Sweating

When I was about 23, I remember being enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso while I worked part time as a bank teller at the State National Bank. It was a good combination until I started talking to my older brother, Steve, who is a great artist and who I've pretty much seen eye to eye with on the creative process. We talked into the night one evening, probably over beers, and I must have panged for creative freedom as a burgeoning writer. Somewhere in that heady discussion it was decided upon - from me to Steve to the forces of nature - that I should quit my part time job and write full time while in school.

My parents were not pleased. My father was on medical long-term leave and my mother was working herself to death as a medical secretary and attending business classes at night at the same university. Even my alcoholic uncle from Nevada voiced his disapproval and the word was Nancy's kids were up to no good in Texas.

On one uncomfortable day at home, my Dad was eating a sandwich and looking out his front kitchen window, as he did often and now what I think was his desire to get the hell out of there, and my brother was doing something in another room. My Mom was at work and my younger brother, James, and even younger sister, Sandy, were in high school. I had entered the kitchen to make a sandwich, also, and my Dad offered help, with everything. That's when I knew he really didn't want me there. It was an unnatural, forced, "I'm your Dad and at one point I wanted to help you" thing coupled with "you dumb shit, what are you doing here and in my way? This is my time!"

I have asked myself that on many occasions as a full-grown adult. Today, I am a single parent and my two daughters are just about grown; one in college the other a fashion stylist. I married their Dad, a musician, who drank too much and died seven years ago. I divorced him in '88, half a year after giving birth to Sarah who is four years younger than her sis, Leila.

I think about why I never took writing to where my brain is screaming it needs to be now? Quitting the bank position caused a lot of stress at home, not out and out yelling, but quiet stress, you know, the kind that will kill you. But leaving the bank did help me to move over to the Communication department at UTEP and learn how to write like a journalist and that landed me a job as a reporter for the college newspaper, The Prospector. Not much money, but I learned to write and to be edited like a mofo!

But I really didn't like journalism. Still don't. The English department was furious with for me leaving them for Mass Comm. Again, I wonder why I did that for it threw me into a whole new world of communication, and once I graduated, took a job in public relations because by then I had been married, divorced, and had these two beautiful girls to raise. I'd heard good money could be made in PR and it was "fun."

I enjoyed it; did well. But it was nine years ago when I moved with my girls to New York and there I met a cool dude named Ricardo who figured out real fast that I was what Julia Cameron calls roughly a shadow creative. I was doing work close to what I wanted to do, but simply supporting the craft, not fully immersed in it. He handed me her book, 'The Artist's Way" and I read it on the subway coming and going to my job as a publications specialist at the New York Foundling Hospital. I remember reading that book and snapping my head up when she had said something particularly poignant to me and I wanted to cry out right there in that car!

So it's been a journey, trying to figure out what kind of a writer I am, all these years and since discovering Julia Cameron and my creative heart. In 2001, I quit as a communication director for the Vanderbilt branch of the YMCA in Manhattan. I just couldn't do it anymore. They wanted so much from me and my heart was not in it and on September 5, 2001, I went into my office and peered at the projects around the room and as I observed one after another, I discovered I had turned round in a complete circle! I slumped down into my chair, picked up the phone, called my brother and told him I thought I was going to quit my job. "Do it," he said.

From there I truly thought I had lost my mind, but that night, as I walked out of the YMCA on 47th Street I, for the first time in the year I had been there, recognized smells, sights, and sounds. That triggered something in me that has nested deep down in my soul. I went from there to become a youth advisor and facilitator for the YMCA's Teen Action program. Sarah, a social worker there, needed another worker and knew I was quitting. She also knew I was a single mom to two teenaged females. So a month later I was at Washington Irving High School, talking to urban teens. Wearing jeans and sneakers, I felt reborn. I tried to write inbetween, but nothing seemed solid. I also needed another job; Teen Action was only part-time. Oddly, the New York Foundling needed a conference organizer, so they hired me back on a part time basis. I worked one floor below where I used to be a specialist and highly regarded and now I was a glorified secretary. Employees who used to call out my name and hug me now looked at me as if they smelled something funny. This road I was taking - trying to find my way - was a humbling one.

I did a short stint as a resource counselor for Literacy Partners and that along with my boss at Teen Action, Michelle Fried, sealed up the gaping holes of who I was and I began to understand I was pretty good at holding workshops and giving positive reinforcement to young people and adult learners, helping them to see that it was okay to do what made them happy. "What are you doing when you lose track of time?" I would ask or "If money was not a problem, what would you do from this day on?" Suddenly their faces went from somber to sunlight. Their answers ranged from "I've always wanted to own a restaurant" to "I'd like to have a daycare."

