One word.

A paragraph.

Another sentence.

Ooh! He's asleep! Maybe I can write an actual entry!

           Er, no. He's awake.

Trying to write with a baby in the house is nothing short of Sisyphean. He seems to sense when I need a few minutes of uninterrupted thought - and interrupts it. By the time I return to the keyboard, most of the ideas that had previously been flitting about my brain have flitted right out through the nearest orifice. "Where was I? Oh, yes; time to start dinner..."

Journal entries are done when Eric's at home and can occupy Sam, but Sam only grudgingly accepts this. Not that he doesn't enjoy spending time with Eric. He merely knows that he has no other choice, and so he begins to loudly protest.

(Speaking of his protests, listening to him these days is really a trip. Up until just a few days ago, his "speech" was primarily limited to closed-throat noises: "Mmmm! Nnnnng, nnnng, mmmmmm!" As of late, he's opened up and really seems to be trying to communicate with all his available resources. Right now, he just said, "Nek! Oooooo-nek. Ah, ah, oooooo. Nebbbbbbble! La...")

There! You see? Problem number two: I can't seem to keep focused. Distractions abound; I've got a load in the washer that needs me to tend to it, Sam is squealing in a bizarre manner, and I think the guinea pigs may need water. Concentration? I've lost the art.

This bothers me for several reasons, but chief among them is this: I've got a, well, secret project. I haven't mentioned it here because I didn't want to risk anybody's expectations. A few months ago, I started writing a book. It's a memoir of our homebirth experience, and I'm really excited about it.

Go on, now. Ask me how much is finished.

Yeah. It's even worse than you're probably thinking.

Ugh! I don't like seeing projects go unfinished! I've got a partially completed afghan upstairs, semi-done Christmas presents for my family, and a load of wet laundry in the washer that is slowly beginning to drive me insane by its existence. I'm hopeless.

This is the point where Eric might remind me that I have, indeed, been keeping this journal for over two years. I might answer that I haven't been updating it as regularly as I'd like. Never satisfied, my inner taskmistress. If only she was as effective at motivation as she is at guilt.

When I was in fourth grade, our major assignment was to write a book. It was just supposed to be a little story, and we were supposed to write it on good paper, which was to be "bound" in cloth-covered cardboard to make a nice project to show the parents.

I've got that book on the bookshelf in my old room in my parents' house. If I remember correctly, there are two pages' worth of story completed; my maiden and her knight never made it out of the woods surrounding her cottage.

My teacher was not pleased. "Carrie, you're never going to actually finish this, are you?" I recall her saying in front of the whole class, eyebrows raised over the frames of her thick glasses. I blushed and shook my head; there was only a week left in school, and I couldn't see any way of finishing it. I didn't even know how it was going to end.

In college, my proposed senior project was to write a Latin Mass. I completed the first, third, and fifth parts before giving up in exhaustion and having my professor tell me that, really, I'd done more than enough. I wanted to go back and finish it later, but...

In grad school, my thesis was five movements long. I got to the last one - no, the middle section of the last one, and stopped. Not a note. Nothing would work. I wrote a few measures and erased. A few more measures and erased. It was the Spring semester of me senior year, and I didn't finish that section of the thesis until the following Spring semester. Why? I have no idea. All I know is, I ended up taking months away from the whole thing, feeling sick at the idea of even looking at it.

I can't finish things. Something's wrong with my head.

And now there's this book. I want to finish this. It's important to me. I'd prefer not to wait until Sam's grown and out of the house before sitting down to write about his birth. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that even if Sam weren't as insistent as he is now, there would still be this wall in my brain, keeping me from actually doing it.

I'm afraid.

November's WordGoddess collaboration:
...write about the stories you've always wanted to write.