Balance—I’ve written a lot about trying to maintain a sane and happy balance in a life full of competing demands. For me, this always comes down to not being greedy. When I want too much I inevitably end up feeling driven and guilty and disappointed. Right now I am trying to have too much. I have become a slave to my to-do lists, which saps both my creativity and my enjoyment.

Like everybody else, I struggle with this balance all the time. But mine just got a whole lot more complicated. After spending much of the fall agonizing about it, our family has decided to move to Montreal, Canada next spring. We are incredibly excited about this opportunity, but the reality of an international move is starting to set in. (Sell house, find house, find job, arrange immigration, learn French…) It’s going to be a busy winter. I want to give this move the time and mental energy that it deserves, and to do that I have to pull back from other projects. I can’t think of any other way.

Focus—As I have built this blog my understanding and appreciation of blogs as a medium has grown. I have found that the blogs I follow most eagerly are both entertaining and informative and—here’s the key—related to very specific topics. I have known all along that this blog would benefit from a more defined theme, but I needed to write my way around a variety of topics in order to discern what that central purpose really was. I have some pretty good ideas about it now, but I suspect that the upcoming shift in latitude and career will change my perspective a bit.

I hope that before many months go by I will be able to awaken this blog from its long winter’s nap—reenergized, refocused, and with a renewed sense of purpose. (And perhaps the beginnings of a Quebecois accent!)

In the meantime, warm wishes to all for the holiday season and the New Year.

To illustrate, let me tell you what has happened with this blog. As you know, if you’ve been reading, my husband and I have been in the throes of making a big decision. We’ve been a little busy. So it has been harder than usual to find time to write. Also, my brain has been occupied with gnawing on the various pieces of this decision, and not with the usual random assortment of thoughts that I like to share with you. Some of the issues at play in our decision-making are probably of broader interest, but after a while I figured you’d get tired of hearing about my angst. (After a while, I got tired of it myself.) And because the decision has involved some delicate negotiations, I have not felt free to share all of my musings with the big wide world.

The upshot of all of this is that I stopped writing. And immediately started feeling guilty. (I have literally had “blog” on my to-do list for weeks now.) The longer I waited, the worse I felt, until I didn’t even want to think about blogging because it instantly conjured up all these feelings of failure and regret and frustration. Sitting down to write a post stopped being fun, and started to feel like this miserable, looming chore.

But the truth is, of course, that writing a post is as simple and pleasant as it has always been—as I remembered the instant I sat down at the keyboard just now. The hard part was getting over the emotional barrier that I created when I lost my rhythm.

Writer’s block is a well-known phenomenon, but I notice this pattern in just about every arena of my life. I miss a call from a friend I haven’t talked with in a while, and for whatever reason, don’t return the call right away. And then I spend weeks with “call friend” on my mental list, but feel increasingly sheepish about the delay, and decreasingly likely to just pick up the phone. Or I get in a good exercise routine, but then miss a few days, and a few more, and pretty soon I have to start all over again, convincing myself that I really am the kind of person who exercises and that I should just lace up my shoes and go.

In every instance, resuming the lost routine is much easier in practice than it is in my imagination. In fact, it is usually instantly satisfying because it removes the whole mess of guilt I’ve been carrying around. The frustrating part is that although I am fully aware of this pattern, and recognize it as it is happening, I still succumb to it more often than I would care to admit.

What do you do when you lose your stride…in your work, your hobbies, your relationships? Any tricks for getting back in the saddle more gracefully?

And it’s true—I do find it more engaging than shows about cops and doctors and other things far removed from my identity. From time to time I imagine taking on all those ad men at their testosterone-fueled game. (My character is, of course, ravishingly beautiful, dazzlingly smart, tough as nails, and funny besides.)

But I must confess that when it comes to TV fantasies, my true heart lies elsewhere.  I am, and will forever be, a speechwriter for President Josiah Bartlet. We watched all seven seasons of The West Wing last winter, and at one point I went so far as to do some internet research about speechwriting careers. I realize that it is probably not quite like it looks on TV. (It doesn’t help, though, that President Obama’s main speechwriter is a brilliant young phenom and something of a celebrity besides.)

Who would you play on TV? And what does it reveal about what you want in your real-world career?

