Life (Instructions Not Included): Rule 1 - It is never too late to learn to be 'girlie'

Once upon a time, I was a wee little strawberry blonde child who loved girlie things.

Time passed and next thing I knew I was an over-worked, over-stressed mum and career woman who was lucky to have time to have a shower, let alone the energy necessary to be 'girlie'. So, as often happens for working mums, my own self-care fell to the side in favor of dealing with work and our darling geekling.

Big mistake.

Now, as a forty-'mumblesomething' I am trying to 'relearn' how to be 'feminine'. I can't decide if this is pathetic or a good thing.

Things I have discovered:

• I wish I had taken better care of my body in my 20s and 30s instead of buying into the 'immortality' viewpoint so common to that age group. BIG mistake -- by 35 my body was starting to fall apart. Now I've got no thyroid, a cardiac stent, and enough prescription meds (mostly for my heart) that I should rattle when I walk. While I am a believer in 'better living through chemistry and pharmaceuticals', I hate the side effects that come with the medicines that are keeping me alive. These days the bane of my existence is swollen legs, which cause pain and numbness, no matter what I do (not even the ridiculously expensive pneumatic leg pump can fix them most days).
• Pampering myself in the bath is as much fun as an adult as it was when I was a teen. Seriously, I don't know WHY I stopped indulging in wonderfully scented bath products and time spent on grooming, but I regret the years I have no missed out on.
• Layering bath gel, lotion and body spray is a WONDERFUL thing! I never understood the need to have multiple products with the same scent when I was a teen. As an adult I have developed allergies to most standard perfume additives and have lived a life devoid of perfume for the last five years. It has only been the last two weeks that I took a chance and tried some scented bath products and discovered that if I layer the bath gel, lotion and body spray, I get a light (but pleasing) scent that lasts all day long and doesn't set my allergies off. *happy squee*
• I feel so much better about myself when I wear the things that make me happy. This seems like a 'no-brainer' but I spent years trying to please others and as a result, I wasn't pleasing myself. So with the new job starting, I've been scouring end of summer sales to rework my wardrobe and it is making a remarkable difference to my mood (of course, that could be the Prozac).
• The right shade of red lipstick can make my whole day. Mind you, I am still trying to find the right shade of red for a pale redhead (flame ombre these days), with blue eyes and a raging bout of rosacea that nothing seems to relieve. That said, I think the search for the 'perfect' red lippy is the modern working mum's 'holy grail' quest.

At forty-mumble I am only starting to get the hang of this 'adulting' thing. I hope I start to handle it better before I turn 50!

Woes of the Working/Writing Mum...

My muse has been running at a furious pace for the last three weeks.

After the better part of 6 months without a single breath of life from my (fickle) muse, all of a sudden 'she' starts to talk to me again (yes, my muse is female...my writer's block is male, but that is a post for another day). Not only is she talking to me, but she is incredibly verbose and whispers to me at an almost frantic pace. In the past two weeks she has:

• Given me ideas for finishing my current work in progress (tentatively titled 'Uncaged' but I'm not overly happy with that title).
• Told me how to rework my finished novel to tighten some of the background 'mythos' holes.
• Helped me brainstorm plots/titles for 33 STEM-oriented, geeky romance novels (with a bit of help of my husband and best friend).

Then Monday during my morning commute I was thrilled when she finally whispered the name of the female protagonist in the novel I'm working on, and started showing me flashes of where she lives, how she met the male protagonist, etc.... two things I had been struggling to resolve for a two weeks.

After further examination, it seems that my muse is toying with my heart.

The new character, scenery and plot points aren't for the novel I've been working on, but for something entirely new!

Not that I'm complaining. I'm somewhat obsessed with the scenery at the moment and desperate to work on it, but there is one little problem -- I have to work for a living.

