In which I intend to stop halfway, but do not

“How you doing?” She’s just gotten out of the bath. She’s dressed, but toweling her hair as she walks across the living room. The younger kid’s asleep, the older kid’s watching a video (a pang somewhere inside compels me to tell you the older kid gets an hour a day of screen time; this parenthetical admission sets off at least one more pang), so it was a moment of relative freedom (another pang - what kind of father talks about his kids this way?) and in that moment she took a bath. I wrote. Well, that was the plan.

“The god damn network, or maybe it’s this shitty fucking laptop, I don’t know, I just wanted to check my fucking email real quick before doing some other shit and now it’s half an hour or so later and I’ve only just now wised up and have stopped turning the modem or whatever the fuck it’s called off and on and off and on.” I pause for breath, notice her face has the expression people make when a person at a party - the kind of party where there’s music playing but quiet enough that conversation can happen, and everyone stands around with a drink or a plate of nice cheese and, I don’t know, fruit or fancy crackers (this is what I imagine parties are like, I don’t go out much if I can help it, and after a few years of this, helping it is easy, asphyxiatingly so) - and the person reveals, immediately after, and sometimes even before, the exchange of names that they have just gotten out of a bad marriage, another bad marriage actually, a third, and they are not sure they will ever marry again and their ex, well their ex was probably still in love for the duration of the whole marriage with an old flame and the ex never even moved in, they maintained two separate households the whole time, the ex came over once in a while for sex but they’re too old for that - not for sex, but for someone who just shows up for sex, sex at their age it begins first thing in the morning in the conversations you have and who washes the dishes and anyway the sex wasn’t even all that good and is that a marriage? It does not sound like a marriage to me, not a real marriage oh if you’re getting a drink get me one too, I’ll take another red wine.

I see the look on my wife’s face and stop talking a second then say “Sorry. I’m in a bad mood right now.” She blinks. “Okay.” Blinks again, smiles. “I won’t talk to you right now.” It’s the best choice for all involved and (pang!) I feel in small amounts both relieved and offended.

I just wanted to write, but the kids wanted attention. The older one and I made a house for fairies out of a cut up milk carton and added a construction paper fireplace (it looks fucking cool you guys, I felt legitimately proud of myself for easily fifteen minutes, I - not my kid, mind you, I [pang!] a grown man of 36 [pang!] - showed it to my wife), and we ran around the house chasing circles through the kitchen and bathroom and living room until I was out of breath, and I danced to music with the younger kid (“what do you want to listen to? Jim Croce? Promise Ring? Bob Mould?” “Croce.” “Okay, Jim Croce it is-“ “Mould.” “You changed your mind?” “Mould.” “Okay, Bob Mould it is.”) and I washed a metric fuck ton of dishes and my older kid insisted I “make a scene” which I did, at first not in the way she meant - I made the tent out of construction paper instead of drawing it, and so SHE made a scene, metaphorically I mean, because it’s supposed to be NIGHT time DADDY that’s NOT how I WANT IT TO BE - and then I made another such scene myself, totally fucking losing my temper between the migraine and the trying to art (artify? artisticize? words, man, who knows) and her shouting, so that I shouted back “I need a break!” and I’m pretty sure but only pretty sure (pang!) I did not say “get away from me!” though I know I thought it as she followed me across the kitchen insisting that I make the scene RIGHT NOW.

I calmed down by nuzzling the younger kid’s hair a moment before she laid down for her nap and went back to help the older kid. If you have never tried to make paper cut outs of people - one of them holding a baby, apparently that’s really important - with a mix of construction-paper-and-colored-pencil-drawing clothes, with a migraine, while sitting in front of a five year old who may at any moment burst into tears and/or shouting when you once again do EVERYTHING WRONG - and by the way you genuinely want the five year old to have fun here and you also, if you’re being really honest, deep down care about whether or not she likes your art and you also feel bad (pang! pang! pang!) whenever you raise your voice and she flinches or her face crumples and you have to remind yourself of all the ways you are not your parents and do not do the things they did, and you remind yourself that 95% of the times you raise your voice she just shouts louder back at you - well, if you’ve never done that, then, umm, good for you. I hope you’re a good person. Because if not, you will someday do that, in a very hot room, for eternity.

