Sometimes it's okay to get the thing you've always really wanted

So I haven't been super consistent about the posting on my blog stuff like I'd planned to be when I started this a year ago.  And I haven't been super consistent about my writing in general for a while now.  I'm supposed to be spending the year working on being brave, but it's hard to be brave about your work when you aren't consistently writing anything to be brave about.  Now you have the backstory.

Here is the middle story - I belong to this great writer's group with people in my ward.  We've been meeting every month for over three years.  Everyone is writing different things and is at a different stage of their writing, but in the last six months or so we've become really productive at our meetings.  My favorite part is that we each get to set our own goal for the next month and then report back to see how we've accomplished it.  No one is judgy or pushy or naggy, afterall this is a Relief Society midweek activity so we all love each other, and I'm judgy/pushy/naggy enough for 12 people (just ask my husband, he'll tell you great stories).  So knowing that I have to report back on my goal is usually sufficiently motivating that I work toward it.  In the past I've set all types of small basically meaningless goals (IE try to schedule time to write, or try to schedule time to write, or try to schedule time to write.  Are you noticing a pattern here?)  But brave people don't set meaningless goals.  Brave people set goals that are achievable and even a little bit hard.  After all if you can't judge/nag yourself who will?  At our February meeting I set the goal to write more consistently, specifically to write 5-6 times per week and track it on a calendar.  What I found was this, I think about writing sometimes and I pickup my little pink notebook even less than I think about writing.  The days I do write are productive in spirit but produce small results.  Lesson learned: if I want to finish this endless 1st draft I'm working on, I'll need to work a little bit harder.  Now that I know I need to work a little harder than just thinking about the next scene while doing the dishes and singing along to Pandora I wanted to know why I was struggling to actually sit down and be productive. 

I emailed some of my friends in the group about my dilemma and what they said helped a great deal, but didn't completely solve my problem.  Then in talking to my mom about a completely different subject I had a huge epiphany.

New backstory - One of the 1st things you learn as a new mom bringing home a helpless baby from the hospital is that your needs are now secondary.  This is reinforced when you bring more babies home.  So that by the time you have 4 babies at home you quickly learn the luxury of an uninterrupted shower or being alone for more than 30 seconds in the bathroom. (again we have a theme here)  When having learned this lesson you decide to quit your job and try to live on one income and at the same time pay off a bunch of debt you learn all the things you can truly do without.  If your journey to manage children, money, and get out of debt takes a few years you might tend to end up stuck in a holding pattern of saying no to yourself.  I even wrote a song to help.  It is sung to the tune of the "Just keep swimming" song from Finding Nemo and it goes like this "We have no money.  We have no money"  Well, you get the picture.  It does help when you really don't want to cook, and it would be easier to have Dad pick up pizza on the way home.  But it can also put your head in a very unpleasant place.

New middle story - We are doing well with the awfully long pay off the debt plan.  In the last few weeks we've fixed the broken van for less than we thought and finally refi'd our mortgage so we have a little tiny bit more money each month.  So when the super pushy salesman can to my door (or followed me into my garage) on Monday I actually listened to what he had to say and four hours later we had a newly installed thermostat, smoke/CO2 detector, and alarm.  And I was happy.  But I wasn't just average Liz happy I was giddy dance around the room happy, over an alarm system.  Insert someone here saying "What the foo?  That is sooooo sad."

And finally the end . . . . .

The next day I called my mom, as I often do when things make me happy, or sad, or scared, or confused, or I just want to talk.  Seriously I have an awesome mom.  Oh wait I told you I this was the end.  Anyway, I was telling her all about my great new system and all the fancy things it does and you can program it from the internet so the next time we go on vacation I can turn the lights on and the air conditioning off and stuff.  And I told her how it might be silly but I'd always wanted one. Then she told me about a television commercial that gave me nightmares for weeks as a child that showed a burglar peeking in a window.  I remember this commercial.  It still sounds creepy.  And she says it was probably for an alarm system.  So yeah, I've wanted one really bad since I was like 4 or something.  And now I have one and it makes me happy.  Then the kicker, the moral of this very long and involved story (frankly I'm a little surprised you're still reading this) she says "Sometimes it's okay to get the thing you've always really wanted."  Or something profoundly similar.  And I thought . . .

You know she's right.  Sometimes it is okay to get that thing you've always really wanted, or to do the thing you've always really wanted to.  I realized that it was okay to leave the dishes in the sink and go to the park and write in the sunshine while the kids play.  Or lock myself in my bedroom and not feel bad about missing family time.  Or generally be okay that the thing I most want to do right now is write a story.  So if you see me around and my nose is buried in a notebook please don't be offended if I don't start chatting right away.  I'm taking a few minutes to enjoy doing that thing I've always really wanted to do.