"mommy, what are you doing?"

after reviewing the current critical discourse on virginia woolf & the body for my diss. chapter i decided it was time to transcribe my own writing notebook--the trusty ark journal i scribbled in as i reread the novels that launched me on the quest in the first place. and i must confess i'm exhausted, owen's napping and all advice suggests i should nap too--and so i thought i'd compromise with my notebook and a sticky pad while lying in bed, but as i started reading i realized this is it--the key to what this chapter needs to be about, the key to my own sanity and why it seemed at times i never wanted to come home (and if you're reading rose mari, thanks for sharing your space with me; and caroline, thanks for giving me this time):

tues 8 may 07

everytime i begin again with virginia it is a renewed love affair. the need to weep describes it best, but triumphantly so. this is the experience of 'a room of one's own'. this sitting at a small table with a lattice green tablecloth and a hlaf drunk cappuccino, a slice of carrot cake with a surprising bite of lemon zest. the hum of cafe talk. jazz. the old stuff of throaty inappropriate women--"tipsy" they might be called. a nd the overwhelming push that comes from stilled momentum seems more grassy knoll than boggy swamp. becasue she is beautiful, brilliant and so longingly real. "i want beautiful prose" she writes. her work list alone is an echo of desire and most-dos--evrything from bringing Dalloway 'to full talk' on january 1923 to tackling proust as a meanst to earn some pocket money. i am dizzied on where to begin-again- and so i go back to Dalloway. It seems the bridge anyhow between Jacob and the lighthouse , even between the voyage out the dalloways are on a ship bound for america and the waves. and i lok ahead at this introduction i see that "clearly the diaries and the letters can be read as a history of distraction" ah, back to reading...

and so this too is a kind of distraction, but i think as with virginia, a necessary one. for me it's the momentum of fingers (and newly cut nails--i hate nothing more than the click of fingernails on a keyboard) on keys, words dancing across the screen, and a reminder of this kind of love, this kind of work. and it's the core part of me that after all of this angst and trying to "figure IT out" the mothering, the moving, the writing that this is just all part of the process. this thinking through language and knowing that one of the most brilliant writers of our time too had bouts of panic and insecurity and struggled with words and yet kept writing because it was the only thing she knew to do. it is the same with carson mccullers, who finds in her bouts of illness (she suffered half a dozen strokes before thirty) that writing was the only thing that seemed to keep her alive. and it is this desire, this passion that i can't help but think is part of what makes me a good mother--that keeping this momentum is crucial not just for the life of my soul but for my role as a mother: owen is exponentially and i daresay exceptionally amazing and he's not just a smart, funny kid but a boy with an desire for knowledge--he looks at the world with creative, inquisitive energy and he ispires me to ask more, to see more colors. it seems only right that i should continue to do the same for him.

and the title of this is of course what owen asked bleary eyed from his nap as he stumbled into my office. and how wonderful to answer: writing, sweet boy.