Quiet Times

My mother has been here in Laos for two weeks now helping out with Dominic and saving my sanity (or, at the very least, forestalling a complete breakdown). With Mike still out of action as far as lifting goes, it’s been a great luxury to have someone else around all day who can change a diaper, chase Dominic up the stairs, or put him down for a nap. 

Mike’s doing better, but it’s turning out to be a long, slow recovery. Much longer and slower than either of us had expected. He’s still battling significant pain but not, thankfully, the same type of nerve pain that was plaguing him before the surgery.

Dominic is probably the busiest being in the house. In the last couple of week’s he’s learned to walk, dance, point up whenever he hears the sound of a plane, push all our heavy wooden furniture around, pull the handle on our water cooler and douse himself with ice-cold water, and (finally) go to sleep without being held and sung. Thank you, Nana, for cot-breaking our child. Mind you, someone still needs to sit there while he’s going to sleep and he’s not usually staying in his cot all night, but it’s a big step forward. Oh, and he turned one the day after we returned to Laos. He likes chocolate.

I half thought that I’d use any extra time that came my way while Mum was here to write. That’s what I’m used to doing with my extra time, but it isn’t panning out that way.

This is partly because I’ve taken on some consulting projects for the first time since Dominic’s birth, so I’m back in the world of consult calls and deadlines. But the other, stranger part of it is that I just don’t want to write.

I’m not one of these people who has a dozen stories brewing away at any given moment. I’m more someone who collects fragments of life like you might pick up sea glass on a beach. I carry all of these shiny moments around with me – fingering them, sifting them around, glancing down as they catch the light.

Then a jagged green piece I’ve just collected might nuzzle up next to a burnished ochre round I picked up months ago – a sand-smoothed stone that had tumbled around the ocean floor for decades. I like the way they look lying together – the contrast of it all, the new pattern that has suddenly been revealed in my hand and in my life. Then I write about it.  

Right now, though, it’s not working like that.

Some the pieces I’ve found myself carrying along and pondering most often lately are not really my stones or my stories, and I have to tuck them away and hold them close. Sometimes I’m just too tired to even pick up these small bright pebbles that litter my path. But mostly it seems that they’re slipping straight through my fingers. I touch them for an instant, then they disappear back into the froth and eddy swirling across the sand. Gone. 

So I wanted to let you know why things are a bit quiet around here at the moment. I’m quiet because I don’t feel like I have much to say. It is, it seems, a season of feeling like I have empty hands and an empty head – at least as far as writing goes.

In other ways, of course, my hands are full full full. And perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be.

When was your last quiet season?