Guy Ottewell's "Writing"

With the kind of uncanny timing that makes you wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something, my 2-year-old daughter was conceived within days of my return from Ragdale, an artist colony in Lake Forest, Ill., in 2007.

I’d earned a residency at Ragdale, during the competitive summer months, on the basis of a book excerpt I’d submitted with my application; a book I’d then hoped, and still hope, to see published. But becoming a mom has, for now, derailed this ambition.

My life has seemingly always been pointed toward the goal of writing and publishing a book. The first thing I remember answering to the “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question, posed by my grandfather while I (at age 4 or 5) dried dishes in his kitchen, was: “An author.” (Yes, I later claimed “Avon lady” and “veterinarian” as career goals, at a time when playing with makeup and animals held great appeal, but I eventually came full circle. Good thing, since I never came to wear makeup in day-to-day life.)

I was hardly a natural, however. After being humbled by dark-night-of-the-soul takedowns in various writing workshops in college and beyond, as well as receiving rejections from respected and not-so-respected graduate writing programs across the country, I finally earned a place in Penn State’s MFA program. Yet once I was there, I more fully realized that all this effort and focus might just come to nothing.

For writing is one of those maddening, potentially soul-killing or transcendent (sometimes both on the same day) pursuits where, at some point, you realize: “Wow, I could spend my whole life working at this, and studying with the very best people that I can, and I could still lay a big goose egg.” A pretty tough truth to face. I’d given the pursuit my absolute best shot, but by my last semester at PSU, I grew depressed and questioned whether it was time for me to just give up the ghost and figure out a new path for my life. Maybe it was time to grow up and face the music already.

Of course, that’s the precise moment when I learned that one of my stories (“Under the Influence”) was chosen by the PSU writing faculty as its nomination for the annual “Best New American Voices” anthology. That in itself was validating and wonderful, giving me just enough hope to stay with it. But then the story was actually selected for inclusion, by no less than Joyce Carol Oates, and I thought maybe I’d finally broken through.

But it’s not as though literary magazines suddenly started accepting everything I sent -- far from it. Yet my desire to write a book was still intense, so after repeatedly telling people about my experience driving an author I’d never met around the country for a book tour, unpaid, only weeks after my wedding, I got inspired to write a travel memoir about it.

I wrote "In the Driver's Seat" little by little in the mornings before heading to my part-time job. And it was with an early, completed draft that I applied to Ragdale and earned a fantastic opportunity to shrug off the daily responsibilities of life for two weeks and focus on pounding out a revision.

Yet after spending a total of nine months (no joke) writing and re-writing my book, I then spent nine months building a little person that, naturally, would turn our lives upside down.

While pregnant, though, I got busy trying to push my book out of the nest and into the world. I crafted a query letter and sent it to carefully researched agents who might be interested in it. A few days before my due date, one agent liked the sample she’d read and asked me to work up a book proposal.

Really, the agent wanted truncated summaries of each chapter that wouldn’t be too detailed but would capture the book’s voice and major events. This may not sound like a big deal, but it’s hard work -- work I wouldn’t get to for a while because of my daughter’s impending birth. But at the end of my maternity leave, I arranged for Lily to start daycare one week early so she could get acclimated with shorter-than-usual days while I labored over these summaries.

And I finished them. But the agent responded with suggestions for significantly re-working the proposal, and just then, I was going back to work and negotiating all that comes with adjusting to this completely new phase of motherhood. So I couldn’t make the revisions then, and I haven’t really found the opportunity to do it since.

Did my decision to become a mom mark a moment when, in essence, I said: “This doesn’t seem to be happening for me, even though I gave it my best shot”? Maybe. Despite years of study and effort, a future as the new Anne Tyler or Nick Hornby didn’t seem to be in the cards for me, and I certainly felt like I needed to recognize this.

Not that I’m resigned about the potential and future of my book manuscript. And certainly, if I still had the burning desire to pursue it now, I’d be using the few spare moments I get to re-work its proposal. Instead, though, I often spend those minutes posting parenting essays on my blog, which is what I’ve felt most passionate about writing over the past year.

This is partly because writing about parenting experiences provides me with important insights and perspectives I otherwise wouldn’t have -- something about the process of writing forces you to think things through more completely -- and because I want Lily to have this family record. But on the best days, seeing how many blog visitors I have feels absolutely marvelous -- like what I always thought publishing a book would feel like, albeit on a more modest scale. In this way, blogging is a slightly downgraded, but still satisfying, version of my original dream -- and maybe it will even lead me to the book I’ll write next.

Did I surrender my ambitions when deciding to be a mom? I know everyone would like me to say: “No, I’m plowing ahead, and darn it, I’ll make it happen!” But truth is always thornier and trickier than that. And one of the things that makes the decision to have a child so difficult is that you have to, by necessity, take a good, hard, long look at where you are and where it appears you’re going.

I’m not saying that when you become a parent you have to entirely surrender your dreams, but you do have to keep responding to the new realities you find yourself in. And for me, that means that right now, there’s not enough room in my life for motherhood, my job, and my book.

Of the things on that list, only one can wait.

To read more, visit http://www.anadequatemom.wordpress.com. Jenn McKee is the entertainment digital journalist for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at jennmckee@annarbor.com or (734) 623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.