I Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Birthin' No Babies!

December 28: Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.


*sigh*

Fine.

I want to finish the collection of short stories I've been working on for the better part of 18 months. At least, it was 18 months ago, mid-July 2009 that found me drenched in inspirational sweat.

Apparently, I'd found my muse.

But when the muse left in frustration, anger, guilt? it appeared the project had gone with him. Until I found it lurking in its hidey-hole among other, far more dust-covered ideas when another writer suggested communing around our various projects.

I blew off the dust and put pen to paper again then. Drawing out my "girls", beginning to let them sing...and scream...and cry out as they'd clamored to do when the idea of them dawned.

How long is the gestation period anyway? I feel as though I've been impregnated with all of them for far too long. Swollen, cranky, frightened of the pain of childbirth and of what I may create. Will she be pretty? Will she be rich?

The group fell by the wayside amidst travel schedules and hurt feelings.

And the girls...the girls drew no closer to crowning.

Until last week.

I stumbled across a fleeting glimpse of one of them a few days ago...here, in my infinitely wise space...trembling in her vulnerability. What a terrible mother I am! To have left her pleading - whimpering and afraid - while I did my thing...whatever that thing might have been. Procrastination. Avoidance. Drunkenness. Please don't anyone call the department of health and human welfare on my sorry ass.

So, it's time.

Time to do them all justice. Time to let them kick, punch, bite, and push against my insides until they come flooding out in a torrent of words to make their mark upon me and upon the world - regardless of whether that world is populated with more than just me before they are buried with their ancestors in a grave of cardboard and cobwebs or if their light will shine across the din of humanity.

Today I:
1) Acknowledge them.
2) Name them.
3) Consider their essence.
4) Give them power.
5) Give them sober sustenance.
6) Lay waste to their (my) secrets.
7) Give thanks to their father.
8) Forgive their mother.
9) Make plans for the nursery.
10) And steel myself for the final push of the afterbirth.