A blocked artist isn't lazy.

(Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way.)

So all this time, I've been motivated by two things: the fear of dying, and"is it fun?"

And my married with children friends (some of them) have looked at my single life and its somewhat aimless path and said, you are lazy. What are you doing with your life? Because no, I'm not raising children so they can go off to school and eat paste. I'm not doing loads of laundry for four or six hundred people. I'm not cooking dinner every night for people that want to feed the floor or the family pet.

So it looks, pretty much, like I'm lazy. I watch a lot of TV, I procrastinate, I go to work, I come home, and watch more TV. I live in an apartment of unfinished projects, piles of laundry, piles of dishes.

But if I had remembered what I learned in Black Women Writers, my senior year of college, I would have remembered Remita Weems, who said, "Madness is never just madness. It is a way of coping when sanity will no longer do." (Home Girls, 103)

Madness. Yes. A 38 year old woman in Pittsburgh that is single? That is madness. This city? Where everyone has nieces and nephews out the wazoo? Where early marriage is the norm? It wants to make you run into the woods. (Or put your heads under the cover and watch those four ladies in New York walk around in their Manolo Blahniks and talk about how hard it is to find a good man.)

And then, well, it looks like she's lazy. But maybe she's just SCARED.

I remember sitting on the steps of the porch, waiting for the airport shuttle, talking with a man I thought I was going to marry, and saying, "Are we nuts? Is this going to work?" And me saying, as I had said time and time before, "scared is just sacred with the words in the wrong order." But somewhere between THAT heartbreak and the rest, I forgot. This is the year of remembering. And it is the year of healing.

to be continued...