Booked Up

One of my friends has a teen daughter with too many talents to enumerate. The daughter wanted to earn some money now that she's in high school, but she didn't yet have a driver's license. I wanted to help and had an idea: some day, it's possible I will want my Rooster to have a copy of my blog. I said to my friend, "Tell her to find a way to copy the first year of my posts into something tangible I can give Roo or Peaches one day, if I decide to, and I'll pay her."

Now, talented girls who act, write, dance, swim, excel in visual arts and earn top grades at competitive schools, while having lots of friends, don't have tons of free time. You might have noticed that I can go on and on in my blog. And as good as things like Blurb and Lulu have gotten, they haven't evolved yet as far as they probably will. So it takes a while; I practically forgot about the project.

But this week, my friend brought me... (drum roll please...) Rooster Calls, year one, the book.

Whoaaaahhhh.

On my bedside table, I have a HEFTY paperback. My young editor informs me it taxes and maxes Blurb's size limit, which I'm going to guess (since the pages aren't numbered) is in the neighborhood of 300 pages. That's weird. I don't know what it is I expected, or why I found this so shocking, but the weirdest thing is that it looks just like a book. It looks just like I wrote a book, and it's got my name on it and a photo of my boy on the front, and it's sitting on my bedside table right next to stuff by Anne Lamott and Terry McMillan, and that strikes me and exceedingly weird when I think about it.

Here is the weirdest part: I read it, and I liked it. I enjoyed reading it. Why?! I can't say I enjoyed writing it! Or living it! You know? It's my angsty wallowing. I can never really believe it that you all are reading as I write it, because I feel so annoying while I'm bleeding loudly into my laptop. Yet, when I read the book, I saw the arc of the story as one that showed a family developing, a woman growing, a community building. (You, by the way, are one of my favorite characters.)

I don't know that I will want my kids to read this book ever. (I worry more, I think, about my mom reading it.) But, it turns out, my hesitation doesn't come from worrying I'm too negative (which, of course, I am), as I expected, but because I realize once again that I didn't write it for them, or for anyone else. I wrote it for me. My blog is my sanity, my outlet, my self-medication, my community, my drug. I DO want to write a book for others, and I fantasize all the time about how, in particular, to write one for families just facing a diagnosis who are freaking out the way that I was when started reading blogs because the books I found just kept failing me. I hope I write that book. I feel like seeing Rooster Calls as a book empowers me to believe I can do that. But Rooster Calls is how I give myself an act of kindness, and because it turns out I like reading it, I don't really want to worry about if anyone else does, especially my kids.

Hey, I gotta go now. I am reading this really great book, and even though I've already read it once, I can't seem to put it down.