So it’s 5 a.m. and I got to bed quite late, but here I am, Butt In Chair (BIC, as Jane Yolen calls it), writing.

If this blog has a theme, it’s about how one gets writing done despite having a life. Yes, there is the day job, 75-100 students each quarter, advisees, meetings; and there are the 3 daughters and 1 husband and 1 mother (very much as time-consuming as the day job).

And then there’s little old me who watches television and plays Spider Solitaire and … well, you get the idea. The trick is, how do I get out of my own way and get some writing done, today — not after I retire from teaching and after my daughters grow up?

It’s been a lucky life. There was a time when I wanted to be married — wanted it with a pure and unmixed desire. And I met Bruce. Then I wanted children, and these girls showed up. I wanted to be a teacher, and life handed me that favor, too. But through it all — even before fourth grade (when I got those fabulous glasses) — I have wanted to be a writer. And here I am.

I think there’s a little more here that I’m supposed to notice. I didn’t meet Bruce until I was 27. It took us several years and tons of heartache (failed infertility treatment, one failed adoption) before the girls arrived. The start of my teaching career included teaching as an adjunct and never knowing from year to year (and, often, quarter to quarter) if I’d have work. Not to mention the years I put in before that as a waitress. My path has always been one of fits and starts…being a bit thick-headed about wanting what I wanted and never giving up on it has been the trait that got me through. Getting up every morning and scribbling in a notebook got me through.

It can get you through, too.

I opened an old notebook, thinking I must have a poem — one bad poem — that would illustrate this feeling. And I found this, from February.  I keep confronting the same blocks, and learning the same lessons over and over again. It’s a spiral.

THE TABLET OF THE HEART

Today my heart is a tabby cat,
and then a slice of lemon in a water glass.
My heart is a postcard of Notre Dame,
a few lines of a poem by Rumi
on my coffee mug.
Later, my heart is a child swinging
from her mother’s grocery cart.
At evening, I open my notebook to write
and nothing comes.
So I sit listening to the wind in the trees
outside my window
and I remember how God writes,
how effortlessly–a foil star on a calendar page,
dinner on the stove, a daughter
leaning in the doorway, her hand
on her skinny hip.
All of it written indelibly on the tablet of the heart.