By the time I got to the writing it was past midnight. My family was in bed. I stared a while at the cursor blinking with all that empty white space below it. I cracked my knuckles and opened Firefox, read jokes on Twitter, maybe made a couple, I don’t remember, but if I did they were probably about infanticide or having an ugly body or how no one truly knows or loves anyone. I counted (using a spreadsheet! anyone wanna make out?) the numbers of exercises in my current routine, the totals of each individual exercise and the total number of exercises altogether for each day, the ones I’ve done so far and what I’m aspiring to over the next 5 or 6 weeks. I went back to the flickering cursor in the blank space and finally I started to type, describing a scene with my kid.

It was okay.

Actually for me I think it was pretty good and above all, and this is the cool part, I was actually writing. I wrote a while, about an hour, about 700 words. I felt really good about that. I stopped before that blog post was finished and I felt good about that too because it was a Decision rather than a Reaction and it was a Good Decision backed by Sound Advice. See, I’m told that both Ernest Hemmingway and Bill Watterson - they’re real writers, you guys, maybe you’ve heard of them? - recommend stopping writing in the middle of a piece of writing. That makes starting writing easier.

Starting to write and beginning a new piece of writing are both hard. Doubling them up is like four times as hard as either is alone. (Four point six times if you want the exact number. Math is truth. These are not the droids you are looking for.) With that in mind I stopped in the middle, and made some notes on where to go next, so that the next time I could start writing where I left off and eventually finish that blog post and feel good for having finished it. (Is there anything better than feeling good? And is there any better kind of feeling good than feeling like you’re going to feel good at some point in the future?)

Tonight I started this blog post here, with the plan to stop halfway too, though without knowing the end point the halfway point is murky. What I’m doing is saving the unfinishedness of that other piece, I’ll finish that piece later, and I’m savoring it (because knowing I have it there and can finish it means I can write and knowing I can write is so much better than the swelling of that empty space where voices echo in time with the cursor blink, “You! Can’t! You! Can’t! You! Can’t!”) and by writing this I’m making more of it - this is a bit like using what’s left in the bottom of the pan to make gravy though I suppose since the other piece is still unfinished then the metaphor means I’m using the juice of undercooked food to make gravy. Thank fuck I’m a vegetarian.

I was in the bathtub tonight, fantasizing (I mean about writing, sorry for any distress there), and it occurred to me I could write about choosing to not finish pieces of writing as a choice to help myself write more, and more frequently, and the fantasy expanded to a whole blog of half-written pieces, but deliberately half-written, with the discipline to finish them later, and as with most fantasies as I stood up and dried off it just seemed impractical and I felt a bit ridiculous (thinking about THAT at my age?!).

As I toweled off I thought about how I want to be better at all this (pang!) and how I’m self conscious about my performance (pang! Is that a sex joke? You’re gonna gross everyone out. Pang! [No it’s about my writing, it’s verbalizing instead of just saying pang, that’s probably getting old by now. Pang!]) and I asked myself in my serious self-talk voice, not the petulant one (“but whyyyyy”) or the rageful one (“shut. the. fuck. up.”) or the self-hating one (“you’re a terrible person”) or the arrogant self-aggrandizing fantasist one (“they’re all morons! I’m amazing!”) but the straightforward one, the one that probably sounds like a mix of the counselors I went to in college, in that direct but caring voice I asked “what’s the big deal here? what’s on the line? You were in a bad mood because that’s how you reacted to not writing, then you wrote and you were in a good mood, and this all seems like it’s a big deal to you in some way I don’t understand.”

I didn’t answer myself, it was too direct and reasonable.

So I continued, “I mean, it’s not as if your self-respect is at stake here, is it?” and I jumped at that, shouted “yes, yes it is!”

