A Reasonable Amount of Chaos And Paper

I’m finally starting to enjoy my summer.

I know. It’s August.

Spring had already decided to be mildly cursed, and then I spent a good part of the summer recovering from foot surgery. For two or three weeks, my physical universe was essentially reduced to a bed, a table for my laptop, and whatever surface I could sit on while keeping my foot elevated.

My body was recovering. My brain, meanwhile, apparently interpreted “rest” as a writing residency.

I finished and revised all 48 pages of Lunaire. I wrote the 264 pages of the next Éphéméride. Then the 48 pages of Rémanence, our upcoming journal on grief. Somewhere in there were the research, corrections, rewrites, changes of mind, and that highly professional activity of staring at a paragraph for twenty minutes wondering whether it’s brilliant or completely stupid.

So, roughly 360 finished pages, not counting everything that was written, deleted, and rewritten to get there.

I have never been this immobile. I have never had this many ideas.

Attention: major scientific breakthrough! I’m seriously starting to believe my brain runs on sleep. 

Because for a few weeks, I wasn’t doing nights with Rosalie. I could barely stand on both feet, so sprinting toward a two-year-old’s bedroom in the middle of the night seemed like a medically questionable strategy.

And now? I’m walking again. Not quite “frolicking joyfully through a meadow” walking, but enough that the world suddenly feels much bigger again.

Rosalie and I went to a puppet show. We went back to the park. To the splash pad. We even went to the Pride Parade, where she clapped harder than I have ever seen her clap and danced like she had personally been hired to keep the party going.

After weeks of calculating every single outing, it feels exhilarating.

The world is our oyster again. The oyster simply comes with terms and conditions.

After about an hour of walking, my foot sends me an official notice, I go home, and I ice it. Progress.

Meanwhile, Writuals apparently decided that my return to mobility was the perfect time to enter its busiest season of the year. Obviously.

All the printed products for the next collection are currently in production with a new local printer that uses vegetable-based inks. My mom is reviewing my products. My friend Kristina proofread all the texts. And I’ve started moving my workshop into the space my in-laws created for me at their house.

This move has forced me to confront a reality I had successfully avoided until now: There is an absolutely obscene amount of paper in my life. And before anyone very reasonably suggests that I simplify things: every paper is different. Obviously. This one is 80 gsm. That one is 100. That one is 160. This one has the right texture. That one has the right rigidity. This one is for interior pages. That one is for covers. That one is waiting for an extremely specific project that I will defend in a court of law if necessary.

Between two boxes of perfectly justified paper weights, I’ve also started carving the linocuts for the next solstice cards, gift tags, and ornaments.

There are owls. There are stars. There are more owls.

They’re probably the most detailed designs I’ve carved so far and, frankly, I’m really proud of them.

I wanted this collection to feel more nocturnal, more astral, darker, more boreal. Apparently, my brain heard: OWLS. EVERYWHERE. IMMEDIATELY. I respect its commitment to the creative direction.

And the more this collection takes shape, the more I realize it’s embracing a side of Writuals that I may have kept a little quieter until now. It’s witchier. There. I said it. More moons. More stars. More symbols. More darkness. More of that strange territory somewhere between natural science, old books, cycles, myths, seasons, and the things that make you want to light a candle simply because it’s 4:37 p.m. and the mood requires it.

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

Thankfully, I’m not opening a David’s Tea.

I think I’ve spent enough time over the past year wondering what people are going to like. Obviously, I still think about it. I run a business. It would be mildly concerning if my customers never entered the equation. But I also want to make things that excite me. Things I can’t wait to see exist. Things that make me pull a freshly carved lino out from under my gouge, look at it, and think: Oh. Yes. That’s us.

I know this direction won’t speak to everyone. And I’m starting to be genuinely okay with that. Maybe a small business doesn’t need to speak to everyone. Maybe it just needs to speak loudly enough to the right people.

So this fall, I fully intend to find mine.

And I’ll have plenty of opportunities to do that, because my market calendar is starting to resemble a military logistics exercise. We’ll be announcing all the dates very soon, but let’s just say Writuals will be getting out a lot this fall.

Which makes me incredibly excited. Which makes me incredibly stressed. And which has already awakened that perfectly rational creature known as mom guilt.

Because every date I add to the calendar is also a Saturday or Sunday I won’t be spending with Rosalie.

And while I intellectually understand that working a few weekends in no way calls my love for my child into question, my mom brain appears to have its own communications department, and its distribution strategy is excellent.

