Kids (enter stage right, tearing books off shelf, shedding stuffed animals all over the place, hitting each other, crying and giggling all at once): “Rarrrr! Rarrrrrrrr! Wheeee! Hooo!!!! Catharina hit me! Tyndall put yogurt on my head! Whaaaaa! Please have candy? Please?”
Self: “No… No candy. Go play. Daddy’s trying to write. Now let’s see here… Then Esmond pulled forth the sacred chicken of Oom from his helm and… Tyndall! If you are going to sit on daddy, don’t wiggle so mu- Agh! Where did all this yogurt come from? Wife!”
Wife: “I’m feeding the baby and reading my book. Can you please deal with it, Darling, dear?”
Self (inside my head of course): “Why doesn’t she deal with all these kids? Why does she always dump them on me?” She only spends, like, every day wrangling them by herself every minute. “This is my writing time! My own! Mine! My preciouuuuusss….”
Kids: “Please have candy? Please? Please? You said yesterday…”
Self: “No I didn’t! Now what was that character’s name again…?”
Other kid: “Hold you! Hoooold you, daddy!”
Another kid: “Foo? Foo?”
Still another kid I didn’t even know we had: “Toys are boring. Play a game with us!”
You get the idea. I sometimes get a paragraph or two squeezed out before I shamefully lose my temper, blow up, and then pout like… Well, a toddler. Or just put it all down and go play a board game with the kids or swing em on the swing. And no writing gets done.
That is, of course, if it’s not at a late night writing session at work. Those nights I can generally get a page or two written before something comes in dying, with screaming owners… Who am I fooling? Usually two or three things come in dying, and my section dies with it. That’s why the whole second half of this book seems so choppy and sectioned that it might have been written by James T. Kirk.
And maybe that’s just the point… Maybe God intended this project all along to bring me (more than once) to the point of deciding whether to obsess about things or to obsess about my family. It’s really not hard to see which of those two I’d regret losing time with most when I look back on all this craziness.
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