Labors of Love

For most children, the beginning of summer represents a long season of possibilities. Early in June, my thirteen-year old daughter (who writes circles around me) tagged me to a NaNoWriMo Duel. In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Every year, in November, would-be novelists from all over the country challenge themselves to craft a novel in a month (50,000 words) and keep track of their progress on the NanoWriMo website.

I spend an awful lot of time worrying whether or not my daughter is "okey-dokey" with life. Her upbringing has never sailed an often navigated course. For those of you who don't know, Gina has two little brothers with autism. She's grown up inside of an often frenetic life that requires a whole lot of giving from her and precious little take. So I not only stop to relish the rare events she asks to "take" a little--I dive in head first.

That my daughter wanted to train for such a monumental event *with* me spoke volumes. She wanted to celebrate her artist within, and she wanted to do so with me. For once, here was a place where I could serve as my daughter's role model. So we spent our summer stealing bits of time a long walk to talk plot, or to sit by the pool allowing our imaginations to run wild. We'd invent obstacles and motivations, and develop dimensional characters designed only to delight ourselves.

On days when walking was not an option, and the boys needs would not allow us one moment to sneak away, we'd have a writing party after Gina's brothers had finally fallen asleep. Some days, we even employed instant messaging to share our thoughts from her upstairs lair to mine downstairs.

If I am to be truly honest, my effort to feed my daughter's muse was not only for her benefit. I needed this time, too. The often bitter advocacy wars related to autism can consume my every waking moment. As a writer, I needed to be challenged, because I'd allowed life obstacles to lock my daughter's favorite part of me away. Instead of working my way out of my quagmire, I stirred myself into a major writing funk. I poured out my writer's angst to anyone who would listen to me (the garden statuary, mostly). I bemoaned my utter inability to craft more than one page of coherent words in a week's time. If I pushed myself to create more, my cold-hearted bitch of a muse left me high and dry.

In short, I was one burned out super-mom. And my daughter saw right through me. I accepted her challenge so that both of us might learn that much of our life's course is based on the choices we make.

We chose November.

As the summer drew to a close, and NaNoWriMo loomed ahead of me, I chained the evil bitch muse to my bedpost and ball gagged her. ( Kinky, yes, but highly effective). Freed from obsessing about creative inspiration and large blocks of free time, I put myself on a word count "stamina building" program. I decided to I extend my writing by a half-page per day, even if that extra half-page meant laying words on paper in fifteen minute chunks. I did this by working on my blogs, writing meaningless dribble, or writing a story to read to my kids (one of them which I actually LOVE).

Yesterday I met my pre-Nanowrimo goal. I wrote twenty typed, double-spaced pages in one day, on the same story. I even solved a plot problem in the process. I laughed a lot. I had scads of fun. My daughter and I crawled into the center of my bed last night, and she hooted and howled as I read my work to her.

"Mommy, I want to be like you when I'm grown. You're so cool."

Here's to November, baby girl.