The more I want to focus on my writing, the more I find being a 'PayrollCaptive' to be a painful and infinitely frustrating experience. I have an hour-long commute each morning, during which I think about my plot holes, story outlines, characterization questions, and all manner of writing 'brainstorming'. By the time I get to work I am dying to dive in and write, especially since the morning is my best time for writing -- but I can't. As I pull into the parking lot each morning and make my way into the glass encased building, I realize that I am doomed to spend the next eight hours hunched in front of three computer monitors (not including my work laptop), rushing through the work of two people while my bosses demand I do the work of three people.

Then when my spirit is wrecked from the stress and my mind is turning to mush from crunching numbers and pounding out reports all day, I begin my drive home, once more dodging semi-trucks and crazies as I zoom down the interstate in my Beetle, hoping I am small enough to avoid any major collisions. The whole way home my thoughts are on what I want to write when I get there, frantically working to remember the scenery, dialogue and emotion of the scenes in my head.

Yet, when I arrive home there are other things that must be done before I can carve out 'writing time'...

• Dinner needs to be sorted out.
• Whoever doesn't handle dinner has to help the spawn with her homework.
• Then there is the nightly coin-toss to see who has to supervise the geekling through her nightly ablutions (where she tries to alternately sing every song from Moana or wet down every square inch of her bathroom).

By the time our darling child is tucked up in bed with her nightly story, all I want to do is collapse into my own bed in order to store up some energy to do it all over again the next day.

But...I can't. Now that the spawn is asleep, I need to spend some time with my husband and try to connect with him. 

So at the end of the day, when I am finally ensconsed on the couch with my feet tucked against hubby's side (because he will idly rub them if I keep them within his reach, and I'm no fool!), I have *maybe* an hour to myself to write -- unfortunately by that time of the day my brain is the consistency of pudding and I'm struggling just to keep my eyes open until 9pm.

Not a particularly good time to do anything that requires much in the way of brain-power or concentation, muchless creativity.

Something is going to have to give, but I'm not sure what. I know there are other working professionals/parents who manage to get their novels written, but I am struggling to see how. I cannot squeeze anymore hours into the day, and have yet to discover a 'time-turner'. 

Who am I kidding, it isn't a time-turner that I need, I need an 'energizer' that would allow me to function at full capacity on only two hours of sleep. THEN...maybe, I could do what I long to do and actually finish the stories that are trying to claw their way out of my imagination.

The Muse is on the Loose

Being a writer is both a blessing and a curse.

Having a way with words has allowed me to carve out a comfortable living as a communication consultant after spending 15 years as a university professor. Neither profession is what I wanted to do with my life,  but they pay the bills and all me to enjoy my creature comforts (like having a roof over my head and being able to afford the occasional vacation).

The curse is twofold. For the last two years work has chaotic (and thanks to the current government budget situation, will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). I regularly work 60-70 hour weeks which leaves little time for my 'fun' writing, and when I do manage to find a spare hour to devote to it, my brain is the consistency of warm tapioca. No real surprise here, but 'Tapioca-Brain' is not particularly conducive to writing anything coherent and frequently is accompanied by the ailment universally dreaded by writers for centuries -- writer's block.

Still, at other times, life is chaotic and work is a madhouse, but the novel ideas flow thick and fast. Sadly, this is usually just my muse teasing me. Apparently, my muse is a sadistic witch who likes torturing me with a bunch of ideas all at once, especially when I have no time to do more than scribble down the bare bones of a plot before I get pulled back into other 'responsibilities' that (unfortunately) take priority over writing.

Stupidly enough I spent two hours in an MRI machine this week, staring at the ugly ceiling (they took my glasses so I couldn't even count dots in the institutional grey ceiling tiles). While fighting to stay still, I laid there getting increasingly frustrated as my muse flung idea after idea into my head, when I was powerless to write them down or record them. Sure enough, the minute I got out of there and back to my phone so I could start recording the ideas they rushed out of my brain, like water pouring through a colander -- until only the tiniest detail remained.

If only the lottery commission would do the nice thing and pull our numbers for the next big pot so I could quit being a slave to the 'Capitalist Bitch' and devote all of my time to writing for a living.

It's a lovely dream.