Greetings and thank you for stopping by!
Who am I? I am a novelist and 41-year-old woman with one biological child and who is thinking of adding another to our family.
Before I had children, I used to state that I thought of each book of mine as a child: something you gestate, nurture, then set free into the world. People told me that after I had a child of my own, I’d realize how that metaphor is totally bunkum, that a child can’t compare with some old novel.
Au contraire. The comparison with the wild, wicked, beautiful path to motherhood seems more and more apropos every day. Each book I work on has its own weird way of coming into being: sometimes the ending comes first, sometimes I write the whole thing through, sometimes it’s more impressionistic. Similarly, I am mother to 6-year-old J, the child I could have never imagined being the mother to in a million years (more later), and we are considering adding another child to the family, whether biologically or by adoption. We’ve had a few pregnancy “misses,” and the biological clock is now ticking very loudly, to the point where when we begin trying to conceive, with each twinge I’ll probably be wondering, “Is it pregnancy, or peri-menopause?”
When writing a novel, I also somehow always know it’s going to get done. My last novel took me 7 long years, but I always knew it would get done. Similarly, I know our family-making is going to be completed as well, we just don’t know the how and when of it. But again, to keep extending the novel-writing metaphor, some things are out of our control, you gotta let the universe do its work, you’d might as well enjoy the mystery…
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