seeker.  Feminist.  Burned out therapist.  Novelist (in theory).   Fangirl (write it, read it, live it.  Yeah.)

I read like books are going out of style (which they very well may be, depending on who you ask). I read fiction, non-fiction, magazines... whatever happens to speak to my obsession at the moment.  I watch too much TV.  I enjoy some movies - at the moment, Stranger than Fiction is a new favorite. 

I tend toward anxiety.  I have a special talent for anticipatory anxiety.  But when push comes to shove, I do what needs to be done.

I also tend toward shyness, but I love deeply and long.  I have few friends, but they are part of my family.

My wish for myself, and everyone else is to live life, no matter what.

Tonight was my first evening writing class.  It went from 7:00 until 9:30, which is the longest time I've been away from both Tom and Tai.  I was both weird and a bit... pleasant.  Sure, I was a little nervous both about starting a new class (meeting new people) and being away from Tai... Needless to say I had my phone on me and I checked it several times during the class just to make sure I had service and that I hadn't missed an important call or text.  Of course Dad and boy were just fine.  Tai was a bit fussy but he sucked down the bottle and fell asleep which made Tom a happy camper.  (I'll admit to a bit of pleasure at Tai's fussiness.  Now Tom knows how hard it is to do anything when takign care of the babe.)

I got to spend a couple of hours with a group of adults, talking about writing, thinking about writing, and even doing some writing.  It's going to be a good class, I think.  There are five of us (including me) - four women and one man.  Since it's such a small class we're going to get to share our writing a lot more often than planned.  This is going to be really good for me.  It's going to make me sit my butt down in a chair when Tai is sleeping or Tom is home and put pen to paper.  (Or fingers to keyboard, depending.)  My first day of sharing is next Sunday, which means I need new stuff by Thursday. 

One of the women seems a bit pretentious, but I'm trying to hold off on judgment.  The other two seem down to earth - and no one seems like they're going to be overly critical, including the teacher.  This is the first time I've had a male writing teacher since college and my painful experience with Professor Clayton.  I'm hoping that this helps me get past that experience.   One of my goals in this class is to make a writing friend or two.  Or, at the very least, decide whether or not I like this teacher - if I do I can take the class again.

I did write a bit tonight and I thought I'd share -