Fingers and toes crossed that I got this freelance writing position at Femde.com, an emerging website for and by women, created by Liz Hausle. A music industry marketing powerhouse, I’ve known of Liz for 20 years, and brushed paths with her briefly last year at All Def Digital, while I was consulting for Russell Simmons on his YouTube vertical, All Def Poetry. Liz had just left Roc Nation to be All Def’s marketing executive. She has since left that startup to form Femde. When my brother saw the announcement of her new venture and learned that she was looking for writers, I reached out.
The next best thing to building your own dream is to step into someone else’s dream (that you believe in) at the beginning of its manifestation. Liz was beyond cool. Our conversation was an open sea. We spoke of pasts and possibilities. She talked about her pivot from the male dominated spaces of the music industry, and I shared with her my recent departure from NYC, and becoming a mom. She mentioned that I could write editorials on motherhood, among other things, and also seemed super interested in my poetry background.
Next, she threw down the gauntlet. Two sample articles, due in a week. Yikes! My first deadline for anything since the birth. I was excited and a bit tense, because outside of Sedar, it was a busy family week—weddings, and such. I imagined this was how my Juilliard students must’ve felt on the first day of my poetry class when I let them know they had to turn in a poem a week. The same way they wondered how they would squeeze poem writing into their corpulent schedules is the same way I wondered how much time these 700-900 word pieces would take me to research and write. Traditionally, I’m a pretty slow writer; would I become more adept at it, now that I had less time?
During nap time, when I’m free from Sedar’s pressing needs, I never sleep when he sleeps. When Sedar sleeps, I am superwoman. I prepare food, eat, wash dishes, laundry, bathe, and when I work fast and he naps long, write something of value. The struggle is real, because so often when I am finally ready to sit at the computer to put a few thoughts together, Sedar would raise his head and unbutton his eyes from a dream. Now that writing was a pressing priority, something else would have to suffer.
Even more sleep. That’s what. I’m staying in someone’s house, so can’t leave it a mess. Trinidad makes me sweat, Sedar pees through his clothes nightly, and I’m living out of a small suitcase, so I can’t slack on laundry for too long. One day, I bypassed eating and wrote until I saw the stars of hunger, and then later noticed how much less breastmilk I produced during my next pumping session.
After I nursed Sedar and put him down after his evening bath, I would write deep into the night until the gears inside my mind no longer worked and my eyes rang. The day before the deadline, I was less confident that I would be able to finish. I tried to put Sedar in the other room to play independently, but it was a hard week to do that since he’s teething, and still adjusting to the new environment—making him extra fussy and needful. I would play and sing to him, while revising word choices and moving sentences around in my mind. On the day of the deadline, I went to my aunt and uncle’s house five minutes away and let Auntie Maureen entertain Sedar in the next room, as I put in two final hours, before hitting send. Phew!
November 18, 2015
Port of Spain, Trinidad
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