Nothing is Finished

Nothing is perfect.

I record myself as I read the first ten pages of my book because I don’t have a guest for the podcast. This is not how I’d like things to be. I want a manager for my writer business, someone to give me a list of tasks and a quarterly assessment complete with bonuses and vacations.

Something about the situation, or maybe something about my hormones, is making me hungry. Karli is preparing for finals week, and when I suggest that I might order pizza, she gets that joy in her—like when she was a kid and I would suggest we go to the donut shop or have Taco Bell for dinner. Like my mom, and the moms that came before her, my relationship with food rides on an ever-changing landscape. The food rules I’m living by these days are basic. I don’t eat things made from white powder: flour, sugar, cocaine.

It’s just pizza, but I may as well have called a dealer.

Karli sits next to me on the couch and starts sketching a project onto a canvas that’s bigger than our television.

“I think I hate my book,” I confess.

“Why?” She answers with nonchalance that does not reflect the crisis I’m going through. Maybe she’s just high on the prospect of pizza.

“I don’t know. I am just reading it, and I want to change everything.”

She motions to the room around us. “I hate all of these paintings.” From where we sit, there is not a wall without a painting by Karli. Her art is bright and joyful and each piece is a window to her inner life. “I want to take all of them down and paint over them.”

As the mother of every version of her, I am appalled at the thought of this one erasing the art of her younger self.

Her words do comfort me. It would be nice to think that everything I’ve ever written is the most perfect and transcendent version of itself. Maybe part of being a less anguished artist is relaxing into the idea that you will never be satisfied.

Maybe the lesson of the moment is that I can leave a legacy of clunky phrases in my wake and try to be chill about it.

The pizza arrives, is delicious, and I find moments to beat myself up for eating it for the next couple of days. I don’t want to be this way, but I also don’t want to eat pizza. I want them to make it illegal or at least harder to get.

I want to forgive myself for every blunder, especially this newsletter, which I write, selfishly, the morning of, without preparation, research, or editing, just so I can keep calling myself a writer.

This is the painting she sketched. It’s not finished. The cats still need whiskers. The woman in repose is me, but Karli is worried that it looks too much like her. I think it’s perfect.