Today was my day off! I did not have to be up at the hour of “whatthefuckisthetime”, did not have to make the mad-dash out the door, did not have to mindlessly sort my letters, and did not have to walk 12-16 miles for my daily bread. As it’s a dream to finally finish the novel and send it off for editing/possible publication (and start work on the next one), you’d think I would have taken this opportunity to seclude myself at my desk and plunk away at the keyboard.
Alas, you’d be wrong.
The main reason I don’t use my day off to fully embrace my introversion and write for 8 hours is a reasonable one: I love my family and it kills me that I don’t get to see them that often. A couple weeks ago, my daughter, soon to be 4 years old, was up with me while I readied to head to the office.
“Will you be gone all day?” she asked. I was buttoning my shirt and looking for my satchel.
“I’ll be gone all day,” I said. “But I’ll be home in the evening, at least by dinner-time.”
This little girl stood by the door and gave me a blank stare. “I never see you,” she said. “I wish you were home.”
I’m not going to lie, people. Being told by your child that they miss you, and the reason that they miss you is because you’re gone for most of the day, between 8-12 hours, just fucking hurts. On top of that, when I get home, I’m too exhausted to really play or do anything except sit down and decompress. I’m on my feet all day for my bread, so I take full advantage of the couch when I get home. I have to wait until the late-night hours, when everyone is asleep and my mind is finally clear of the mail, for me to focus on the story. Until that moment, I try my best to be present around the family, which can get troublesome, as both kids are stubborn and don’t like being told things like “we don’t push” or “stop leaping off the couch into the pile of laundry” or, my favorite, “if you don’t stop running without looking, you’re going to hit a wall at full speed”.
But wait, that’s not the only reason I struggle to write.
One of the problems with being in a full-time job of old-school trappings is that it becomes a fight to be both an old-school husband and a modern day spouse. Yes, I work my long hours to provide for the family. But I also want/need to handle my share of the chores, and that has a higher priority than being useless in the house and smacking the keyboard with hopes of entertaining the masses. There’s dishes to do, animals to feed/care for, and the yard to maintain. If I was already a successful writer, and not gone for most of the day, I don’t think I’d notice these chores. They’d all be done before 10. But as I do work a ‘real job’, I have to have the mad-scramble of taking care of all of these things in the few hours I have between “I have clocked out!” and “I’m gonna pass out now!”, thanks to the sheer exhaustion of enduring the elements for the daily bread.
But wait, there’s STILL more.
This one is an honest trapping of the writer’s mind: it’s a bitch to want to write after work, and the day off is such a joy to have that I unknowingly embrace the entirety of a day off. I relax (as much as I’m capable of), I goof off, I play friggin’ video games. This is a discipline issue, but dammit man, I never get to do that and it’d drive me crazy to not.
I’m looking into a possible career change that wouldn’t take me away from home for so long. I’ll stay in the federal field if I can, as I’ve already invested almost 10 years into it. But I’m looking into something like programming or IT, so I’d be able to do more work remotely. That’d be something, right?
I did manage to get almost 800 words down today, in snippets throughout the day. I still need to attend to my lunches for the week, and then, then, I’m going to attempt to write more.
Cheers, folks.
Swift's Corner 