Like No-one's Lookin'

Last Friday, I sent off the manuscript to my book. Well, returned it to the publisher after edits is more like it. That piece of work has taken years to produce and years to refine. Then another year to re-vision, take apart, put back together and send off with a wish. I’ve heard other writers refer to their books as their “children,” and indeed I’ve had this one longer than my living child, with whom it is now in competition for attention. When I began the revision process, Connor was just born, mewling and drinking in the sounds, visions and sustenance of his new life. Poor baby, he already had competition.

I found partway through the process that I was enjoying the work again. I thought I might never go back to that kind of academic pondering, testing and concluding. I thought that perhaps my time for such things and patience at building that work was past. I’m delighted to find that I’m wrong, that I still have a life of the mind that burns, not with a hard, gemlike flame, but the reassuring crackle of a hearth fire. This isn’t anymore where I have to prove myself a genius, but an intellect still on fire. Not the consuming sort, but the warming sort, that is sustaining and not scorching.

Not that it’s not still immense effort that the last push of effort required a great deal of fuel to consume. My grading slowed down to a two-week-turnaround, my drycleaning is still where I left it down the street, and I’ve been eating my lunches out of cans and off the salad bar at the school. For whole days I’ve fretted and twitched, while others I sat comatose with the effort. Nonetheless, the troublesome creature is off my desk.

But then I found my son underfoot, absent-mindedly picked him up and found that he’s turned into a very different creature. He’s about to walk, is fascinated with everything from the coasters off the living room table to the candy box I put on the end of my fingers a few days before Halloween. He claps his hands, giggles when you blow on his belly and bounces. A lot of babies love their bouncing chairs. This baby is a veritable bouncing machine. He bounces in his bouncy seat like there’s no tomorrow to bounce in. He bounces when he’s happy, when he wakes up from his nap, and to express pleasure. He bounces like no-one's looking, to quote a colleage. I am overwhelmed at the sheer force of life in his little legs and the little bright eyes bobbing over his pacifier as he bounces through the living room, standing first near a chair, then near the coffee table. His energy confounds me. Like his father, I’m feeling the effects of months of broken sleep and too many early wake-up calls. Like his father, I’m still entirely smitten with this little creature.

There are days, now that the manuscript is done and shipped off, where I put on sweats and just clamber about the living room with him while he bounces from one thing to another. The up and down, stretching of limbs and backbones, kneebones acclimating to his growing weight and the enthusiasm of his joy is good for these old bones.

And life goes on. Life without the manuscript is a hazy thing, unmarked by the passage of completed chapter revisions, the clear goals and easy markers of success. From here, life is marked in soups made and consumed, stacks of papers graded and replaced with others, dinners made, parties thrown and cleaned up after, conversations had and added to. And someday, maybe even someday soon, there will be a new project, with new markers of success and new challenges.

In the meantime, I think I’ll bounce a little. I think I'll bounce like no-one's looking.