Getting What You Wish For

So, after a lifetime of wishing, yearning, praying, scheming, planning for, and hardly ever getting some time to myself, I suddenly have it and in spades.
The baby is off to college. The husband is at work. I have no "real" job as my resume has read "housewife" for many years now. I am trained and licensed as a nurse, but it's been so long since I worked at anything remotely involved in nursing that only a desperate fool would hire me to do anything that involved a "patient". Except to perhaps make a bed or bring in a tray of food. Something like that.
Something, in fact, a housewife might do.
Back in the olden days, when I had assorted children around, some of them still hanging like monkeys on my hip, some of them needing transportation to various lessons, all of them needing breakfast, lunch, dinner and clean clothes, I somehow managed to write a novel. I thought it was a decent novel and I still do. I sent it around and got an actual agent. She thought it was good. She tried to sell it. She didn't. I haven't heard from her in several years now.
This is so depressing that I don't even want to talk about it.
But now I have time to write, right? I have at least four other novels on various back burners, some of them with hundreds of pages in them, a few with actual plots.
So now it's time to get off my ass (or, more accurately, it's time to get ON my ass) and do some real writing. The problem is...
Oh Lord. The problems are so vast as to render me in full writer's block.
My main problem is that even though the children are gone, I am still a housewife. The good, old fashioned kind of a housewife that hangs clothes on the line and sweeps daily and washes dogs and works in the garden and the yard and cooks from scratch and has no dishwasher. And even though I could and SHOULD let some of this go, I have over three decades of conditioning and training in the field and it just feels so wrong to sit down to write when there are dirty dishes in the sink or if the beans haven't been soaked or if the dog hair in the hallway is thick enough to knit a nice peasant-y sweater out of if I'd just collect it, clean it, card it, dye it and spin it into yarn.
Okay. I'm not that crazy. But almost.
And I think I'm afraid. What if, after all that whining about not having the time to write that I needed to do it RIGHT- what if I get the time, use the time, and find out I SUCK?! Huh? What then? Because if that happens, my dearest, deepest non-family related, completely selfish and life-sustaining dream will have been a lie. A pretty little lie I told myself for all those years when I should have been working part time as a nurse so I could make good use of my time now that the children are grown.

Ah me. Ah dear me.

I suppose, since the baby has been gone for less than a week, I need to give myself a little time to settle into this new reality. I need to realize that it's not wasting time to sit out here in my office, dogs scattered around under my feet and in front of the fan, to try and spin words into worlds.

And besides, it's only two thirty in the afternoon and I've already done the laundry, put it away, made up the bed with clean sheets, washed the dogs, done a little sweeping, a little yard work, got the beans and collard greens half-cooked for tonight's supper and taken a walk.
So. It's time.

Wish me luck.