My friends, Aimee and Lenna, are both making their own laundry detergent these days. I buy those little pods so I don’t even have to take time to measure. My friend, Jan, was inspired by Pinterest to make me this sweet brown paper package tied up with string and filled with a few of my favorite things. Just because. No occasion other than friendship.
I’ve never been on Pinterest, and I sent my children checks for their birthdays this year. I’m not even sure I included cards.
It isn’t that I don’t appreciate these kinds of things. I totally do. But, I’ve had to make some hard choices about time management in order to pursue this crazy idea that I could be a writer. (Okay. Deciding not to make my own laundry soap was not a hard choice. You go, girls.)
But deciding to stay home and write Saturday afternoon instead of going to a grandson’s ballgame an hour away? Yeah, hard choice. And the crazy thing is I’ve been making this choice since the 1980’s, and I don’t have a lot of literary accomplishments to show for it.
What I do have is a handmade card from my son. He was probably a second-grader at the time. And he made this little pop-up section in the middle with a woman sitting at a desk. He wrote, “Mom, I love you because you do all of your writing and still have time for us.”
Oh, man. I hope that was true. I hope it still is. I hope the people who matter the most know they are more important than the characters who populate my brain and sometimes make it to the page. And, most of all, I hope the whole thing pays off one of these days!!
(Just kidding about that last part. Mostly.)