“broad sky” by devi laskar

Blog Editor’s Note: Many of the Book Writing World members are parents and have found an overlap between the lessons learned as parents and as writers. Lea Page is writing a nonfiction book about parenting so the editors of the BWW wanted to offer this slice of “real life” to our readers.

I have been working on a chapter called “Ho hum meets the Tantrum,” and I was describing a mother at the grocery, holding her fussing child on her hip while she tried to stuff a dripping head of lettuce into a plastic bag that is hermetically sealed on both ends. She is wishing aloud for that third hand.

And just now, I was running late, trying to grate cheese for stuffed potatoes and fry onions for the baked beans and get it in the oven before we had to dash off for soccer practice. Just then I got a call from my daughter in Africa, who had been hospitalized with a bacterial infection. She was fine but was missing Mom, like anyone does when they are sick, and I was trying to do a million things while holding my husband’s smart/stupid phone to my ear with my shoulder without touching the screen and causing it to hang up. The thing cut out a million times anyway because the connection is never certain, and I found myself thinking, “if I just had one more hand.”

My little one/big one is far, far away, but she might as well have been sitting there on my hip, wetting down my neck with tears. And I have to admit that I am glad I still have that job, even if I don’t have the third hand to do it with.

Lea Page raised her children in Montana and now lives in New Hampshire with her husband and son.  She is working on a book about parenting and writes from home, the hockey rink and anywhere else she finds herself with a free moment.