10.02.2010

Confession Saturday -- Holed Up

I confess:

~ I love Saturdays because they are my "day off" from being a Mom Trying to Write, and my "day on" for being a Writer Raising Kids.  Usually, I am by now holed up in one of the study carrels at the library, but today a headache keeps me home and I am holed up with a card table and a cup of tea in my bedroom.  Husband and the three lovelies are Elsewhere.

~I require things to be just-so before I can settle into writing.  Therefore, I confess, I had to move all the piles of clean-but-not-put-away laundry out into the hallway before I sat down to write.  Did you know piles of clean laundry can actually sneer?

~I confess, I just got up to see if my bedroom door is closed.  It is.

~I confess, I always feel like I should apologize when I write about my illness, as I did yesterday.  I feel compelled to say this:  I would choose my life, including my chronic illness, over a million other fates.  I feel compelled to say:  I am one of the luckiest people on the planet.  Amen.

~I am taking a class in memoir at the friendly neighborhood literary center.  I confess, I have no desire to write two journal pages a day about my nose, as the instructor has asked us to do.  I confess, I will only do it because I have learned over and over again that Just Writing (even about your nose) can get you places you never thought you'd go in your writing.

~I confess, I feel sad about the world this week.  Sad about a world in which someone can be humiliated and bullied with devices, and for all the world to see.  Sad about a world in which one young man kills another young man over a stolen cell phone because "it had to be done."  Sad when the cell phone is found on the floor a few hours later, never stolen at all.  Sad about a world in which girls attending school in Afghanistan are gassed, probably because they are girls.  Attending school.  Sad about my church, which sometimes seems bent on exclusion and intolerance.  Sad about all the hungry people, and many, many other things.  I confess, I don't know whether to dwell in the sadness or hide from the news.

Sigh.
I think I'll go write about my nose now.

4 comments:

CitricSugar said...

One should never apologize for writing. :-)

I found the world of news to be the world of 'olds' and 'whys' this weekend myself. But I wasn't assigned nose-writing. Was it Gogol that wrote an entire novel on that very subject?

Molly said...

Yes, Gogol! I think, though, that it was a short story or novella, and not a novel. Still quite a feat, IMHO. Here is a link to the story for the curious: http://h42day.100megsfree5.com/texts/russia/gogol/nose.html

Ms. WK said...

I confess, you writing about your nose pulled me through the depression of the last paragraph.
I confess, I am choosing to hide from the news and go with the nose this week.

Molly said...

MsWK, I too am hiding from the news these days. It helps. I am also so over the nose.