Hilary Moon Murphy

The Fine Art of Telepathy

On Saturday night, I had two long distance phone conversations. One was a talk with Trey. He gave his blessings to my blatant plagiarism of his web design, and mentioned that another one of the web rats, Lena Sawyer, had also modeled her page on his. That Trey. Such a trendsetter.

Then Trey asked me a pointed question. "So you're going to put up more entries, right? And regularly?"

After a year's hiatus, I deserved that question. Yeah, I hope to check in here several times a week. Let's see how it goes. Trey also asked me what I was writing that evening, and I was chagrined to admit that the annual holiday newsletter was taking priority over my fiction. But hey, I wrote 900 words. Newsletters count, don't they?

Okay, maybe not. But the writing that I do each year on my annual Holiday newsletter reaps a reward that rivals anything I could earn from my fiction. It keeps me connected, however ephemerally, to all those friends and family that have drifted away. Steven King in his On Writing mentions that the act of writing is an act of telepathy. It draws connections between the writer, and the reader, no matter how much space and time separate them.

Which brings me to my other long distance phone call. This one came from my brother Alex, whom I had not talked to since March. Partly this was because he had had no phone. The other part of this was that I am a lousy correspondent, and let those important to me drift away for months at a time. Still, it had been so long that I had begun to get seriously worried, the way big sisters do.

I shouldn't have been. He's doing great, working as a mechanic in Seattle and terribly proud of his first solo apartment. An apartment that has a phone! We talked for way too long and when it was over I realized just how much I had missed him. My brother and I are as different as different can be, but he has been one of the anchors of my soul from the time he was born.

And that was when I had one of those amazing lightning bolts that strike down from on high. For the past year, I've been struggling with the question of whether we should have another child. Andy wants one, but I've been quite happy with our current family constellation. Cassie is a delight, I argued. Did we really want to tempt fate by trying for another child? Who knows what we could wind up with the next time around?

More seriously, there are a lot of other reasons to stop at one child, most of them financial. At our current savings rate, we can finance a college education for one child. More immediately, we can afford day care costs for one child. And we could keep our adorable little house if we only had one child. In addition, I have to admit that I'm scared of what would happen to me with a second child. At the moment, I'm managing to balance full-time work, motherhood, and writing. If we added a second child into the mix, something would probably have to drop, and I'm afraid that it would be my writing. I'm so happy to finally be writing again, and I don't want to stop.

Which brings me back to the lightning bolt. I thought about the relationship that I have with Alex, and that Andy has with his sister Amy. And I looked at my daughter and I realized that I wanted her to have siblings. My God, I thought, I want to have another one. To heck with the financial and time management issues. If having a second child is important enough, we will find a way to manage it.

Have I told Andy yet? No. I'm still mulling things over in my head. Maybe tomorrow the cold light of reason will dawn again. I don't want to tell him until a few days have passed, and I'm certain that this is the right course. (So why, you may ask, am I putting this in my web journal? Good question. And in truth, I don't know. Maybe I want him to find out after all, but I can't bring myself to tell him outright. Some days, I can't figure out what motivates me…)

I should probably also mention Cassie's latest milestone. We (stupidly) had not blocked off the stairs that lead up to our bedroom, letting Cassie happily bang on them with whatever toys she had on hand. Then tonight I noticed that she was being unusually quiet. As other parents can attest, quiet is bad. So long as you can hear your kids babbling in the background, you know what they're doing. But when they get quiet, that means they're up to something.

And so Cassie was. Literally. She had made it halfway up the stairs before we realized what was happening. I had thought that before she started crawling on stairs, that we would have a few days warning. Maybe we would see her struggling to get her feet up onto the steps, or doing other preclimbing activity. Not a chance.

One of Cassie's quirks is that she does not progress in little steps, but in great humongous leaps with long fallow periods in between. She learned to crawl in a few days while we were at Worldcon. Over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend, she went from no words to ten words. We've been waiting for her to start walking, but she'll probably surprise us by jogging first.

Some other stuff. The two stories that I said went in the mail really didn't. By the time I got to the post office, it was closed. They will be mailed out on Monday along with all of our Christmas parcels.

Karina is enduring a web journalist's nightmare. Her web site has been hacked, so sometimes her web pages work, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they are replaced with random porn sites. I'm crossing my fingers that she can make everything work out.

The holiday newsletter still is not finished. These acts of telepathy take time.

Hmm