I am deeply excited about this fall. I also already feel guilty about some of the Saturdays in it. Both are true. I wish I had a particularly brilliant feminist conclusion to offer you here. At the moment, what I mostly have is an extremely elaborate family calendar.

My parents, my in-laws, and Cédric are juggling dates with me to make everything work. Who has Rosalie. Who’s available. Who can give me a lift. Who can help. Where. When. How.

A small family infrastructure quietly assembles itself behind every market, every box that gets moved, and every slightly overambitious idea I have the brilliant impulse to add to the project.

And while we’re doing all of that, we’re also renovating our condo so we can sell it. Oh, right. That too. Because apparently we looked at our current lives and concluded they were suffering from a slight shortage of drywall dust.

There is a reason for all of this. Cédric and I are slowly starting to prepare the ground for a possible baby number two. 

Yes.

I have officially lost my mind.

I have only just started sleeping again, I’ve regained enough cognitive function to write roughly 360 pages in a matter of weeks, and apparently my natural response is: “Great. What if we did it again?”

Excellent decision-making. No notes.

But underneath the joke, there’s something about that possibility that is shaping the way I’m looking at this fall.

I have absolutely no idea what next year will look like. Maybe we’ll be in a new home. Maybe Writuals will have found a different way to fit into our daily lives. Maybe I’ll be pregnant. Maybe I’ll be back in the postpartum fog. Maybe none of those things will happen according to the magnificent imaginary timeline my brain is already desperately trying to construct.

I still hope I get the chance to do it all again. Even the chaos. Even the nights. Even that strange period when I could forget why I had walked into a room before I had technically finished walking into it.

So yes, I want this fall to be epic. And by epic, I mean full. I want to do markets. Meet people. Get Writuals out of my workshop and watch this collection exist somewhere other than inside my head and on my screen. I want to come home at night with my feet absolutely wrecked—which is probably a mildly threatening choice of metaphor under the circumstances—and want to squeeze Rosalie far too tightly. I want to have moments when I wonder why on earth I decided to do this many markets, followed fifteen minutes later by something that reminds me exactly why.

I want to give this collection a real chance. Writuals. My ideas. Myself, too, I suppose. Because I’m learning that loving my life as a mother deeply doesn’t stop me from desperately wanting to see how far my own ideas can go.

I still haven’t found the magic formula that makes the guilt attached to that disappear. Apparently, nobody included it in the motherhood manual I was never given. So I’m simply going to keep moving forward with both. The excitement and the guilt. The ambition and the exhaustion. The desire to grow something that belongs to me and the desire to be there for every tiny thing that belongs to Rosalie’s childhood. Sometimes they coexist very badly. They coexist anyway.

And somewhere in all this chaos, Lammas passed me by.

It is August 12 as I write this, and I have essentially just looked at the calendar with the expression of a woman who designs a seasonal planner and has realized she missed a festival on the Wheel of the Year. Excellent.

At the same time, it may be the most accurate description of my summer: I spent so much time writing about the seasons that I temporarily missed part of one. Very meta. And yet, August is here.

August, which I’m finally able to live a little. August with splash pads, parks, puppets, Pride, and a two-year-old who dances like nobody has introduced her to the concept of restraint yet. August with lino blocks already beginning to tell stories about December. August with the autumn products at the printer. August with stacks of paper migrating to my new workshop. Different stacks. I need that to be clear. August with a market calendar filling up dangerously fast, a condo under renovation, an entire family engaged in an advanced form of logistical gymnastics, and the possibility of another tiny human somewhere in our future.

And me, obviously, already mentally in October.

I’m an autumn girl.

I can deeply love summer while simultaneously fantasizing about the exact moment I’ll be able to pull out the largest cardigan ever created by humankind. Those two can coexist, too.

I’m already thinking about the leaves. Cool evenings. Markets. The woods. Pumpkins. The first pumpkin-spice latte I will inevitably order far too early and drink with the conviction of a woman who refuses to check the temperature outside.

I’m ready. Far too ready.

So before I launch myself headfirst into fallen leaves, autumn markets, enormous sweaters, and the season that makes my heart beat just a little faster, I’m going to try to stay here.

There is still summer left.

Rosalie still has her fear of flies to conquer.

My foot still has a lot of ice in its future.

Lammas will probably forgive me.

And my cardigan can wait. Probably.

With one foot on ice, far too much paper, and a cardigan waiting for its moment,

Sarah
Atelier scriptural Writuals