Pasta Salad and The Muse

I just finished making a pasta salad. If that were my only accomplishment today, that would be fine with Paul. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many times I stare into the diamond chips on my wedding band as if gleaning insight from a crystal ball, I cannot wrap my head around that fact.

My job is to run a household. All I have to do is get out of bed, make sure things don’t explode (which does happen sometimes—slippery bottles of Low-sodium V8 juice and falling glass mixing bowls, for example—and then my job is to clean up the explosion), buy groceries at the farmer’s market, make food, deal with laundry/dry cleaning, keep dustbunnies out of the crevices of the apartment and mold from growing in the toilet. There are other “responsibilities,” of course, but I don’t need to go into those here. And besides, I don’t consider them responsibilities so much as sublime gifts from God. (Yeah, I’m talking about sex.)

But wait! Is that all? Really? All I have to do is keep things running smoothly on the homefront? Can someone please point to the day on the calendar when my husband will wake up and look at me and become terminally bored with this automaton of a creature he seems to have found himself married to? Seriously. I want to buy a pretty new frock for the occasion. And book a therapist.

What I’m getting at is this: I am a vital, creative woman with a brain that works pretty well. I’m no logician (ask my first husband), and my eyes do tend to glaze over when the rules of some professional sports are explained to me. I’m sorry about that. I do wish I were smarter about a lot of things. I’m working on it. Meanwhile, I do have a writer’s soul that needs nurturing and exercising. I like to chew on things, wrassle with them in my journals and notebooks, grapple with life dilemmas and find keys to unlock the bliss in others. It’s what I do.

If I cease to do that, a light goes out in me. I feel it. I sleepwalk through my day or quite literally “nap” until 2pm, funked out in some low-grade depression I cannot shake. What to do? Make a casserole. (At least I’m creating something.)

Now, it should be noted that Paul does not expect me to abandon my work as a writer. In fact, he’s been more than supportive in all ways. I gave him the test: “What if you come home and there’s no dinner made because I’m caught up in writing TGAN*?” His response? “I know how to cook, too, you know.”

So, there is no outside pressure for me to stop being who I am. Then what’s the conflict? I’ll tell you: It’s me. The thing of it is, I like running a household. I’m good at it. Besides, it’s so easy to get caught up in the traditional role of wife (even though it is a role I’ve eschewed for decades, and one that even landed me in Jungian therapy to squeeze the dankness out of that aspect of my Shadow).

The problem is now that I get to play house, I can ignore my duties as a creator. The really hard work is not mopping floors or bleaching bath grouting. It’s facing the psychic abyss, diving into it, and retrieving nuggets of wisdom that I’ll melt down and craft into books and articles and poems and scripts that will help bring us all a little closer to ourselves and each other.

I’m vowing now to take my work and myself more seriously. Or, what I mean is, give it more respect. Sure, I’ll pick up Paul’s work shirts from the cleaners. But I’ll probably be making mental rewrites of my latest whatever-it-is while I do it. Such is life.


*The Great American Novel