That's when I knew I had to find my way. Back in my Cameron reading days, I had also picked up Deepak Chopra's book, "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success," and read it so many times the binding threaded loose. What was my dharma? I wanted to know. Looking back at the flaps of the book, I saw that I'd written several items in there referring to my dharma. "'I'd write all day and teach people to write." "I'd write children's books." "I'd have a youth organization." I'd have..." nothing sparked a fire. What a poser I am, I have often thought. Those complaints all those years ago were right: I should have stayed at the bank.

From youth advisor, I again got the pangs of getting out of there. I can only take teens for so long and when my younger daughter, Sarah became 16 and was showing all signs of a normal, brooding, mouthy teen, I quit Teen Action. I stayed at Literacy Partners, but the supervisor told me the grant for my job would be ending in a month. So, once again I was out of work and as Head of Household, that was not an option.

I'd gotten an MA in Creative Writing simply to find my voice and to have the means to teach should I ever need to do such. Well, now I considered it. I saw an advertisement for a composition instructor at a trade school in Brooklyn. I sent my resume off and went on looking. One week before I was to leave Literacy Partners, the head woman of the organization called me and asked if I would consider teaching an adult ed class in Harlem? I said I would, instantly, hung up, and immediately began to dread my decision. Teaching? Math, too? I knew nothing about being a GED teacher. I knew GED teachers and I was not one of them.

But I had no other options. It would be a full-time position, decent pay, and would keep me off the streets But, it would also keep me away from any further ideas of writing in the daytime hours. I hadn't told my daughters yet. I sat on my bed and mourned. Then, I went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror and really looked at myself. I knew this was my moment of truth. I went to the phone and called the woman at Literacy Partners back. I told her thank you, but no thank you. She said okay and wished me well. I went back into the bathroom and looked into my eyes. There was a strength not there a moment ago. "Hold on to this," my heart said.

The next morning the trade school called and hired me. I've been there for two and a half years, kicking and screaming internally all the way, and this past semester, the students voted me "Most Popular Teacher." It afforded me some leverage so I requested working only at night and on the weekends. They gave it to me and now I have big, whole chunks of daylight to write. Currently, I have about 50 unfinished essays sitting on my desktop. I'd love to be a columnist and am revising a handful of essays to show Creative Syndicate. It is a desire I have, a strength in the mirror look, and now I know to hold on to it.

Three months ago, I was talking to two professors I value at the school. One is a published novelist of young adult books and the other, well, simply brilliant and trying to find his way in the writing mine field, too. He had just read one of my essays and said, exasperated and almost in a shout, "Why not a novel? I mean your essays are cathartic, but where can it go?" he said frustrated and I looked at him dumbfounded. I looked at my other treasured friend, a woman who researches and explores her ideas until she's on her own magical mystery tour and that's when it hit me: Well, why not?

Both Eileen Ressler and Bryan Fox inspired me, but it was Eileen who emailed me with encouragement and talked to me, writer to writer. Suddenly, like Evelyn Ryan in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" I was with a kindred spirit, just as surely as Evelyn Ryan was with the other contesters. Suddenly I was home.

I toyed with the idea. Me as a novelist? It was a form I had always shoved away and really, really never considered. My brother once said to me, "I look forward to reading the novels that are inside you," and I remember thinking how odd but delicious that sounded. And now I was actually considering it?

A wonderful friend, Steve Sederwall, sent me Stephen King's memoir on writing a year or so ago. I read it and like Emeril, said "Bam!" I got the same feeling from Brenda Ueland's book "If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit." Something was coming together.

Eileen said something that set me into motion. She said I should take all my angst, worries, family problems back in Texas, everything and start weaving characters out of it. Huh? Oh yes! Of course! I got it! I finally understood!

Now I have the seedlings and they are taking root. It's like finding out you're pregnant and after the initial shock, feeling warm and fuzzy, and excited that you are growing something, that you are in the process of it all. So finally I have found my dharma: I'm an essayist and a novelist. It makes sense and I know what I would do if money was no concern. I am doing it.

I take walks when I can in the late afternoons in my neighborhood and gather up ideas, characters, a man runs by me, bam! he'll be my lover; a woman and her small child go by, I hear the child's high-pitched whiney voice, bam! they'll be in there, too. I return home happy and content. I do not know the beginning, middle or ending of my novel, but I know I am in my first trimester and I am healthy. It is rooting and will not be denied. No miscarriage will there be.

Back in those early days when I was 23 and my father was eating his sandwich, looking like he'd smelled something bad, too, I had crept out to my car and had driven to the desert in the hot July sun of the Southwest. I sat there and let the sweat form and drip down between my breasts. I wrote about it and then drove home. In my darkest times, I've thought of that drive and what would have happened if I hadn't abandoned writing so early? I soon left my day job and went back to work for someone else - out of pressure - and now here I am, ready to sweat again. This time, I have the faith and audacity to keep driving. Watch me drive.