My contract for next school year is due in three hours and I still haven’t decided if I’m going to sign it.
Here’s what I really want to do: I want time and peace and quiet to collect my thoughts and finish the wonderful, promising projects I’ve started. I want to be a writer-in-residence on a beach somewhere, or even right here in the apartment where I live. I want to finish the Disney book and start another one, something like Under the Tuscan Sun, or An Italian Affair or Eat,Love, Pray or whatever that one is called. What would I call mine? Just Another Divorced American Woman in Europe? That’s not very funny, is it?
And I want to travel.
One of the reasons I know I’ll sign this contract is that I’m not anywhere near finished seeing Europe. I want to see Spain and Portugal, Greece and Turkey, the markets in Morocco, even the pyramids in Egypt aren’t that far away. I want to go.
But I don’t want to do it alone.
In my twenties, the idea of taking off across Europe alone seemed brash and daring, a fun adventure. I travelled to hear my own voice. I remember one morning waking up in a tiny sliver of a hotel room in Venice, on Campo San Stefano. It was entirely white — the room. Church bells woke me. I opened the shutters and peered out onto the empty square below, wondering, “What do I want to do today?” I loved then that I got to decide with no one else’s shoulds, nothing that I had to do, nowhere I had to be. All I had to do was listen to my own voice. It was a revelation, that moment 16 years ago.
Now I am tired of my own voice. I’d like to listen.
I left my marriage to cultivate peace and quiet, and I’m still seeking more. That seems to be my quest.
Another thing about that: in a writing group online, the subject today was motherhood. It’s Mother’s Day in the UK this week, I think. And what to say for all the mothers who are mothers no more? For the mothers whose kids have died or been taken away or are otherwise no longer a part of their lives? We never talk about that motherhood is something you cannot really put down. Is it something you carry with you forever once you have been that?
That’s hard to think about.
I must go sign my contract now.
