Daily Splurge

I think the cat is pregnant. Yesterday I briefly considered using human pregnancy testing kit on her, but the logistics of getting a cat to pee on a stick swiftly put me off the idea. The vet will tell us on Wednesday if she’s with child, and if she’s not now, she never will be, if you get my drift.

My boys continue to win me over with their many charms. I’ve suddenly turned back into one of those mothers who have always baffled me until now: who actually LOVES just staying at home and being a Mum, and feels fulfilled by that. Madness, eh? Reading back through the archives of this blog around New Year’s Eve, I realised just how much time I’ve wasted in the past year on dithering and wittering angst-ridden nonsense about motherhood. Well, ok, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement and I suppose I’m just in a very ‘different place’ these days, but I think I’ve finally learned to just enjoy the present with my boys, and to appreciate the unhurried fun of just hanging out with them. I think a soon-to-be-4-year-old is also waaaay cooler and SO much easier to be with than the 3 year old version was. 3 was hard on him, 4 is looking pretty fabulous from here. Actually having the capacity to enjoy parenting all boils down to time management for me. My New Year’s resolutions are all about that; creating space for the things that energise me and help equip me for all the other stuff. I’ve realised that I cram too many conflicting priorities into whatever down-time I have; I’m trying to write a novel, get a business off the ground, keep in touch with friends and relax, all in the few hours of relative peace that descend at bedtime. Not anymore; I got tired of crawling into bed feeling far from relaxed, as if I’d given little pieces of my attention in all too many directions. Now I’m learning how to leave the kitchen in disarray in order to get 5 minutes with a hot cup of tea and my book. Or generally use my time more wisely so that there’s some semblance of order to the more creative spaces that I have. All I really lack now is a little hut at the bottom of the garden where I can head when my time is my own. I muttered something about that to Dada yesterday and he promptly opened his little black notepad pertaining to his dream of building us a house before we’re 40, and added HEIDI’S HUT in capital letters. Isn’t he a dude?

The resolution I’m most stoked about relates to my (mostly pathetic) efforts to write a novel. I’m giving myself 3 months to finish the first draft, 3 months to persuade people to read and critique it, 3 months to re-write it, and 3 months to flog it to the unsuspecting publishing world. Sounds easy, eh? Actually I’d somehow managed to tangle up the plot (what little of it there is) so desperately that I’d got completely stuck. Except thanks to my new approach to post-bedtime me-time, I finally disentangled it all last night and started to see the wood for the trees. I reckon I might be writing the final chapter in no more than a week or two. Most of what I read back over induces the biggest cringe I’ve ever known, but every now and then I come across a part that I can’t believe I wrote. It’s a surreal process. I suspect it’s really only fit for the delete button, if the truth be told, but I’ve invested so much time and soul into it that to have come this far only to give up seems inconceivable. I want to finish it as much so I don’t have to think about it anymore, as anything else. The point is, much as I hate what I’ve written I have really loved the writing process – it amazes me the way characters seem to spring out of the darkness, fully-formed, without any sense that they’ve come from me. Or the way an entirely unplanned, ill-considered sentence suddenly leads the way to a perfect plot-turn, yet if you’d asked me 5 seconds before where I was going with that I would have scratched my head and shrugged my shoulders – clueless. So while what I’ve got makes me turn fuschia with embarrassment, and the idea of it ever seeing daylight still makes me want to crawl into a hole, I’ll admit that the daily grind of stringing sentences together, waiting to see where they lead, is still the biggest thrill I known. I wonder if that makes me a geek? I think it probably does. And I’m cool with that.