This weekend I took DQ with me to the salon where we both could get our last haircut before the wedding. I love my new hairdresser. She remembers details told to her at previous appointments – like the fact the DQ has a new baby brother on her dad’s side and that she was preparing for her school promotion at the last haircut. So I wasn’t surprised when she asked about the wedding.
“Are you nervous?” she asked. I’ve been asked this question so many times by everyone I meet these days. It’s one of the first things they ask. And I always say no because I’m not. We’ve got a really good handle on everything, Mr. W has been an amazing partner in planning, and it’s great to see the finish line at the end of the tunnel. So when she asked me if I was nervous, it was only natural to say no.
And then the strangest thing happened. I got really hot and uncomfortable. The room began closing on me. There wasn’t enough air to breathe. And I couldn’t decide if I needed to go to the bathroom or throw up.
I told Mr. W the next day on our way to church that if anyone actually did ask me if I was nervous, I really would throw up. It was suddenly occurring to me that we may have finished all the big stuff, but there were still a million tiny things that needed finalization before I could cross them off my list. I spent the weekend tackling all those tiny details in A.D.D. fashion – flitting from item to item so that everything I needed to do was started, but nothing could be considered done. A new day brings on new tasks, and those old tasks are still hanging in the wings wondering when I’m going to finish them up. Not really sure, I keep telling them. Meanwhile, they keep hanging around adding more for me to do every time I check in.
In the meantime, Taz hands me a piece of paper over the weekend that listed three different things he failed to turn in as homework to his teacher. All last week I painstakingly went over every single bit of his homework every single day. I checked it against what he had written down that needed to be done, and then check each piece to make sure it was done correctly. Friday morning I felt confident that the kid had gotten through a week of successful organization and being responsible. Sunday night, I was informed that this was hardly the case. I am convinced that his videogames are the root of the problem, and have already taken them away. The kid is unmotivated, lazy, and is quickly losing all his socializing skills. My father had to reprimand him earlier on Sunday due to his inability to actually acknowledge that his grandparents were even there, and I felt like the biggest failure in the world as a mother because my kid has little interest in anything that doesn’t require staring at a screen for hours on end. Seeing that his school work is suffering only adds to my feelings of failure.
This morning I sat down with my novel I’ve been writing – the one that practically wrote itself a mere couple of weeks ago, and now can barely get through a sentence at a time. Over the weekend I blatantly ignored it. This morning I typed in 200 words. The last time I touched it was 150. My goal had been to get to 30,000 words by the wedding. I’m at 27,000. And it’s an effort to get my characters to do much else than observe everything around them and feel sorry for themselves. I’m frozen in writer’s block as I try to get them to move forward when they keep fighting me in the direction I’m leading them. I lament the fact that I didn’t choose a certain path several chapters earlier, wondering if I should restart at 10,000 words, and sure that any future reader is going to see through my lack of writing talent and throw the book away before they finish it.
All this, and it’s not even published.
So I think I’m going to set the book down early, picking it up again when I’m not so stressed and writing crap just to give myself a daily word count. This decision scares me to death because a) I’m afraid that someone, anyone, will write a book before I finish this one. This is seriously a fear of mine. And B) I run the risk of losing motivation and the story line I’m living in. But truthfully, I’ve been losing it already while I write it half-assed.
Even at work it takes everything I have to keep from getting distracted, and everything I’m doing takes three times as long.
I’m trying not to wish this wedding to pass quickly. I really am not. But I can’t help but feel that I will have a better handle on life once this really huge thing that requires all my attention is finally behind me.
At any rate, here’s to 19 more days of trying not to throw up every time I think too hard about the wedding, hoping it all goes fine, wishing it would hurry up and get here, and trying not to wish it here too fast lest it is over before I know it.
19 more days. Wow.
Wine Country Mom 
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