I’ve decided to give up writing.

This was not an easy decision. It came the week after the bathtub began leaking through the kitchen ceiling. This was the second leak since we moved in a year earlier, the first one coming from the toilet and spreading across the ceiling above the kitchen sink, puddling in the cabinet where I keep the boxes of pastas and bags of rice.

My decision came a week later, several days after the 250-lb television slipped from the hands of my son and husband and landed squarely onto my husband’s right foot, cracking three metatarsals which prevented him from being able to drive to the various schools where he teaches.

 Did I mention we have no health insurance? Adjuncts receive no benefits. All the money I had squirreled away for bathroom renovations, or ceiling repairs, or the off-chance that one of our children would decide to get married, went to pay for x-rays and casts and crutches.

Luckily, in addition to the freelancing I do regularly for a local periodical, I had just sold four articles and a short story, and my novel manuscript was just accepted by a major publisher. Said Caroline Rock never. 

“It’s time to stop living a fantasy. Reality is right in front of us, and it is spelled M-O-N-E-Y.”

This was the argument I made to my husband as he lay on the couch with his bulbous foot elevated and tried to dissuade me. Guilt me, really.

 “So you’re just giving up?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just throwing away your God-given talent?”

“Not all of it. Just this one part.”

Never mind that he felt the pinch much sooner than I and took a part-time job in a bookstore over the Christmas holidays. We both worked in a bookstore decades ago. In fact, we met while working in a bookstore. So it was highly romantic that he chose to take a job in a bookstore instead of, say, a shoe store or a soap store.

Now I’m job-hunting. This is more challenging than I imagined. It is not that I am too proud to take a job in a soap store or a shoe store or even a fast food restaurant. It’s just that I stand in front of my students and admonish them daily to stick with their plans, to keep up with their studies, to earn that degree if they ever want to get out of the retail rat-race. I would lose all my credibility if I had to suggestive sell fries to someone I had just scolded for not turning in an essay.

Another thing that prompted me to make this choice was that I turned fifty. Just like that, out of the blue, I woke up Sunday morning, and I was fifty years old. Shouldn’t I already have success as a writer at this age if I were truly meant to be a writer? Successful writers all say they have been writing since they were children, they can’t remember a time when they weren’t writing. I remember long periods of time when I wasn’t writing. I was teaching, or having babies, or homeschooling, always thinking I SHOULD be writing.

 My decision is made. I want to teach my classes, go to my new job, and come home to watch television like normal people. I’m tired of having in the back of my head the thought that I should be doing something else, something more, something important. It’s too much pressure. It distracts me from what I am doing right now.

As soon as I decided this, I felt a great relief. I was released from the “tyranny of the should.” I began to enjoy my classes. I no longer dreaded grading essays, essays that previously reminded me only that I should be writing my own essays. I liked the feeling of knowing my work is complete and there is nothing lingering to be done, nothing new to be started or revised, no unknown world to develop or person to create and destroy.

 My only New Year’s resolution was to learn to live the Sacrament of the Moment. I believe this decision is a big step. By releasing the speculation that comes with writing, I have regained appreciation for my talent as a teacher or even as a housewife, whose rewards are immediate and tangible.

 I will find a second job, or maybe I will do as my husband does and extend my adjuncting to more colleges. Then I can rebuild my little nest egg and see about getting the plumbing fixed. And I will continue to admonish my students to get a degree and find that dream career, only NOT as an adjunct.

 Meanwhile, I am driving my husband around and waiting in tiny lounges with my laptop. Now and then I get a thought and jot it down. Not because I am a writer. I am not. But because sometimes I have no choice but to write.