Giving birth to my oldest child was hard. After nine months of a challenging pregnancy, I spent two full days in painful labor in a German hospital bed, without the benefit of any pain killers, until birth came so suddenly that the midwife had no time to call for help or a gurney. She and a nurse threw my arms over their shoulders and literally dragged me from my hospital room next door to the delivery room, where I delivered without the benefit of a doctor. Five minutes later, my son let out his first scream. I was still crippled with pain, but joy and relief overpowered any previous discomfort. 

Working on the same manuscript for almost 30 years feels a bit like a very long, complicated pregnancy. It started out with passion, joy, exuberance, excitement, and lots of optimism that, over time, as the writing process progressed, was tempered by setbacks, disillusion, and self-doubt. But just like there was no choice of giving birth, there’s no choice of abandoning this manuscript unless risking a permanent feeling of failure that would be undoubtedly much more severe than the expected pain of the final delivery.

And so it continues – the hard labor through these final stages. The doubts, the writer’s block, whether perceived or real, the “why did I even start this” questions, the endless revisions that never seem to lead to the desired outcome, the reluctance in tackling it again, the excuses for not doing so, and the nagging feeling that this whole project is a lost cause anyway.  

This place of being stuck, of being so close and yet so far, of spiraling between continuing and letting go, this state of writing inertia, feels like a cork that’s tightly lodged in a wine bottle, like an engine that turns over, but won’t start up, like running in place instead of bridging the distance.

It’s going to require a shakeup, an epic event, a change of scene, to get things moving again. I’m hopeful.

P.S. The birth of my second child was a cinch. A couple of hours of relatively easy labor in an American hospital, and it was over and done with. One can only hope.