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I am overwhelmed even before I enter the starting gate of my book-writing project by the staggering inadequacies within my technological scenery.  Since last Sunday when I tried to establish a Google Drive account to provide online backup for my work I have seen my computer crash over and over and over again.

I do not have the money to set myself up with the technological equipment I need to accomplish my task.  In my mind’s eye the image came this morning about trying to tow a loaded semi-truck with a worn and battered VW Bug.

The volume of information in my mother’s writings is staggering.  The files I currently have of her transcribed work are monstrous — way too large for my old laptop to handle.  The Google Drive does not seem to continuously back anything up automatically.  When I try to accomplish in-process backups my computer crashes.

It strikes me that I will probably need to rely on the creation of another WordPress blog for sorting, dividing, organizing and backing up my work online.  I am forever grateful to the most generous resource WordPress is providing to me and to other ‘common folk’ who are most limited both in technological skills and resources to improve our equipment.

I am intimidated by the task I have given myself.  Most fortunately I have over these past 6 years been able to make major progress with Mother’s writings without evidently stopping to realize how overwhelming this work has actually been to me each step of the way.

I do not wish for current limitations in my life to stop me from accomplishing my goal of publishing two books by spring.  Actually, it seems to me that I will create three books of Mother’s story, with the final one being a greatly abridged edition.  I will thus give readers the opportunity to choose whether or not they wish to read Mother’s accounts of her life as she recorded them versus reading a ‘censored’ version in which I delete repetitious and probably boring details of her day-to-day existence.

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I have also been struck lately with the thought that while women and men seem to find interest in reading accounts of MEN’S lives, any time a story (or a film) is about how women see and experience life there is a danger that men will not take the work seriously (unless the women at center stage is already known to be ‘famous’).

‘Chick Flick’ – I cannot control the final readership of this account of ‘The Demise of Mildred’.  Her story will stand with great value to a wide readership — but it will also include details about caring for sick children, about doing laundry, cooking meals, being pregnant — all the mundane aspects of being a woman that our culture has long ago lost interest in as activities of meaning or of value.

Into this tangled web enters a concept of highest importance:  Women as the mothers of infants and children have the most critical responsibility for creating human beings.

The job of the mother cannot be passed onto anybody else.  Certainly support is needed for the raising of infants and children, but nature has designed the beginning relationship between mother and infant to be the primary attachment relationship that forms an infant’s physiological foundations during its earliest developmental stages that determine the life trajectory of the infant.

We alter this fact.

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I may not at this moment see that I can find a way to accomplish my task given the great limitations at the start that would stop me if I let them.  J.K. Rowling’s writing process serves as a great inspiration to me — she DID IT with very little resources available to her at the start of her project.

Now I must take a step every moment in the right direction – and then another step – and another step.  I need a different kind of stamina than any I have ever recognized in myself before.  In fact, I probably won’t know what I need to do this task until I have finished it successfully.

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