I spent this morning scraping old paint off of the woodwork in an upstairs bedroom. It's a job I decided to do months ago and have been putting off ever since, and even now that I've buckled down and started it feels like a job that will never end. Most of my days are like this, spent either chipping away at the task of the moment or enthusiastically procrastinating; the core of the matter is that I spend my days at home. This is the life I chose.
There's another life that I keep expecting to start one of these days. Maybe I'll just wake up and the time will have come, and I'll suddenly be working long hours on a novel or a screenplay or a really witty memoir. In the early days of my current arrangement, I assumed that the paint-scraping-type projects would last a year or so before I'd move on to these bigger and better things, and the home improvements would become occasional matters for weekends and rainy days.
I think I've always been a writer. There were childhood ambitions of the usual sort (artist and dancer come most quickly to mind) but the final word on the matter was always words. Then I grew up, married a math man, and we bought a house. For a while I was a writer who was temporarily fixing up her home. Then I was someone who was going to be a writer once the other pockets of busyness died down. Then I wasn't sure what I was and what I wasn't or when I was going to be something else.
For the writer in me - the writer that is me - it has been a hard year, this first year in our old house. The hours that I want to spend on building worlds with words have been put into our house, into odd jobs and side projects and an absurd amount of white paint being layered onto the walls. And I love this house business, this home business, this process of making it beautiful in our eyes, and I feel secretly guilty about my enjoyment because this was never what I was supposed to be doing.
Can I claim to be a writer and yet spend so much time on so many other things?
For some reason, the answer that is hand-waving-student-in-the-front-row obvious didn't sound right to me for a very long time. The house was in a separate district of my mind, and never the twain shall meet - but then again, why not write about this house? Write what you know. After a year this house and I know each other well. If this house was a person, we'd have stayed up all night telling each other our life stories multiple times. Even though this house is not a person, that's still sort of the case.
When people ask me what I do, I perform a fast mental calculation. It's often the second question when making a new acquaintance, and there have been many since we moved to Des Moines. "What do you do?" the new person asks me, and I have a split second or a few stuttering sentences of stalling to decide whether to say that I pour all my time into a hundred-year-old house, or that I am a writer. Neither sounds quite like a job and I am paid for neither, so neither one ends up being the easiest answer. Usually my response depends on the feeling of the moment. The result is that various people have various ideas about who I am and what I do. The other result is that I'm a little confused myself.
I do write about the house from time to time, because it's what I think the most about, but every time I do it feels like illicit cross-over between ambition and reality. It doesn't make sense to think that way, so I've decided to quit. I declare that there will be no more guilt, and there will be a lot more writing about the ins and outs of owning and loving an old house.
So let it be written; so let it be done.
I am a writer, whatever else I may be, and who says that job titles are exclusive? Right now I'm headed back to the upstairs bedroom to excavate a windowsill out from under four layers of paint. It will be a labor of love, and it will be something to write about!
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