Connecting the Shards

“I write because writing helps bring life into clearer focus and give shape to what I might otherwise experience as disconnected shards.” – Joyce Thomas

I read the above quote in my latest writing magazine and practically hummed out loud in my attraction to it. The urge to write for me is a primordial need I have to make sense of experiences that often come to my mind in pieces. Certainly in the case my daughter’s birth, the pieces of a fifty-four hour labor are disconnected. And yet, long as the labor was and the outcome bloody as it was, I don’t use warfare metaphors to discuss that birth or write about my body as a battlefield, or even discuss the experience in sharp-terms images like shards. I have a choice in how I give shape to that experience.

Still, being cut open has made me feel at times like I have two parts of a body, and writing about that experience has been so far the best work I’ve done that’s allowed me to connect the two parts. As a former teacher once said, "if you write it down, it can't own you." For me, writing about the birth helps me own that experience, rather than it owning me. And while obviously much of the writing I’ve done about the birth has been on the blog, not all of it has been or will be written here.

People often ask, when they hear I’m a writer, “what do you write?” I answer that I write everything – poetry, fiction, non-fiction, a blog. I’ve taught all of those genres, too, and love thinking about the differences between forms because I’m a believer that form follows function. Each story demands its own structure, and each story will tell you in what form to write it. I also believe: the greater the pain behind the experience, the greater the need for precision within the form. Joyce Thomas, the writer of the above quote, begins her essay by saying the morning after she was raped at gunpoint, she wrote her very first poem. She wonders why she turned to poetry at that moment, and I’d argue the reason is because the pain was great and poetry, the most precise of forms, was the only way at that moment to connect the shards. For the same reason, that of great pain, I wrote a quite precise poem about the experience.

Certainly, a blog is a form, a step up from journal writing but a few steps down from creative non-fiction, and lower still than fiction and poetry. For me, the blog form generates ideas and keeps the engine of creativity greased when all I have time for as the stay-at-home mother of a toddler is to start the engine just to keep the gnawing mice out rather than actually driving anywhere. And, I write here because the blog is a public forum, which allows interaction and, hopefully, a chance to help a few other people.

Recently, I changed the name of this site, getting rid of the old address, which included my name, and perhaps losing in the process a few readers who only knew how to get to the blog via that old address. I hope those readers find their way back here if what they need to read about is recovering from a cesarean while mothering and keeping a semblance of a creative self. But the reason I changed the name was because, as a writer, being a long-labored, unwanted c-section mother is not all I write about and I didn’t want my writerly identity to be only associated with those experiences. I have a lot more to write about.

The other question people ask when hearing I’m a writer is “what do you write about?” That question is quite a bit more complicated and I’m sure there’s not one answer any writer could give, although as some famous writer once suggested (write a comment if you know the answer!), each writer writes the same story over and over. When I taught writing classes, particularly creative writing classes, one of the first exercises I’d do with students is to have them write a one or two word “top ten” list of topics they thought were important to write about, topics that would excite them and get their engine greased. They’d come up with weighty subjects like the environment, God, being a mother or father, daughter or son, and sometimes less weighty subjects like cars or video games. Still, every subject has potential for deeper exploration, and certainly can be honed down into a story. When I did that exercise, I often wrote “human relationships” as my number one topic, so I guess that’d be my answer to “write do you write about.”

This blog is a place where I can write about my relationship to myself with this new-ish moniker of “mother,” and my relationship to a fabulous daughter, and my relationship to other mothers in this sisterhood I’ve joined. But as a writer, I need more space and more forms to write about all the other human relationships that interest me – those of fictional characters, or real-life teachers or, of late in my poetry, archetypal creatures who are straight out of myths. All the writing allows me to connect pieces of my life. And I’m grateful not only that I have this primordial need (because I’d argue we all have a need to express our “top ten” list), but I’m grateful I have, most of the time, the wherewithal to abide to that need and act accordingly. And I wish the same wherewithal for you. May the disconnected shards of your experiences find a form by which to connect.

Career and Mothering

I talked to a friend a while ago, to whom I was complaining that I don’t get enough time to write because my kid is a crappy sleeper, that I have no career, that my writing is in the toilet, and that when nap time comes all I can seem to manage is looking at other people’s websites, sometimes in a research effort but, truth be told, more often with envy and wonder that anyone is blogging out there at all or getting books published or in general doing anything of literary ilk. And she said, “But isn’t being a mom your career now? I mean, isn’t it your life’s work?”

Well, yes, of course, mothering is my life’s work, but my career? Well, no. I love my job as mom; it’s just that in my mind I have another job, a writer. And that writer job is the only really consistent job I’ve done, though not always done well, for the past twenty-plus years. Of course, I’ve had many paying jobs; mostly as a teacher of writing, but also as freelance writer, a violence prevention educator, a natural history guide, a coffee shop worker, a pre-school teacher/crowd control management provider, a literacy tutor, and an editor, all of which lasted various amounts of time from a few months to a few years. But during all of those jobs, I was always a writer – every year I’ve written something and produced some stuff. I’ve sent my work out for the last ten-plus years, and been rejected plenty, way over a hundred times. I’ve also had some pieces accepted (way less than a hundred). Writing has for the longest time been the foundation for my beingness, the reason I get up every day. I do now have another reason to get up, and being a mother is a foundation, too, but I’m sorry to say, that beingness doesn’t feel as foundational as writing does for me. Perhaps my feeling is because writing is actually for me.

