Patron Saint

Winter, 1990something

My boyfriend’s cousin is having brunch. Maybe it’s New Year’s day, or someone’s birthday.  I have met this cousin and his wife and their two young girls before, although I don’t know them well.  The husband and wife are writers.  Maybe he writes mysteries novels or screenplays.  I can’t remember.  No one seems to know what she (I’ll call her Carol) writes; she has been working on a book for as long as anyone can remember, but makes little progress. Everyone talks about the book the same way.   She’s writing a book, they say, and then there is a little shrug or an eye roll, and a knowing smile.  I get the idea that no one is expecting her to finish.

I don’t remember what my boyfriend’s cousin looked like, but I remember Carol.   She looked happy, and tired.  She looked older than me.  She looked like a mother.  She looked the way I look now.

On the way to the bathroom from the kitchen I walk past a pantry with floor to ceiling shelves filled with books and notebooks and a desk no wider than an ironing board covered with papers.  Carol’s office.  Carol’s desk.

When I come back from the bathroom everyone is in the living room, and little girls are dancing.  Carol is laughing, and dancing with them, and then she grabs the video camera off the dining room table and starts to film them.  I remember her smile from behind that camera, and the way that she was still dancing with them while she was filming.

I don’t remember anything else from that weekend in the city, or how many months it was until our last weekend in the city together, or exactly how many years it was before I saw Carol’s book on the front cover of the New York Times book review.

What I do remember is Carol’s face, and the way she talked about her daughters, and the way she didn’t talk about her book.  I remember her pantry office, and the stack of dishes in her sink.

I do not expect to write a book that makes the cover of the NYT book review or wins a Pulitzer (Carol’s book did), but I do expect to finish a book.   I don’t know how, or when.  I am tired; my desk is messy; my daughters are dancing in the living room and I am dancing with them.

I think of Carol all the time.  I can’t even begin to know what it really took for her to finish her book, what and who she had to sacrifice.  But what I can know is that she held her book and her daughters in her heart and her mind, and that gave them each what she had, when she could.  For now I make her the woman I need her to be, the woman who, like me, stoked the fire for her children while managing to keep an ember of work alive because she believed that someday both could throw their own heat.  For now I make her my Patron Saint of Writing Mothers, and I sanctify her pantry office and her narrow desk, her video camera and her bare feet, moving fast to keep up with her dancing children.