Unfinished Business

 This holiday season is different than any other I've ever had. My mother passed away in February and it's the first time I won't be bringing her apple pie, or at least talking to her about the pies I made for my friends while I was somewhere else. Her recipe has been passed down and is, hands down, the best apple pie in the world. It's also the first time I won't be hearing "Rackeye, rackeye, rackeye", her words that replaced everything else in her vocabulary after her stroke.

My mother dabbled in writing herself. Somewhere on a hard drive I have pages and pages of blog posts from her Wordpress blog she maintained through the early 2000s, tucked into boxes I have the journals she wrote in intermittently, not a single one full until the end. In my storage unit I have an entire giant rubbermaid bin of unfinished quilting projects she was in progress on before she suffered her stroke in 2010. She left a lot of things unfinished and I feel a pressure to finish those quilts, but also an overwhelming sense that  I cannot possibly.

This year, for the first time, I have participated in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and I am about 6,000 words away from the finish line, which should only be about two days of writing. For the last two days I haven't been able to bring myself to write the climactic scene that would essentially end the story. 

I know I will finish the project, complete the rough draft and let people read my jumble of a murder mystery. But that's what is, I think, holding me back. I've promised to send the rough draft to a few people upon it's completion. I am scared of their judgement and criticism, even though I know my story has a ways to go until I would consider it publishable. It's also what keeps me from finishing my mother's quilts. And I think it's what kept her from finishing a journal completely. 

There is a level of expectation for a finished project or work. If it's still in progress, we can pass off it's inadequacies so much more simply than if we've deemed it done. That judgement and criticism can be hard to take, and I for one am scared of it.

That's the hard part, allowing ourselves to release our finished projects into the world to be judged on their quality from an audience of people who likely will never understand the amount of work, or the emotions brought forth, by actually finishing the damn thing.

I suppose I should stop writing about unfinished works as a means of procrastination (another quality my mother passed down to me) and instead get to finishing something, because perhaps the sense of accomplishment will outweigh these other fears.