The reminder.

She was sure it started out of boredom; her brain was just wanting to break the monotony of it all.  But even thinking that way stabbed her with guilt.  She loved her kids fiercely, but she ached for something beyond this little house, tinker toys and Cheerios.


The first sentence she wrote down was "Martha dropped the plant on the piano keys and the pot cracked."  It came to her out of nowhere as she was cleaning off the table.  There happened to be a notebook and a pencil on the counter, where she had been writing out a shopping list, so she wrote the sentence down underneath "onions".


The next day, she wrote down "Her cloth carved a steady path through years of dust and condensation on the windowsill."  She looked at the sentence and shook her head.  It didn't inspire her to dust her own windowsills, instead she took the kids to the park.


After two months, she had a few pages of random sentences, including "The baseball shattered the window at the same moment Martha stepped into the bathtub." and "Her hand rose absentmindedly to her earlobe; were these earrings too much?"  She flipped the pages back and forth, wondering if she moved them fast enough whether a story would appear in the blur of fluttering paper.  She put the notebook down and went in to tuck in the kids.

One night she was getting ready for bed and realized that she had not written a sentence that day.  It was odd, but she didn't think much of it, so she went to bed.  She had been asleep for an hour and a half, when suddenly she was wide awake with "She tried not to be bothered by it, but the look on his face wouldn't leave her." running over and over through her mind.  She finally got up, went to the kitchen and wrote the sentence in her notebook.  When she returned to bed and turned out the light, she noticed it was two minutes until midnight.


What were these sentences?  Who was this Martha person?  She had never been a writer, never wanted to be.  And she had never known anyone named Martha.  Still, the sentences kept coming once a day, every day.  She wondered if she would eventually be able to scatter them about and then fit them all back together like some sort of story-puzzle.  Was there even a story here at all?


Some of the sentences made her laugh because they were funny, and some made her laugh because they were strange, almost painful and unlike anything she ever thought about.  "Martha knelt down to pull the green bean out of little Johnny's nose."  "She smiled as Mrs. Parker walked by, while below the windowsill she viciously twisted the bloom off her prize rose."  She didn't even live the same type of life as Martha.  She had never played piano, never even knew how to grow a garden.  But day after day, Martha's life made its way into her notebook, sentence by sentence.


As time passed and the notebook filled, she noticed a change in herself: she no longer felt bogged down by the repetitive details of motherhood.  She allowed herself to revel in her kids' beauty, in their laughter, in their intelligence and humour.  Laundry, dishes, cooking and cleaning became stepping stones to getting to the things that mattered.  She came to see that there was no story to Martha's life, just a collection of fractured moments.  As those moments revealed themselves in all their self-conscious duplicity, she knew it was a life she would never want.  She was grateful for the reminder.