November thanks and giving

Glanced over the November dates on the family calendar yesterday, unprepared for the fist of anxiety that lodged itself in my chest. Shouldn't have been surprised.

Nestled amidst the coming month's activities, seemingly so casual alongside the reminders about L's school production of Midsummer Night's Dream, S's girl scout meetings, and the Illinois SCBWI writer's conference, is E's surgery date.

Bleh. Three weeks and few days from now, everything will change. Hopefully for the better. Please, God, for the better. The mom part of me wants to believe the surgeon's assurances. Going in ahead of time to clip an aneurysm, he says, is so very different from treating it after it ruptures. My writer's brain wrestles with the what-ifs, revisiting all the dark roads we've traveled with E since 2001, and then some.

And then there's the whole calendar thing. Like I often do at the end of the month, I planned to write the 31st on the November page and flip it over this am so during the rush of all the trick or treaters tonight, I wouldn't have to remember to change it. Decided against it. As if not doing so will change the date for E's surgery, or hold back God's plans for the outcome.

Appetite for writing today: Mixed. Have no taste for my novel. It's too big a project for my brain to grok right now. Though ideas for shorter pieces keep coming, especially for non-fiction. In the rare case that I leave home without my trusty notebook, I jot down ideas on whatever scrap of paper I can find. Later, I tape them into my book, making notes about where I was when the ideas occurred to me, and thinking more about what my muse might be trying to say.

Listening to my muse in this way feels very much like writing behind my back. I've yet to make sense of it all, but don't expect to do so. Not in the near future, anyway. I'm too close to this situation, too deep within the heart of the forest to see anything but the trees.

Current read: My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Amazing. Poignant. Multiple points of view. I hope someday to tell E's story with such power and grace.