When I was about thirteen, my aunt gave me her horse. I had always loved horses, loved riding them at a brisk walk, and loved it the most when the horse would start to gallop and my situation straddled the line between control and chaos. Would I manage to stay in my seat? More often than not, the answer was no. I never achieved anything that could be called equestrian skill, but I cared for that horse for years, despite not being able to ride without considerable assistance from someone more experienced.
After spending one miserable, cold winter scrambling to find straw for bedding, hay for feed, and carrying 5-gallon buckets of water the thousand yards or so from my home to the barn, I'd decided I'd had enough. (I think it might have been when I had to use a pick-axe to get at the frozen manure in the stall, but that's not a memory I've striven to keep.)
I sold my horse. For the next few months, I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. No more getting up at the crack of dawn to take care of my horse before catching the school bus; I no longer had to shovel manure.
Then summer came, and my other friends with horses were out galavanting, while I sat home with my family - not a teenager's idea of a good time. I began to miss my horse terribly, but it taught me a valuable lesson. When you love something, there are times when you will have to just push through the momentary unpleasantness.
This past December, I knew I'd had it. I was constantly exhausted, time-starved and chronically sleep-deprived. In addition to processing all of flashquake's submissions, maintaining the database, functioning as a working editor, overseeing publication, managing our online class registration, designing and marking up the site for each issue, I took care of all the small, one-off tasks that needed handling such as correspondence, requests for interviews, request for guideline updates from all of the market collections that feature literary journals.
At work, I was consumed with a new supervisor, a radically new way of doing business, and the culmination of a project I'd worked toward for nearly ten long years, but that had me working ten hours a day, seven days a week. I began to think wistfully about retirement and chucking flashquake. I knew then that something had to give.
That something was my editorial role at flashquake. I asked our HR/PR person, Didi Wood, to find a sub for me, and Sharon Hurlbut graciously agreed to step in. I would still continue to fulfill all my other duties, but I would bow out of the editorial duties for our Spring issue.
I felt at first as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders (sound familiar?). I could concentrate on the other things clamoring for my attention without feeling guilty about all the submissions I had waiting to be read and reviewed. The development phase of my project was scheduled to culminate at mid-December, but as even the best laid plans.well, you can guess the rest. We had about two weeks of no-fault slippage, and still hadn't wrapped things up by the time I was scheduled to leave for Virginia to spend the holiday week with my family.
I gave out my private e-mail address and my personal cell phone number, and spent much of my Christmas vacation working. Family activities we'd planned for months were interrupted time and again as sleepless automatons from our corporate partner called me to check on details or to ask me to review and critique prototypes. But we were able to complete work on the project by the end of the year, and I'm thrilled with the result.
After the new year I felt flushed with success, invigorated after realizing a decade-long dream. I walked back into work (humming that old Gene Autry standard, "Back in the Saddle Again") with a new enthusiasm, and even began reading - for pleasure, what a concept! But as I settled back into the groove, I found myself missing my editorial duties. I posted editorial reviews to the database, feeling perhaps a little cheated when an editor had something particularly complimentary to say about a submission. I missed the thrill of discovery, of being the first to realize we'd uncovered the next Lydia Davis.
The lesson I learned as a thirteen-year-old saved me from losing something that love, and now I'm getting ready to really get back in the saddle again. It's really true - absence does make the heart grow fonder.