Ideas come from strange places.

Last night, I couldn't even look at the computer without my eyes crossing and my head going to fuzz. So, I took my clean laundry and emerged from my dungeon to fold.

I'm at this point in my WIP (BMC) where I need to solidify the motivations of my main characters, and I need to show/say it as succinctly as possible. For me, this is a challenge, because I'm pushing deeper into my own psyche than I really care to push. I think I've been lured into writing about things I know, only to discover I have acted without understanding. Now I'm looking back and trying to understand.

So anyways, I couldn't get it quite right and I've been stuck here for days.

I turned on Netflix, picking an old seventies documentary on the Amish to watch while I folded clothes. I'm not writing about Amish, but Pennsylvania Dutch & Anabaptist culture. Close enough, right? I hoped it would jar my memory.

It did, to a certain extent. I can't believe there was a lifetime where I ran barefoot in dresses. Where I had my grandmother braid my hair into a crown of braids. Where I hayed.

But all that didn't help me understand why, for example, I left. And that's what I was looking for-- the understanding of why, at ten or eleven, I wanted to leave and never come back. Why at sixteen, I went away to college and hardly even called my parents. That's what I needed to know for my female MC.

And harder still, was why anyone would find it appealing? That's what I needed to know for my male MC.

Then, my husband woke up to leave for work. And he came out and saw what I was watching, and as he put his holstered gun in his backpack, he said.

I wish we were Amish.

And then I knew.

I remembered where I even got this idea for a story anyways. We were living in Baltimore, and hanging to the edge of a cliff in every aspect of our lives. For the fourth of July, we went to my grandparents cottage in rural Pennsylvania. It was the first time my husband had really seen Mennonite's, Amish and other German Baptist sects. The broad spectrum of Anabaptist culture.
And it was the first time he saw kids in rumspringa.

My childhood.

And here we'd been in Baltimore for the last two years, where everything I saw was the first time, and he already understood it. Now the role's were reversed.

Our kitchen floor in Baltimore-- it was stuffed with used needles, rats/mice, and the middle of the floor was rotted and sagged into the basement. I could jump here and it bounced like a trampoline.

And I thought, what an interesting concept. Two completely different worlds, two completely different people, looking for the same thing in completely different places. And worse, trying to find those things in the middle of a marriage.

I remembered all of this last night.

The reason I wanted to write this story in the first place is because I don't have the words to just tell you the complexity I saw in my own life. A huge, culture, modern disenfranchised coomplexity...a sweeping complexity that harkened back to a complexity in American culture that's been there since fucking Columbus and was now rearing it's head in...of all places, my marriage.

But while I can't tell it, I can show you in a story.

As soon as he left, I ran downstairs and in ten minutes finished what I'd been struggling with for days.

P.S. I've never been Amish, or Mennonite. My family is Pennsylvania Dutch and while growing up, part of the PARBC (Pennsylvania Association of Regular Baptist Churches). Conservative, but not so conservative. So, I'm not writing about my life--- just the conflicts present in it...if that makes sense.