For about a month I’ve been on a self-imposed blackout. I cut all unnecessary things in my life. No Twitter, no blogging, no critique groups, no phone calls I didn’t have to make, no events I didn’t absolutely have to go to. You may be thinking, what was left to do? This was one thing: How We Roll. And SHE was another.

About the time I started my other blog, joined this one, started Tweeting, joined critique groups, sent my MS to agents, and generally dove head-first into advancing as a writer; when all of that happened, she stopped taking naps. You have to be a mother or a nanny to really understand the severity of that sentence.

Fast forward six months. The agents have responded, the blog is getting traffic, the tweeting is well, whatever it does, and I’m so strapped for writing time I’m taking rough drafts to critique group. One day, being the decisive, action-oriented person that I am, I decided to do the blackout.

I was like Alice in Wonderland when she falls down the rabbit hole and everything is upside-down. I fell from the ceiling and the world righted itself again.

When I reemerged a week ago and went to a critique group, Lisha asked, “Where have you been?” I told her I was reading books, writing, doing the occasional exercise video, taking my daughter to the park. I said, “You know what I learned? I like my daughter. She’d kinda fun.”

By the grace of God I checked my calendar and saw I was supposed to post today. And I’m okay with that. But truth be told, I’m not ready to end my blackout quite yet. (Partly because of this: Dancing) Social media is wonderful, great, irreplaceable. I wouldn’t have the writer friends I do, the critique partners, this blog, or half the knowledge I have without them. But every once in awhile it’s nice to get perspective. I’m in a different stage of things right now, I need that gold pond to sit and think, I need a room of my own to write, and I need to make castles in the sand with a three-year-old. These are the things that are making me a better writer.

What about you guys? What’s working for you? What are you doing to grow this month?

I’m not a religious woman. I appreciate the symbolism of my culture – the nuance and metaphor – over the literal translations of the traditions we pass from generation to generation. One of my favorite traditions happens during Passover, when we open our doors for the prophet Elijah.

During the sedar, a meal commemorating freedom and redemption, a place setting is left vacant at the table, and a glass of wine poured for Elijah. A child is asked to open the door for his spirit, so that he may enter the hearts of those who celebrate, fill us with assurances of freedom, instill us with hope, and inspire us to build a better world.

There are many literal interpretations of this ritual found in the writings of the Talmud. But for me, the symbolic gesture – opening the door and leaving it ajar throughout the Passover meal – is an expression of trust. We are safe. We are free to dine and worship without fear. The seat remains empty each year, and the wine remains in that symbolic cup. Until the end of the night when someone always drinks it. Silly to let it go to waste. After all, it’s a celebration, a night when we luxuriate in the pleasures of free men.

I think of Elijah during Thanksgiving, when two seemingly non-related meals collide in one foggy childhood memory.

The night James came to Thanksgiving dinner.

My father brought James home from work and introduced him to our extended family. James was a quiet man with a warm smile and a kind face. Like my father, he was a decorated war veteran, except James walked with the aid of a cane. And though I was only eight years old at the time, I recall his polite and genuine appreciation for the meal, and for my family’s hospitality. Sad, I thought, that he didn’t have his own family close by. Generous, I thought, of my family to share a seat at our table with this lonely man.

As polite conversation turned toward James, my Uncle asked him, “So you work together?” We kept eating, shoveling in rounded forkfuls of turkey and stuffing. Chasing it with sweet potato casserole and wine. My father was a prison warden. Surely, James was a fellow administrator, a counselor, or a guard. None of us looked up when my Uncle asked, “What exactly do you do at the prison, James?”

There was a quiet beat while James wiped the corner of his mouth with a fine cloth napkin. “Twenty to life,” he said over the clinking of silver on china. “For Murder One.”

Knives poised over plates and forks fell silent while we all waited for a punch line that never came.

When I looked up from my plate, James didn’t look any different. He was still a gracious guest with a gentle face. He still limped from wounds suffered in defense of our country. He was a good man who’d made an angry choice that had cost him twenty years of his life, and taken another.

It’s been thirty years since James came to dinner. But I never forgot that Thanksgiving. Or his grateful smile when James thanked my mother and my father drove him back to prison. How in the blink of five courses, he made me think differently about people. About good and bad. And about what hope, freedom and redemption really mean.