I could probably write half a dozen posts on this topic and still have more questions than answers. And I’d probably leave it all alone and write about something simpler if I could. But we have this decision to make, and these issues are right in the middle of it.

This morning, just as I was getting up the gumption to grapple with this topic, I found comfort and wisdom in an unlikely place: the White House. Jodi Kantor’s profile of the Obamas’ marriage in the New York Times magazine is fascinating and intimate. She captures the ongoing negotiation behind the glossy fairytale that is their public image. Through this article, you see the hard work that it takes to sustain a marriage between two ambitious, uncompromising people. You see the cost of the tradeoffs that they have chosen, and you especially see that although Michelle plays her part with grace, she is not entirely okay with the sacrifices she has been asked to make. Which is reassuring to me, because I’m not entirely okay with what’s being asked of me either. And somehow it makes me feel better to know that as our family works through these issues, we do it in good company.

A bit more background here: I am about to become what you might call a “trailing spouse.” My husband’s career is specialized and geographically restrictive. He loves his work, and he’s good at it, and we have known all along that we would come to a point when following his career would be the only sensible option. I signed on for this and have had nearly a decade to get used to the idea. And still I’m not entirely okay with it.

I guess I have been spoiled by equality. Up to this point, we have made all major decisions on equal footing, so I have no experience in sacrifice, and my feelings about it are all muddled. One script in my head says that all kinds of people—men and women both—follow their partners’ careers at some point. (And probably most of them do it with a lot less angst than this.) Two careers cannot take equal precedence simultaneously. I believe that a solid marriage is built by striving for equality whenever possible and taking turns leading when necessary. I know that it is my turn to follow. But there is this raging feminist inside of me who is so totally not okay with that, and who rails against all the structural forces that have brought us to the point where this decision is inevitable. I don’t know what to do about her.

Let me be clear here: My husband has been tremendous through this whole process. He is wholly on my team and doing everything in his power to make sure that my career and happiness are well-served by any move we make. I have absolute veto power over any opportunity I am not comfortable with, and he would be okay if I used it.

I should also be clear that I’m not being asked to move to a godforsaken outpost. The opportunity in front of us is, in fact, quite romantic. (My friends get these quizzical looks when I express any doubts about it.) I’m fairly sure that this move would prove to be a great adventure for our family, and maybe in the long run a boon for my career too.

But I’m being asked to leave a good job in a city that I love to move to a place where most business is conducted in a language I do not speak. I have no guarantee of a job there, and in fact not much notion of how to find one. And I’m scared. I’m scared that my career will get derailed. I’m scared about having my identity revolve around home and family as I try to make friends and build a network in a new place. And I’m scared because this feels like a pretty major alteration in our life course, and I’m not sure when I will get my turn to lead on a decision of this significance.

But then I think about the Obamas and I feel better, because, jeez, if they can work it out, anybody can. As Michelle Obama said at the close of her New York Times interview, the equality of any partnership “is measured over the scope of the marriage. It’s not just four years or eight years or two. We’re going to be married for a very long time.”

A fascinating report from the Pew Research Center recently highlighted just how difficult it is to balance work and motherhood. Among their survey respondents, the majority of working mothers said that their own work-family balance was less than ideal and identified some other model as preferable. And 40% of working moms reported feeling rushed all the time, as opposed to only about a quarter of the overall public. Whether the moms worked part-time or full-time had no impact on how rushed they felt. (Interestingly, working dads and at-home moms were no more harried than everybody else.)

The fact that working motherhood is tough is no news to me, or anyone else I know who’s doing it. But here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough—my life is more joyful and fulfilling right now than I could ever have imagined. When my husband picks me up after work and my daughter catches her first glimpse of me walking toward the car, her whole face shines and she literally dances in her carseat. It is impossible not to be cheered by this welcome at the end of a long day.

My dad said an interesting thing to me recently. It was during a phone call in which I’d been running through the usual litany of daily chaos at our house—deadlines and chores and colds and decisions. He’s retired now, and he said that from his vantage point it’s clear that the stage we’re in now—just establishing our careers, and our family, and our home—is really the most compelling epoch of a lifetime. Other times are more restful, more settled, maybe easier, but never are you more deeply connected to the work of building a life than we are right now.

