Where did the day go?

Yesterday I rose early and started my day on track. I checked my vegetable garden, hung my clothes out to dry and tried to set about my day of business until I was interrupted again and again. It's one of those frustrating days that just needs to be over. 

As I am trying to clap out a coherent article, I kept hearing my name called to point of madness. Why is it when I am craving for solitude I get distracted the most? And by the time I wanted to sit down and do my writing, it was time to make dinner. It's no wonder all good writers are men. They have the luxury of sitting for hours without distraction from a hungry spouse or children or a pestering elderly relative. Women don't have the luxury of the self-indulgent life of a writer unless she is a spinster. Most of the good women writers we know were spinsters, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot aka Mary Anne Evans was married but child free. One exception is Elizabeth Barrett Browning but she was ill and sickly and so she had the rare privilege of being tended to hand and foot by a doting husband thus without any domestic burdens. 

Every morning I wake up, it is as if I count down the time where I can be at my desk and writing. I wake up, brush my teeth, sometimes I have a quick shower then I go to the kitchen to make breakfast. But sometimes before I can start on breakfast, I might need to clear the dishwasher from the previous day and put the dishes left in the sink into dishwasher before I can even begin breakfast--and that could be a good 20 minutes. Oh, how I long for someone to just empty my dishwasher and put the dishes back where they belong. So, I make breakfast, eat breakfast--trying to eat fast, but not appear to be eating too fast, clear the dishes, put them in the dishwasher. And on a good day, that would be it, but usually there is something else waiting for me, laundry to fold, laundry to do or some other domestic chore that was assigned to me....by whom? Me? 

Sometimes I wonder if I have spoilt all the people in my life, if I have made their lives easy by making mine frustrating and difficult? Did I create the monster that is my life and now there's no way back.? Because if I change now, I would become the proverbial "bait and switch" wife and that's not who I am either.

Oh and the grand finale of yesterday, right after dinner and after I spent a few moments with my cat in the backyard and before I was to get started on my writing. There was a scheduled power outage due to equipment maintenance and the lights didn't come back on until 9 pm. It makes me wonder how human beings survived before the advent of electricity.  

But I did write my article, I finished it at 2 am. It wasn't any good and I probably won't ever publish it, but I wrote it. A writer needs discipline, they need to devote time to writing everyday, even if what is written is rubbish and can never be seen. Hemingway was the most disciplined writer, he always wrote standing up and he devoted a block of time everyday to write and even if he could only get out a few sentences--so be it. But that was Hemingway, who did what he pleased, when he pleased with no social repercussions--no, in fact he was celebrated for being just that, a bon vivant. As much as I wish that for myself, alas, it will never be, for the path I chose in life will not accommodate that.