Confession Tuesday

Happy Tuesday, folks. Do you have something to confess? Then you've come to the right place!

We now have a new edition to the O'Neil household. This is S'mores, the guinea pig. She's a cutie--a belated gift to my daughter. But she belongs to all of us. Very sweet, very docile. The perfect starter pet for two kids who wanted a social animal.

Alex and I had to talk Ella out of getting a hamster, which are not as friendly and move really quickly. I had fears of two hamsters breaking out, scurrying around the insides of walls--taunting me. (Maybe I'm relieving the squirrel in the attic experience.) We just have the one guinea pig. I hope S'mores will be as happy with us as we are with her. Guess that makes me a grandmother. Sigh.

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Today is the first day of school for Alex and Ella. Gosh, summer went by quickly.

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Am I writing? HA HA HA HA HA (insert hysterical laughing here).

I'm in prep mode for classes, so with the addition of S'mores and the kids' back to school stuff I am all over the place. But, a part of me is looking forward to a new routine, making it all work somehow. I thrive on the chaos, I guess.

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Was reading Sharon Olds' piece on Oprah.com (OPRAH!) about divorce and her new book Stag's Leap. This section hit home ...

3. Write What You Really Think
"I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one's own strange self on the page. From the day my husband told me he was leaving, I was writing—a lot. I wanted to make something of my altered life, to break into song, to cry out on paper. Reminding myself that no one else would ever see what I wrote—with my ballpoint pen in my wide-ruled spiral notebook—helped me be less censored and less afraid. Later, I could decide to show or not, because whether anyone ever read it was not the most important thing."

I have done this but I know I can do more. Sometimes I get tired of reading my own poems on divorce and loss, so I take long breaks and do other things, like buy a guinea pig. But some of my best work has come from pushing myself to "go there." I spend so much of my time not going there that I think it may be time to get back to the thing that makes me feel most whole--writing poems. Later, I can decide what I'm going to publish. Or not publish.