It’s true. I know what he means, and I feel it. It’s easy for that feeling to get swamped by the tide of everyday details, but I try to pay attention to it. In the midst of the clamor and the mess, I will sometimes pause and notice how happy I really am—how much I laugh these days, and how much hope I have. These moments fill me with gratitude and humility. I hope I can hold onto them, like photographs, to look back on in later years.

Hardship is always easier to talk about than joy, and working motherhood is no exception. It’s not easy to stay afloat in this busy life of ours, and there are times when I gripe about it, but I know just how lucky we are, and I wanted you to know too.

Hat tip: Nataly of WorkIt, Mom! for the Pew study.

Justin Minkel is an elementary school teacher. He’s pretty good at it. He has won state and national awards, including becoming the 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year and one of four finalists for the National Teacher of the Year, and has hobnobbed with educational bigwigs from former governors to the Deputy Secretary of Education. But if you get him into conversation he will eventually let slip that teaching is not his only occupation. Justin is also a writer. He writes fantasy novels for readers in the middle grades (kids ages 9 to 14). He has written three of these novels, in fact. (It’s fun to watch this conversational exchange. People recover pretty quickly, but there is always an instant of slack-jawed wonder as they absorb this news.)

Justin is devoted to both his teaching and his writing, and he agreed to be profiled here as part of an occasional series on the ways that people blend multiple passions in their careers.

Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your books.

All three novels are part of a series called The Calamon Chronicles, named for a town where sorcery and commerce mingle in the docks and taverns each night.  The most recent novel is about five kids with powerful magical abilities who run away from home to start their own Academy of Sorcery—a magical school designed, built, and taught by children.  Every one of my students has at some point daydreamed about what school would be like if it was run by children instead of adults, and this novel sprang from that idea.

Why did you first decide you wanted to write a book?

I think the book decided it wanted me to write it, and I went along for the ride.  Indian musicians have this concept that musicians don’t make the music, they just channel it for awhile—the music goes on whether they are there to play it or not.  Writing has always been that way for me.  When I sit down to write a novel, I feel like an archaeologist—I’m not creating these cities and ships and mountain ranges, I’m discovering them.  They were there all along.

A lot of people would be daunted by the prospect of writing a novel. Were you intimidated at first? How did you get started? And how do you keep going?

Each plot had its origin in a single moment.  The first novel came from a story my dad told me when I was seven years old about a dragon shrunk inside her mountain to the size of a gem.  I wondered one day, “What would happen if she got out of the gem, and started returning to her original size at a terrifying rate?”  That single ‘I wonder’ led to the manuscript of my first novel, Shammara’s Story.  Once I discover the characters, they seem to do things on their own, and I just follow them until my part in their story ends.  Phillip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, has a simple but profound quote: “Responsibility and delight can co-exist.”  Writing and revising a novel takes discipline and time, but there is no greater sense of wonder than watching a world unfold.

Your books have a lot of detail. How do you get to know your characters and the fantasy world they inhabit?

I write down a lot that never goes into the manuscript.  In my second novel, The South Beyond, the main character is an inventor.  Before I ever began the manuscript itself, I described the clothes hanging in his closet, his daily routine of inventing, his experiences on a gnomish fishing boat years before his part in the novel begins.  That backstory would be far too detailed to include in the book, but it helped me to inhabit this character, named Pockets, until I felt I could sit down across from him in a coffee shop and buy him a cup of tea.  Once the characters are that familiar to me, I don’t have to pause in the writing to wonder “What would Pockets do here?”  He just does it.

How has your teaching affected your writing, and vice versa?

If you’re going to write for children, you have to know children, and teaching has helped me to do that.  Each week, I meet with five of my former students (now 5^th graders) to get their feedback on the manuscript I finished this summer.  They read a chapter a week, and then tell me what they liked, what they think I should change, and why.  Children aren’t just smaller versions of adults—they perceive the world, everything from time to friendship, differently than we do.  Gaining that perspective is critical to writing books they’ll want to read.

Is your writing a hobby, or a career, or something in between?  What do you see as the long-term balance between your teaching and writing?

