I’m coated in to-do lists, buried beneath piles of papers to grade. There are dinosaur stickers on the inside of my shirt and someone else’s Band-Aid on the bottom of my shoe. I know better than to wear white, but jam stains just as well on blue. Between the ballet recitals and baseball games, it’s hard to see me.
But instead of disappearing into parent teacher conferences and playdates, I become something else. I become something else because I write that it’s different.
I write at 4 a.m. in the only hours I have to myself, when coffee drips through the filter in the quiet, still-dark morning.
Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, explains, “You must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so…a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. And first you may find that nothing’s happening there, but if you have a sacred place and use it, and take advantage of it, something will happen.”
In these early hours, in fiction, I am vivid. I leave my children, my partner, my responsibilities. I roam the earth, unbound.
At 6:40 a.m., when the fiction ends, I make pancakes. I lift eight pound weights for seven minutes as my coffee brews. I run the block twice with the dog because I don’t have time to run any further.
I take the kids to school. I sneak notes into lunch boxes. I watch their small bodies, big backpacks, and velcro sneakers enter wide double doors.
Then I teach. At the front of my classroom, I fight for original thought; we critically analyze, in story, the weight of historical and modern oppressions (and the beauty, despite it all). I guide young minds to know these stories. To feel these stories, skin and bones. Our understanding must grow for our discord to lessen.
In my bag, there are stacks of literary analysis essays to grade. Late into the night, I demand layers, evidence, with a red pen in hand. The 18th issue of our student lit magazine ships this weekend. Student novel submissions are due, and I judge them; they are all winning. I want to print them all, but I choose seven.
On weekends, I paint my nine-year-old daughter’s lips bright red. She makes me cry with the brave way she dances (with more power than I knew her small frame could hold). My son, he fights like a small lion through hoards on the soccer field until he is the only one left with the ball. At home, we turn the music up loud, paint pictures of sunrise and flowers. We settle Catan and bike to the park.
In the short moments between the kids’ bedtimes and my own unconsciousness, we connect. It sometimes feels impossible, contrived, to find even the tip of his deep mind, or my own. Where are you? Who am I? We find each other.
Grading pens stain my fingers, my pants are sticky with whatever I feed my kids for breakfast, and I am rushing from dance carpool drop off to soccer coaching to student lit mag meetings, and sometimes I can’t find myself.
Yet I am here.
Will you be ashamed of me if I don’t stay within the lines as I color? If I break beyond my stories, that flimsy threshold between fiction and who I am?
Because something strange happens, when you start writing freedom. The words seep into your soul. You become free, too.
