I’ve found the difference between before and after having kids is not that you don’t have time for anything after kids, but you no longer have time for everything. Your free time is so limited that you have to pick one or two things to do with those precious hours. For the past nearly two years I’ve eschewed housework, personal grooming, and exercise in favor of reading Dear Prudence, knitting obsessively, blogging, and occasionally attempting to work on the novel-in-progress that I’ve been chipping away at for the last four years. Every once in a while I try to add something else–practicing violin, drawing, doing a load of laundry–and it causes everything else to fall apart. So when I started taking a creative writing class at The Grotto this month, it meant that the odd little moments I was using to write blog posts are now devoted to coursework. It’s an interesting and very San Francisco class, involving hypnosis, writing in gibberish, translating poetry from languages we don’t speak, and my new favorite, making poetry with the cut-up technique. Continue reading →