The Son also Rises...and Wants a Bacon Cheese Biscuit

I’ve got a deadline. Several, actually. And in the midst of baking back-to-school brownies, shopping for the most popular gotta-have-‘em teenager footwear (read, “sold out in every store in the tri-state area”), and writing my columns, I have this dream of working on the romance novel that I began writing when I was…I guess about seven.

So I begin with the research. Usually Hubby is my greatest writing supporter. He’s the first to give me my space, my silence, my own touch-it-and-you-die computer. But the note taking he could do without. I can’t blame him, I guess. What most husbands would prefer their wives called “the greatest half hour of Wednesday night” I call “research.”

“Honey,” I’ll say, nibbling on his ear, my best seductive weapon. “Remember what you did last Wednesday?”

He grins, already heading for the bedroom. “Repeat performance, eh?”

I nod. “You bumped my elbow last week and I can’t read my notes.”

Probably not the most romantic thing in the world, asking him to “slow down, I can’t write that fast” or leaning into his ear to ask if he knows another word for “throbbing.”

It doesn’t matter anyway. We haven’t been together alone for longer than six minutes in twelve years. Usually, we will just get started (read, “I’ll get some really great material going”) and a child will cry out.

“Mom!”

We freeze, hoping they’ll figure we’re asleep and drift back to dreamland. It never works. They can smell our fear.

“Mom! I’m thirsty!”

Sighing, I wrap a robe around myself and tell Hubby to “hold that pose and remember I left off at ‘sinewy calves’.” I trudge along the trail of yelps and find a child, who was out cold only ten minutes earlier, sitting up bright-eyed.

A drink, half a box of Vanilla Wafers, two trips to the bathroom, and a stubbed toe (mine) later I’m back in the bedroom.

“Okay, cowboy,” I say, unwrapping my robe. “Call me Madeline again and tell me how happy you are to have found me in that abandoned cave and rescued me before the McCulligan brothers came back to kill me.”

Snoooore!

So much for research.

With my research subject out like a light, I decide to tuck in early myself and get lots of rest so I can beat the kids out of bed for a little early morning writing jam session.

Silly me. Who needs rest when you can have an upset stomach (seems Vanilla Wafers at midnight aren’t the best dietary decision in the world), a nightmare, and bathroom breaks every ten minutes (darn if those drinks don’t go right through you!)? I spend the night thanking God my story isn’t about the insides of my eyelids – I’d have no idea what they even look like.

But I’m nothing, if not determined. So I creep out of bed at the crack of dawn for a little quiet writing time. I sneak into the living room and fire up my computer, not even so much as clearing my throat unless my face is buried deep in the couch cushion I use as a silencer.

I yawn, rub my eyes, and begin writing:

“Oh, Lance, you made it,” cries Madeline, wiping tears of joy out of her eyes.

Lance smiles that irresistible crooked smile of his, mops his sweaty brow with the bottom of his torn flannel shirt, pulls her to her knees ,and looks deep into her aquamarine eyes. He asks, "Can I have a biscuit?"

My fingers freeze. Why would Lance want a biscuit? It takes me a moment to assimilate the information. Slowly, hearing horror movie music in my head, I spin in my office chair. There, fingers digging deep in the top of his funky bed-hair, stands a small child, his face miraculously rested.

“I want a biscuit for breakfast,” he repeats.

“Just give me one minute, honey,” I say, knowing that I’d better wrap up my extensive three-minute writing session.

I turn back to the monitor:

Madeline’s tears are flowing with earnest now as she looks into the rugged and chiseled face of her hero. He leans in to kiss her. He pulls her into him urgently and grabs her by the hair. She moans and whispers savagely into his ear, “I want bacon on it.”

I blink. Where did that come from? Then I realize the child is back and is now demanding side meat with his biscuit while rifling through the papers on my desk. “And cheese, too,” he says.

“Okay, honey. Just give Mommy another minute.”

Ten minutes later, after Madeline “reaches out and tenderly touches Lance’s Legos,” and Lance “bites her leg and shouts, ‘That’s mine! Give it back!’” and there’s a “loud crash followed by a startled meow and a murmur of ‘Mom’s gonna kill you,’” I realize that more than one of them are up and running now. I growl and turn off my computer, knowing that today is not the day for finishing the novel.

I pad around the kitchen buttering and cheesing biscuits, wondering how to finish the chapter I’d been working on. In my head, I try out various ways for Madeline to proclaim her undying devotion to Lance, but they all fall flat.

Shaking my head and trying oh-so-hard not to be in “a mood,” I deal bacon cheese biscuits around the table like poker hands, my mind still searching for that perfect profession of love.

Suddenly my oldest boy holds his bitten biscuit up in front of him and peers into it with utter worship. “I love you so much,” he says around a hunk of bacon, “my tummy is dancing.”

I gasp. That’s it! I rush to my computer, thanking God for my beautiful interruptions…I mean, inspirations.

Jennifer Brown is a freelance writer with award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appearing in over a dozen publications around the world. Jennifer's work has appeared in Writer's Journal, Australia's The Messenger, Long Story Short, and Simple Joy, just to name a few. Jennifer most enjoys writing humor essays, and her humor column, "Adrift in the Gene Pool," appears bi-weekly in The Liberty Sun News. In 2005, Jennifer's humor essay, "Fling Shui for Beginners," won first prize in the global humor category of the Erma Bombeck contest. Jennifer is also a book reviewer for Bookpleasures, Road to Romance, Foreword Reviews, and TCM Reviews, and teaches essay-writing and book reviewing classes for Writer's Success.com and humor writing classes at Long Story Short School of Writing. To find out more about Jennifer's work, visit http://www.freewebs.com/jennifer_brown.