Now I have no excuses. My husband and three brilliant children gave me a Mac iBook for my birthday. That means I must write. Every day. Everywhere. Every little thing that pops into my brain. Okay, not everything.
My son told me that now, I can strap on my iPod, pack up my iBook, head to the coffee shop, and look just like a college kid. That’s sweet. But I think he’s overlooking a few other things, like a few gallons of botox, a breast lift, and some serious liposuction around the ab region, and I do mean region.
I am having a little bit of trouble with the new iBook keyboard and lack of a real mouse. Who knew a gal could get so used to having a mouse at the ready, but I feel like I’m physically-challenged using this finger thing. And every time I try to delete my klutzy errors, I hit the +/= key and end up with equal signs smattered throughout my writing == or wrutung, as I just wrote. So, now I can find a quiet spot, within wireless reach, and jot down my thoughts.
Of course, that’s been possible for generations. I mean, Jane Austen seemed to find a place to call her own and string together a few memorable moments. But, I haven’t been able to write more than a grocery list, things to pack, or maybe one really big idea on real paper for at least a decade.
If you’re trying to do the math that was when I was thirty-eight—I’m forty-eight now, which actually seems young to my fifty and older friends. I’ve found the best way to feel young is to have older friends.
Anyway, back to the writing. It’s not that I don’t have terrific material. As I said, I have three brilliant children. All three teenagers. Two are identical male twins, in their senior year of high school. For the majority of writing parents, that alone is enough to guarantee a book publishing contract. My daughter is fourteen and happy. I’ve found a lot of parents don’t want to hear that. Fourteen, female and happy just seems unreasonable to some. My husband is a successful voice actor who also does live and on-camera work, which clearly makes his work more important than mine. I work part-time at a neighborhood toy and science store.
Back in the day, before kids, I was a creative director at an ad agency. I had a secretary. But that was then, and this is now. I’m the youngest of four, my father was a Southern Baptist minister. My mother was unable to attend my wedding because she was dying in a hospital 100 miles away. That was almost twenty five years ago and yet, I feel the need to mention it out loud, really loud—in a screaming sort of way.
My father moved to my neighborhood just a few short months ago. He’s clinically depressed and suffers from serious OCD. Not the clean freak, count everything and turn the light switch on and off kind, but the self-absorbed I can’t function outside in the real world because the temperature and humidity are never perfect, my shirt is too itchy, and those pollens and perfumes are irritating my nose kind.
Okay, so I have plenty of material. The thing I don’t have is time. But then who does, damnit. Yet, my husband and three brilliant children gave me this iBook. Now I can sit at my computer at my dining room table, while my husband Michael sits at his computer in his isolated, quiet, more important than mine home office—pretending to work but actually playing chess with his best friend in Berkeley—while the kids fight over the household computer and look longingly at me. And because I am who I am, I already gave in and let my son David use MY iBook . He was diligently using my dashboard dictionary to look up vocabulary words for his IB English class, for a while...then I found him face down in his Facebook and now I’m back.
