My latest release, A HIGHLANDER OF HER OWN, just hit bookstores this past week.  As I immersed myself in all the promotion activities that naturally surround a new release, the one thing I’ve been feeling thankful for is the lack of Mama Drama in my life at the moment.

What’s a Mama Drama?
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It’s those moments where your adrenalin starts to pump and your mind shoots into hyper drive because your baby has some awful problem that only you can fix.  Right this minute.  It can be anything from a gash requiring stitches right down the scale to a note from school telling you how the apple of your eye is misbehaving.  From a fight with his best buddy so he doesn’t have a friend in the world to a science project that is due tomorrow morning — and it’s now 6 p.m., and yes, he’s had a month to tell you he needed that poster board, but just didn’t think about it until right this minute.
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You know them.  All the things that kick your stress levels into overdrive, requiring you to drop everything and focus on the drama at hand or, to borrow a phrase, suffer the slings and arrows of all-consuming guilt for years to come.

I have three wonderful sons.  All handsome, all strong and almost all grown up.  My “baby” just turned eighteen a couple of months ago and is in his senior year of high school. 

When my boys were little and I was torn a hundred different directions, I always believed that one day, when they got older, life would get easier for me.  I had this idea that I’d have hours upon end to myself without having to jump to a child’s schedule or mend boo-boos, or play Mayhue Taxi Service, running them from one commitment to the next.  The Mama Dramas would  gracefully come to an end.

I was living in a fantasy world.

Mama Dramas still occur on a regular basis.  They’ve just taken on new dimensions.  Instead of a skinned knee, it’s a broken heart.  Instead of bringing home a note from the principal, they’re handing you an overdraft notice.  Instead of “stop what you’re doing and pay attention to me,” it’s…oh, wait…that one hasn’t changed at all!  

Let me tell you a secret about older children and Mama Dramas.  By the time you’ve been dealing with MD’s for as many years as I have, you realize that they’ve take on a particularly tricky new component.

As your kids get older, they learn that guilt motivates Mom like nothing else in the world.

My latest inconvenient MD struck in December.  I had two weeks left until my next manuscript was due on my editor’s desk and I was nowhere near typing  THE END on the book.  From early in the morning until late at night, I was at my desk, fighting to squeeze out the next words that just didn’t want to come.  I’d even struck up a deal with my husband to cook dinners for the next two weeks just so I didn’t have to stop what I was doing every evening.
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It was a Tuesday at lunch time.    #3 son bounced into my office to announce that he couldn’t find his red tie.  Or his dress shirt.  Or his black dress pants.

Uh-oh.
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“Why are you hunting them?”

A look of feigned innocence greeted my question.  “Jazz band concert tonight, Mom.  Don’t you remember?”  Of course, it’s much harder to ‘remember’ what you’ve never been told.  “You’re coming, right?”

I’m buried in work, tripping over my deadline.  I can’t afford the time to hunt his outfit and wash and dry and iron it after I find it stuffed in the back of his closet. [It’s always stuffed in the back of his closet].  Or the three hours involved in getting to the school early, waiting for the auditorium to open, waiting for the program to start, waiting through the other groups to hear #3’s four songs, waiting for the following groups to finish.  I NEED those three hours to write!

He sees all that in on my face.  “It’s okay.  You don’t have to come.”  A strategic pause.  “Even though it IS my last concert with jazz band.”  Cue the dramatic sigh.

Mama Drama with guilt levels raging at full alert.

Granted, not the open wound, trip to the emergency room kind of MD, but an MD all the same.

What to do?  After years of practice, I went into Mom Mode.  Stopped what I was doing, found the pants and shirt while he went back to school.  Got them ready for that evening.  Went to the concert…though I did compromise and take along a notebook and pencil, just in case inspiration hit.

And you know what?
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Standing in the hallway outside the auditorium, my Muse decided to reward me.  In the thirty minutes I stood there, I suddenly knew what happened next in my story, saw my way to the end and managed to jot down a rough outline of the ending chapters and by the time the concert started, I had a couple of pages of the story.

Mama Drama over.  All’s well in my world once more.  For the moment.

Don’t get me wrong.  My writing is important and I have to make time for it.  Sometimes I simply need to be creative in making that time.  Whether it’s in the hallway waiting for the auditorium to open or in the old days, sitting in a parked car waiting to pick my son up at school, there are always bits and pieces of time for writing.

But, trust me, there are moments in your child’s life, in your relationship with that child, that you’ll regret missing.  Maybe not today.  Or even tomorrow.  But years down the road…when they’re grown and they’ve married and moved on to the next chapter in their lives.  Don’t miss those little moments.  One day you may find yourself sitting in front of a box of photos, trying to choose the best ones for a scrapbook you’re putting together when it hits you.  All those moments that seemed so hard, so trying, so inconvenient at the time, they all went so quickly.  As you fight that tight feeling in your throat, you’ll realize that this is a whole new kind of Mama Drama. 

But that one is a subject for another blog entry…

Melissa Mayhue is the author of the award-winning Daughters of the Glen series — paranormal time travel romances set in the Scottish Highlands, filled with Faerie Magic and happy ever afters.  You can read excerpts from all her books and learn more about her writing at www.MelissaMayhue.com.