Writing is a career for me—I just don’t get paid for it yet.  I approach the craft of writing with the same scrutiny I bring to the craft of teaching.  I set aside the money and time to attend writers’ conferences organized by groups like the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.  I hired a local novelist I respect to help me revise my second novel, and spent three years on those revisions before deciding the manuscript was ready to submit to agents and publishers.  One of the wonderful things about teaching is that it leaves you with plenty of time and imagination each summer.  During June and July, I write for three or four hours every morning, and I think more about dragons and dwarves than math lessons and seating charts.

What will the cover of your first published novel look like?

My students asked me that question last week.  When I asked them for suggestions, Gizelle wanted the cover to feature the heroine of the book—a twelve-year old Weather Sorceress named Agony Illyria, daughter to a murdered pirate lord.  Jacob thought the cover should depict the main male character, Griffomere, a carousing teenage satyr.  So maybe the publisher will go for both their ideas—Griffomere with his lute and a flagon of elderberry wine, Agony standing beside him with sword and wand drawn.

Justin Minkel can be contacted at justinmink@yahoo.com.  He is also developing a website for the novels, CalamonChronicles.com, which will be active in a few months.

But what do you do when confronted with a real whopper of a decision—one whose scale justifies all the angst that you could possibly devote to it?

Welcome to our life right now. We have been offered an opportunity, and we have a decision to make. It will dramatically shape the future of our lives. It is complex, with many variables and many unknowns. It’s exciting and scary, and I am completely at sea. I usually cobble together some combination of logic and intuition to guide me in big decisions, but neither my head nor my gut is serving me well right now.

Rather than spending another evening running mental laps around this issue, I thought it might be helpful to consult the internet and share any useful findings with you. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of info about decision-making out there in the ether. Depending on your preference, you can use complex mathematical functions or a spiritual visioning process, or anything in between.

Here are a few tips that I found helpful for this particular decision. (You will note the prevalence of clichés in this list. As a writer, I am a bit sheepish about this, but as a human being I’m not. Sometimes the most important advice is overlooked because it is too familiar.)

1. Don’t try to do it all—Big decisions often get tangled up with lots of secondary decisions. This gets messy really fast. Trying to anticipate and optimize so many outcomes at once is paralyzing. Keep the focus on the core decision at hand, and gather as much information about that decision as you possibly can. You can figure out all the other stuff later.

2. Imagine the worst case—This is age-old advice, of course, but it’s useful to stop and actually do it. Fear is a driving factor in decision-making, and this exercise helps you factor it out. Often the worst outcome is not nearly as bad as you’d think, and having considered it gives you confidence as you make your choice. (This is especially helpful if you are leaning toward a particular option but hesitating because of fear.)

3. Trust your gut—Research shows that 90% of decision-making is intuitive. Leaders in business, medicine and the military have all acknowledged the importance of intuition in decisions. This is hard for me. I’m a pretty analytical person, but I’ve realized that going through the rational part of my decision-making process often just clears the way for me to discern what my heart is telling me.

4. About that fork in the road—We all know the Yogi Berra-ism: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Partly, of course, this just means that you’ve got to stop dithering and make up your mind. But to me it also implies permission to be bold. I’ve never totally bought into the business about regretting the things you don’t do more than the things you do, but I do believe that you build an interesting life by seizing the opportunities that are presented to you, even if they’re a little scary. Given the choice, I’ll err on the side of adventure every time—but only after I agonize about it first!

I don’t know about you, but when I come apart, I do it with gusto. Here’s a typical scenario:

Something frustrating happens at work–a bad interaction with a coworker, or something I didn’t do as well as I could have, or just a really boring day. Which makes me wonder whether I’m in the right career, and whether I’ve made terrible and irreversible decisions in my education and job choices, and whether I’ll ever excel at anything. I invariably decide that I need to go back to school for something (usually law or business or journalism–varying based on the cause of the funk). I come home cranky and snap at my family, which convinces me that my marriage is stagnating. I despair about whichever issues present themselves in the moment…our finances, the cleanliness of our house, the contents of our refrigerator. Finally, when I’m headed into the home stretch, I get teary about how I’m old and saggy and wrinkly and my new haircut makes me look like Angela Merkel.

And usually, sometime around then, I snap out of it. At least enough to laugh at myself a little. And remember a few things:

1. There’s probably something to it—Convincing myself that I shouldn’t be upset and that there’s no cause to be so blue never works. It’s true that come-aparts do tend to coincide with certain times of the month, but woe unto him who points that out. Hormones and brain chemistry are never the whole story for me. Insufficient sleep and irregular exercise often play a role, but when I really unravel it usually means that things are out of whack outside as well as inside my cranium.

