“I know you have always hated Christmas.”

(Detail, Primavera/Spring, Sandro Botticelli, c. 1480)

This casual comment, spoken to me one recent Christmas season, pierced my heart. This from a friend who has known me for a long while? Why would she think, let alone, say, something so hurtful and wrong? And laugh as she did it.

Am I a Scrooge, a Grinch, a sour, solitary creature with a heart “two sizes too small?”

Her use of the word “always” unlocked memories of a long time ago. I married “late” to a man with four children. Well before then, I understood I wanted to write. Historical fiction. Novels. Transport me into a home with four children under the age of twelve and picture a new wife in her early thirties struggling to be a good mother, while also squirreling away time to write.

I loved my husband. I loved the children.

I was so unhappy.

(The Bad News, Belmiro de Almeida, 1897)

Why?

Author Tillie Olsen, in her classic nonfiction book, Silences, puts her finger on the bruise when she writes of personally having to let writing die over and over, while asking what happens to the creative process when that process dies for one reason or another, whether for years, or for a relatively short while. Olsen is writing of no space, no time alone with our thoughts and the opposite, perfect world, the even flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.

“I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances that calm can seldom be mine.” Author Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

During these silences, if we are serious, we die a little inside.

What are these silences from writing? They happen when we put aside one of our heart’s basic demands and give way to outside life. We all have responsibilities: paid employment (someone else’s work, as Olsen points out); childcare; partner care; care for our parents; illness. All this alongside nourishment: Church, volunteering to help others, book clubs, lasting friendships, pets.

“If I have any responsibility, it is for the deepest and innermost essence of writing, to which I am inseparably bound.” Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. That was why, Rilke said, he could not bear to have a dog.

For me in those early days, when it came to writing, holidays, including Christmas, were the most silencing time of all. At the time, I attended a weekly writing salon. We read our work aloud, critiqued one another, drank wine and, yes, we lamented the holidays that claimed so much of our time.

Are those heartfelt conversations what my friend, who was in the group, remembers now?

Doubtless, she meant well. But times change (and I have told her so). Over the years, I have mellowed. God has given me the grace and strength to take life in stride and to enjoy the whole: husband, family, times both good and bad. Silences. Whether writing in blissful solitude or through the cracks, I have been blessed to publish four novels, with a fifth one on the way. Even now, I have an expanding social circle of friends—along with my husband, grandchildren, two dogs, and a cat.

“The cost of discontinuity is tremendous: what should take days—weeks—can sometimes take months to write; what should take a month, takes years. And, “I think I have only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water. Teaching . . . keeping house.” Katherine Anne Porter. (Twenty years passed on Porter’s writing of Ship of Fools, while she was “trying to get to that table, to that typewriter . . . and keeping house.”

But she did it.

“Passion, piety, patience.” Author Henry James (The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove)

Happy writing. Merry Christmas. “God bless us, Everyone.”