"The only thing harder than writing...

Is not writing," my husband reminds me. He sits beside me now. "Who said that? 'The only thing harder than writing is not writing?'" I ask him. "Me," he says.

Blogging is a way of both writing and not writing, at least for me. In other words, this blog is as much about what I am not writing as what I am writing. I am not writing, at least at this moment, a book I have been struggling with for years. The struggle has everything to do with the fact that the book is one I am not sure I want to write. Yet, I am sure that I need to write it. If I don't write it, the psychological consequences will be staggering. I must confess that the last part of that sentence I borrowed from my husband, as well. (It occurs to me now that maybe the fact that I feel the continous need to borrow words from my husband is at least part of my problem.)

"The way I write is the way I am," Joan Didion writes in the The Year of Magical Thinking. I love that sentiment. I would like to contrbute my own version of it, which is, The way I don't write is also the way I am. I don't write one thing by writing something else.

Back to this book--I think it is meaningful. I used to think it was meaningful. I have believed in its meaningfulness, even as recently as two months ago. I blame the kids. Now that I have children, it's simply harder to force myself into writing that I feel ambivalent about. My ambivalence: the book represents a part, a very hard part, of my past. The kids are the present and the future. The book represents a nightmare, I write with only a bit of exaggeration. The kids are, without exaggeration, a dream come true. How do you say goodbye, literally, every morning to the dream so that you can face down the nightmare? And the nightmare has to be wrestled anew every morning, it never seems to get easier.

I fantasize about life on the other side of this book. I imagine I will have the pleasure of that test taking dream I used to have when I was younger. You know the one. You toss and turn as you struggle unconsciously to get to the room for the exam which, you realize gradually, you will never reach in time. Then, you wake up and realize that, in real life, you actually graduated two months ago. The delight you inevitably feel upon waking from that dream is, I have found, incomparable. I want that dream. Sometimes I think I am dragging myself through this book in order to have that dream again.

The blog is different. The blog is part of the present, the deliciously child-filled present. It is truly a way of living life right now. It is, like writing that feels truest, a way of being. I wake up and immediately start thinking about what I will write next. I experience the day through the blog, and vice versa. And yet, I know this writing is mostly about the freedom it represents. Which is to say that if this blog was somehow mandatory, if it represented need instead of desire (that word again), I wouldn't be able to write it, either.