Putting the "cra(p)" in Crafty

"Oh," says my son, Friday night, around 9 p.m., "I need slippers for [the school play on] Monday. Old-fashioned ones."

Saturday:
Target's slipper cupboard was bare
Sears, alas, also had none
Mervyn's shoe department simply sneered.
Amazon.com? Why, yes! Huzzah! Please, to enjoy our $35 sheepskin slippers, plus our $20 shipping. I could not do it. I could not.

Aha! I shall (the one who glues together Halloween costumes due to an utter inability to sew with needle and thread) sew slippers! On Sunday! While also on deadline and being feted as the stretch marked, strung out, saggy mother I am.


So, I did.


They are like wee plaid potato bags, the slippers he trotted off with this morning. The whole hook-and-loop thing did not work, nor did holding out a handful of safety pins and wishing him much luck. At midnight, I was stabbing at some bits of raffia left over from my holiday wrapping spree (4% of which may or may not go to school fundraising!) so he could tie them closed to fit 'round his wee ankles.

They won't last twenty earnest multi-purpose media room minutes. You know it. I know it. The parents watching the play know it; they'll set their Blackberrys by the unraveling of the clashing thread.

"One must let one's children starve, metaphorically speaking," says my friend, a writer. She's not a mother. "You must give them less to give your art more."

I call bullshit. It's not that easy.

I don't want to be a "Sunday Writer," someone who dabbles, the rueful mom who always wanted to write That Book. Who signs up for that? Would I have rather been working on my novel?

Yes.

And yet . . .

My kid needed goddamn slippers - ones without a Disney icon on the toe. I tried to go the easy route and buy them. I could have said, "Nope. Sorry, Kid. My need to work on my book trumps your need to feel like your edges are square this week."

I can't do that. Who can?

And yet, while I don't let them starve - sometimes, crappy drive-thru food on the way home from Little League means I can hit the computer as soon as we get home. That thirty minutes of writing time, of "me" time, while they watch "iCarly" and eat transfats, is what saves me from therapy and vodka.

Well, therapy, anyway.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm all Craft Hungover. I can't even think about a glue gun without triggering my gag reflex.

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Have you seen "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" yet? No? We need to talk.