I said back to myself, nodding my head (inside my mind and I think for real though I’m not sure, I was also putting my socks on at the time and for some reason I was doing it by standing on one foot and raising the other foot up knee height and bending my torso over to reach that raised foot), “so your self-respect is at stake in your writing?” I paused (while also continuing to put on my socks, and the rest of my clothes; I don’t know why I put my socks on before my other clothes. What order do you get dressed in?).

“Well, okay,“ I replied, "I guess I exaggerated. My self-respect isn’t on the line. It’s just… I don’t know.” Faced with a direct question, sometimes I fold. Do you think THAT?! I hear the judgment behind the question and respond by saying of course I don’t think that. I’m not lying, I really don’t think it at that moment, the threat of judgment changed my mind temporarily. This happens even, maybe especially, when the one asking the questions is me myself. Thinking a bit more I qualify my answer.

My self-respect is on the line and that’s scary but it’s not like my fundamental self-respect, my whole person, is at stake. It’s not like I love or hate myself based on whether I write or not, whether the writing is good or not, whether people like it or not. It’s that I like myself some more, or some less, based on those whethers. This like or dislike is ultimately quite small really (I’m a good father regardless of whether I write [and maybe more if I don’t… pang!], I’m a decent cook, my wife likes me, I have interesting interests and excellent musical taste and… I don’t know, I’m sure I have other good qualities of some kind… anyway) but, you see, we don’t really live at the level of ultimates.

What ultimately matters? How I parent, how much I love, and, I dunno, some other big deal end of life what people say and really mean at your funeral kind of shit. I don’t live in those moments. What matters in the day to day of life far short of that heady stuff is things like have I exercised recently and how’s the writing going and did the dinner I cooked turn out and did my kids like it.

The self-respect that’s on the table, the amount to be won or lost through this, is probably the size of my pinkie fingernail. That’s small. But let me slam your pinkie fingernail in a car door. How big does it feel now? I mean, if I lost it - if you said, “no let’s slam YOUR fucking finger in the car door, that’ll teach you to threaten ME you shit” - my life would be pretty much exactly the same (except I’d never again use that bit of imagery, and you and I would definitely not hang out anymore). Let’s say the finger swelled badly and the nail popped off and once it healed the tip remained a bit sensitive and harder to use. But what’s really different in my life then? I guess I use that finger a little in rock climbing, on the rare occasions I do that, so I’d climb a little different. But I don’t use it to to play bass or guitar, again rare and I don’t really use it to type (I never learned to type correctly [pang!], I think I use four fingers on my left hand - not the pinkie - and mostly just two fingers on my right hand - I very occasionally use the right pinkie to hit the enter key) and I don’t use it to masturb- you know what, never mind that, what I’m saying is that if I had to lose that bit of my body I would get by basically the same as before that loss.

But despite it’s being really just not very important I wouldn’t choose to lose that fingertip or fingernail, and especially not via slamming car door (so stay the fuck away from me you brute, I meant it as an illustration, not a threat; if you’re going to be so violently literal-minded and angry, well, stop reading before someone gets really hurt) because it’s just, well, it’s part of me and I’d like it to avoid the removal of all the parts, even the trivial parts, that I had presumed were permanent, plus, and this is the real concern to be honest, that removal via car door would hurt like a motherfucker and I am afraid of pain. Writing feels like chancing that loss. That’s the truth of the matter. (Of course a lot else feels like chancing that loss, or at least chancing some nasty papercuts.)

So that’s why I was so crabby in the living room after my wife’s bath, and after my family’d gone to bed and I’d not yet written that thing, the deliciously unfinished thing about playing with my kid. Writing feels like I might - and not writing feels like I will definitely - get my fingernail torn off in a door. My wife did the smart thing then by punting on a conversation with me.

I was quite charming today though. I made dinner, and tomorrow’s dinner, and probably enough leftovers for another night or two, and I brought her several cups of tea, and ran around the house with the kids a bunch more, and she took another bath and I was a good-humored and attentive listener after she got out and told me about whatever it was she was going on about. Probably a book.