One of my favorite things about pregnancy, birth, and postpartum is how universal an experience it is, and yet also how what works for one family may not work for another. Each journey is so unique, and yet we can all relate so much in spite of that! It reminds me a lot of how wedding planning goes. Suddenly you tell people you’re getting married and older couples will talk to you differently, almost like you’ve crossed a new threshold of life, and they’re eagerly beckoning you across. 

It's weird, nothing has made me feel more myself lately than pregnancy. I feel this renewed energy just before his birth to create something wonderful, to create many things. Perhaps it's because as I sit here, I'm in the very act of creation. I feel a pull to renew my website, to fill it with interests, pursuits, life lately. But I also want to write my novel again, to embroider beautiful tapestries, to decorate a tray of goods and set a nice table. To make, to make, to make.

To speak frankly, I’ve been wondering where to put this blog and website for many, many years. It’s preserved all over the entire enterprise. I say I want to be a writer, dabble back in it like I should, and then…nothing. I try not to beat myself up too much about this. Life has its ebbs and flows, and I know that when I am called back to writing my novels and stories the time will be right. I’ve felt exceedingly creative lately though, just not via words. In some ways it bothers me, but in others, I’m solely curious.

Sometimes I can feel something good and worth saying pressing upon my skull. It doesn’t require any effort, it’s just a passing thought admiring a little cut of life. And when it passes I feel a fog of calm set over me that can only be described as who I’m supposed to be.

I think that this blog is supposed to be about creative writing, and that’s what it was for. But life evolves and so does my corner of the internet, and now I just feel inclined to turn it into a diary or a log. I think that if I throw in enough adjectives and nice-sounding turns of phrases, I can get away with still calling it a creative writing blog, no? (I hope that if you’re coming here looking for my writing advice you still find what you seek! It’s here. Just not in this post.)

Do you ever read a book that then gets you so excited about the prospect of writing your own book one day that you have to set this bound object down, admire its spine, and curb the fluttering of your heart?

That’s how I feel whenever I read an epic piece of literature. And by that I mean, a large novel, one that requires absolute patience and perseverance. It doesn’t hook you in right away. In fact, it may move too slowly for your taste, and it does so on purpose. But then one day, you’re absorbed by the context only a massive book can grant.

My dermatologist has a chart I can access at any time that shows me all the moles I should keep an eye on. It’s a three-dimensional model of a generic white woman wearing a ponytail, completely naked, not unlike myself every time I visit my doctor. She didn’t tell me about this chart, it wouldn’t interest most, but at times it gives me comfort. At other times, it becomes a laundry list of anxiety.

You may have noticed mention of The Maximalist Essays in my portfolio. Or maybe you didn’t.

You see, I actually sort of snuck these essays into my portfolio as a work-in-progress for later this year, maybe next. But then something hit me, and I realized I needed to make like Charles Dickens and begin posting my work online, free-of-charge, completely opening myself up to the risk of plagiarism, if I wanted to make my work available to people, which is as it turns out, what matters to me most.

Why are women portrayed as insane so often in classic novels? Even those written by women, the women can often be hysterical and irrational, a vibrant, thrashing force to be reckoned with. Is it because this was how women behaved at the time, or was this just how people perceived them?

What’s been on top of my mind in conversation lately is the strangeness of memories. I know I’ll remember this past week because of the panic I felt driving in the snow and the comfort later of having my brother here with his dog—a change in scenery and daily life. But other parts of my life, especially the banal, I seem to have no power on what memories stay with me and what leave me.