2. It might not be what I think—Here’s the tricky part, though: the root cause of a funk is not always, and maybe even not usually, the thing I’m most fixated on. I can get a major bee in my bonnet about how we need to move to a bigger house, when the real issue is that I need more challenge at work. Or I can get all mopey about how there’s no romance in our marriage anymore when what I really need is to get out more with my friends. It’s totally unpredictable. Also exasperating. Self-awareness is fallible, and even though I recognize this pattern, I can still waste a lot of energy looking at real-estate listings before I figure out what’s actually going on.

3. Now is not the time to fix it—This is the hardest lesson of all for me. With time, I always manage to sift through, figure out what’s really wrong, and make the necessary adjustments. But it is never a good idea to attempt this in the midst of the funk. By the time I’ve reached the Angela Merkel stage I’ve lost all perspective on what’s bothering me and what’s important. But the deeper I get into a funk, the more doggedly I want to fix it right now. I am oh-so-gradually learning to be more patient with myself. Silly movies are good in the middle of a funk. So are backrubs and cups of tea. Discrete, menial projects like organizing the closet are satisfying. Anything to take the mind off until the worst has passed and everything has returned to its usual order. I have found that things are always both brighter and clearer in the morning.

In case you are wondering, I’m not in a funk right now, but I did have a classic one recently. As I watched myself go through all the stages, this post started to take shape in my head. It was kind of fun, actually.

What are your tactics for coping with a funk?

One of my favorites was the instructor whose universal response when approached by students with problems, complaints, and tales of woe, was:

“Put on your hat, drink some water, and look at your map. If you still have a problem, come talk to me again.”

I find myself recalling these words remarkably often. It’s amazing how many of life’s problems disappear when you take a few moments to tend to your basic needs and think about where you are and where you’re headed.

All of which is a big preamble to tell you that I am about to write a post about my daughter.

She will turn two this winter. Like all parents, I am completely smitten. I am constantly amazed and amused by her antics and accomplishments. But the most magical part for me is her language development. Since her birth I have felt like we were in one of those sappy movies where the characters, although besotted with each other, speak different languages. We developed rudimentary ways to communicate. (The first time she pointed to the cupboard, said “ca-ker” and made the sign for “please” I felt like I had made contact with Mars.) It worked. We got by. But now that we speak a common tongue, our relationship has progressed to a whole new level.

Words are important to me, so I guess that this should come as no surprise, but I am completely blown away by watching this little person learn to speak. I’m talking about open-mouth, wide-eyed wonder here. The kind you associate with childhood Christmas mornings, or disturbing astronomical phenomena, or religious experiences.  I know that the process of acquiring language is mundane and universal, but I cannot shake the feeling that there is something miraculous about it.

Being a word geek, I am fascinated by the pure mechanics of it—watching when verbs started to show up, and prepositions, and when she graduated from two-word sentences to three. I’m intrigued by the things that are confusing (pronouns) or physically difficult (the ‘L’ sound). I love that vocabulary grows exponentially—she acquires new words too fast now for me to even keep track. And I love what her language tells me about her mind. When she busts out a classic like “No, this MINE polar bear,” I think about all the concepts that went into forming that little sentence and I stand amazed.

Here are three things I love about being able to converse with this daughter of mine:

1.  Practicality–It is indisputably useful to be able to ask her what she wants to eat for breakfast, or where she put her shoes, or which part got hurt when she fell down, and expect to receive an answer.

2. Play–Words have opened up whole new avenues for amusement. We take turns singing songs now, and while away the hours consuming endless combinations of pretend cake and coffee. She is often intentionally silly. Asked what her toes (which were in her mouth) tasted like, she giggled and replied, “Bananas!”

3. Politeness–It’s funny how hardwired we are to respond to polite verbal cues. Some of her more civilized expressions are surely rote—“Salud!” for a sneeze or “Thank you, Mommy!” for more snacks—but they evoke genuine gratitude all the same, and smooth out the edges if we’re having a hard day. And some of them express things that I don’t actually need to be told—things that we covered way back in our non-verbal days.  But “Love you, Mommy,” still gets me every time.