Over the last two blogless months, I’ve spent my time becoming intimately acquainted with the new floor my husband recently installed in our bathroom. Along with the floor, I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with the porcelain fixture that sits atop it. I love that it’s there to receive what my stomach decides to regurgitate; I hate that I haven’t dare strayed too far from it the past several weeks.
Our new floor is a nice, wide plank laminate that looks great next to the newly-installed beadboard and brushed nickel fixtures on the wall. However, I’ve found myself missing the twelve-years-old carpeting that previously covered the floor. Many times over the years we’ve lived in our home I have asked myself why on earth I chose carpeting for our master bath. The answer came to me this past month as I lay on our new floor—I was pregnant when we were building and moving into this house. Some part of my subconscious must have recognized that carpet would be much nicer to lay on when curled up in a ball of nauseated misery.
Fortunately our new bath mat from IKEA is a soft place to rest one’s head while contemplating whether it is worth it to get off the floor and attempt to do something (anything—start a load of desperately-needed laundry for my neglected family, fix a meal for my surviving-on-mac-n-cheese kids—oooh food. Bad thought. Nevermind. I’m not going anywhere). I’ve also had plenty of time to contemplate the past year or so of my life, and particularly what I was doing exactly one year ago.
Last June I was getting my feet wet with booksignings and just beginning to get the sense that people liked Counting Stars. The (great) experience was tempered somewhat by the unexpected, early-second trimester miscarriage I’d had in May, and while I was thrilled to finally be published, I was still pretty sad. For a long time both my husband and I had felt like one more child was meant to come to our home, and the loss went very deep.
Flash forward one year. I’d thought (planned, hoped, believed) that once published I would—like my brilliant friends Annette Lyon and Heather Moore—have a book come out with Covenant each year. The manuscript I turned in last November had some problems initially, but I felt confident I’d worked those out some time ago, and though I knew I’d missed getting a June release again, I still had a vague hope for later this year. But, things don’t always work out the way I think they should (a pattern repeated often throughout my life—I should get it by now :D). And here it is June, and still I wait to see if Beneath A Canopy of Stars will even be accepted. I’d be lying if I said this isn’t discouraging, depressing, and downright frustrating. But I’d also be lying if I said it was hugely important right now.
Something much more important has happened—a late in life miracle, if you will—and it looks like we are going to be blessed with that one more child in our family after all. Considering the medical trials and prognosis I’ve had over the past year, this really is a miracle. And so I’ll happily trade booksignings last June for lying on the bathroom floor this June. There’s a time and season for everything, and if I’ve learned one thing throughout my life it is that you can have it all—but not necessarily at the same time.
And maybe, just maybe if I work hard and am very fortunate, June of 2009 will see me juggling feeding our baby between visiting bookstores again.