These Five Years: Part Three

How a pandemic, pastries, and partnership helped shape the second draft.

Thank you for reading this third installment of my on-going series chronicling the five years I’ve been writing fiction. If you’re just joining, here are some quick links to get you caught up:

These Five Years: Part One

These Five Years: Part Two

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We’d packed pens and nature journals and picked up a late lunch, shadows stretching far across the winding roads leading to the park. Once there, the kids ate and I read. Before long, they were off to play. Soon, the sun began setting on the shortest day of the longest year.

The trees were bare: their branches broken to build a fort — dried pine needles, dead vines, and brush piled across their frame. I’ll never forget the kids’ beaming smiles tucked inside that nature tent. These creators, these makers, they’d hunted and foraged and built — of the resources offered to them from the earth and their imaginative minds — a shelter.

For nearly ten months, I’d been trying to do the same.

One year and a day to the anniversary of my diagnosis, an automated call informed me and every other county school parent that the kids would be let out early for the day, the rest of the week, the next week, the month, the rest of the school year. All those calls and emails, each one bringing more questions than answers.

In that initial blaze of uncertainty — spring break spent wringing our hands at home — Cliff sent me to a hotel for the weekend to work on my book. We had an inkling that the momentum I’d been gaining with this second draft was about to come to a screeching halt, though neither of us knew exactly how true that would be.

It was the last time I’d touch my manuscript for almost ten months.

I felt like a postpartum mother, again. All that buzzing brain energy diverted to the care and keeping of the fragile, needy humans who were entirely under my care. The world around them, as they knew it, was upside down. Wasn’t it my job to keep things as normal as possible?

The calendar was wiped of all activity, and not a single one of us could make sense of it, though we tried. We practiced math facts and sight words and took free online drawing classes. We spent endless hours outside. We watched movies, played games, and baked loaf after loaf of banana bread. It was like summer had come early, but there was a deep part of me in winter.

Again, I could not read books or write. I could not imagine a world beside the one I saw crumbling outside my proverbial windows. My spare attention was given to keeping a pulse on current events, my thumb aching from hours spent scrolling the internet for evidence that everyone else was going through it, too.

The school year finally bled into summer and still the questions raged. By late July, we had decisions to make. The only one that brought any peace was paired with a massive shift in my paradigm. Though I’d always said “never,” we were going to homeschool. This was our for now.

My reflections on homeschooling are best saved for another time. It’s nothing like I thought it would be, and everything we’ve needed, even when it’s been hard.

My own creativity was growing in new ways while teaching that fall, eventually thawing my inner winter. I was playing the piano. I was learning French. I was drawing and painting, again. I was doing my best to model the love of learning that had always been part of me.

In the new year, I finally signed up for one of Molly J. Wilk’s virtual classes on making macarons. I enjoyed the experience so much, I began making French patisserie every month, and it was spring — inside and out.

Taking classes with Molly makes the most impossible things feel within reach.

I started to imagine that I could keep doing this school thing and start writing again. I even practiced planning our days for the fall semester. We’d take it a year at a time, but in a way that enabled me to carve out time for my work. Work that was now slowly resuming in unbothered chunks of time here and there, thanks to Cliff. He’d take the kids out for errands, for the day, or to visit his family for the weekend, leaving me to think in silence in a space usually filled with chaos and clutter. I never asked; he simply offered. With his help, I was coming back to the page.

In late July, with Cliff and the kids away, I worked and made croissants from scratch while a good friend in LA did the same. I finished the second draft. We started our second school year at home, and I read my novel aloud on Voxer to another close friend, making line edits in the process. The same week the kids started an enrichment tutorial two days a week, the rest of my beta readers received their copies.

The work was out of my hands.

What if I was always so delighted by what I can’t control?

This was a season of learning from and leaning on others in ways I never had before.

No part of life was what we’d once known as “normal,” but we were finding our new — something all of us, me and the book, included — were becoming.

So many of our stories from this time are the same but different, and I recognize mine comes with great privilege, even in what was still difficult. If you have a moment, I’d love to hear how you and your work were shaped during this collective season of “giving up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.”

Stay tuned for These Five Years: Part Four, next week.

Until then,