To be sure, being a mother is a personal growth process, indeed, more of an enforced growth process than being a writer ever was, but being a mother means mostly being there for my daughter. Writing, however, is lovely, selfish, time to myself in my head and with my heart and with a chance to have contact with another realm; time that, apparently, I need to help me actually function sanely in the world. I’ve tried all other methods for sanity – sobriety, self-help, therapy, coffee klatches, other forms of art, exercise, eating right, juicing, meditation – and myriad others. But the only one that really keeps me sane, by which I mean peaceful, is writing.

Motherhood, I’m again sorry to say, does not keep me sane – indeed, fighting off insanity while, for example, I’m picking up yet another gigantic trail of toys such as playing cards and game pieces from the game cabinet, the new bristle blocks from Christmas, the two-dozen felt fairies that never make it on the felt board but only on the floor, the paper money from the new birthday cash register, and inexplicably, the re-usable grocery bags that have been taken from their confinement under the counter and then scattered around the house after a botched attempt to give the cat, who had inexplicably settled to nap on these said bags, a magic carpet ride across the floor – is an amazing effort each day. My effort to fight off insanity during those moments, or like this morning when I was sure my child would sleep another two hours but woke before I’d even made a cup of coffee, is more like white-knuckling through while saying prayers to the universe about granting me serenity while trying to figure out how, as a parent, I can actually encourage my Dr. Destructo Insomniac daughter to put her toys away after use and then go to bed.

Writing is, to me, a form of getting in touch with the spiritual world I do believe exists, and getting connected with the unity of the universe, without my ego and, even if I end up writing a lot about myself like I do in these pages, I still have the hope that I am helping someone else by telling my story and allowing them a chance to relate somehow. Writing is for me a chance to be in service to something greater than myself, even if I write about myself, because many of us feel the same feelings even if they are expressed differently.

So, what I know today is that my career is in the hands of a power I cannot see but do believe in and so, yet again, I humbly ask for removal of all my complaints, negativity, envy, and other shortcomings. I’ll focus instead on how my life’s work is joyous, both the mothering and the writing.

Fake Mommy

One of the worst things about being a mother is how, on many days, I don’t feel like a mother at all.  I can hardly comprehend that a child, my child, sleeps in a room just down the hall.  I hear about mothers who say “the umbilical cord is never cut,” (my own mother being the prime reciter of that quote) and they describe such strong feelings of attachment that they spend every non-mothering moment still thinking about their kid.  But for me, some days, I really don’t feel like a mother at all.

Sometimes my daughter seems to me a puppet and I’m just a puppeteer, not only in the ways I am a control freak, having to put the toys away every night and searching for hours to find the last piece of the puzzle, but a puppeteer who is detached, like she’s a marionette and I’m just a handler, not a mother.  I’m sad on these days, when I have the “I’m faking it” feeling, when I don’t feel gushing love in my heart at every turn, when I am so damn annoyed and grumpy that she woke up again a 5:30 a.m., even though she slept “through the night,” from about ten p.m. the night before and even though the sleeping thing is so much better than earlier in her life.  But, as a mother and a nut who knows she shouldn’t compare kids, I compare my daughter to the neighbor kid behind us who sleeps twelve straight hours, consistently, since her sixth month of life.  My baby still thinks her job is to test, every day, my flexibility in the face of not knowing what comes next.  And then, I feel sad that I want my daughter to sleep and not interact with me, that I just want to be alone.

Most of my detachment disorder comes from my ambition disorder – the fact that I am a writer and want to be a paid writer.  Really, I’m a poor teacher who makes a meager, meager pay, and now that I am also mother, any free time to write is sucked up by taking care of this precious, sweet, so much lovelier than anything I’ve ever written, little person.  But sometimes, I need hours and hours of time alone to just feel myself again, to feel in my body, to gain some sort of conscious contact with a higher power or at least my higher self that doesn’t want to clobber my young daughter for yet again getting into the CD case and throwing every damn one of them like a Frisbee across the room.  Certainly, my need for time alone to just feel okay in the world is some kind personality defect, that I need to sit for hours in front of a blank screen or piece of paper just to feel human again. 

Most days, as a mother, I can forget my need to write, my need to play around in the world of words.  And some days I don’t feel ambition nagging at me like a puppy.  And some days, I don’t care at all that I don’t get any exercise besides hoisting my daughter around, let alone breathe in fresh air or eat a healthy meal.  Most days, I am quite present with my daughter, hugging and kissing and laughing with her, playing with her, inventing new games, like “sculpture making,” with all of her already old toys, even though some are just a few weeks old from her birthday.  But then, some days, like today – is it the rain or the 5:30 a.m. wake up call or the fact that I’m alone again in this mother thing, with no other mommies nor my partner nearby? – finds me crawling in my skin, and wanting a stiff drink at 11:06 in the morning, and wanting to run out of my house screaming in the rain, leaving my poor daughter to fend for herself. 

Last night, the part-time neighbors came over for a nice dinner.  I had whipped up an elk stew, they brought a salad.   Their daughter ate the squash I had cooked, mine wouldn’t eat one bite.  Later when the girls were playing, their daughter was mad because mine was holding one of the eight hundred toys she wanted to play with and so their girl started crying a fussy little whine.  “Fake crying,” the neighbor-mother said.  The girl was communicating she wasn’t happy, was discontent.  Those feelings were real.  But perhaps the mom was right, the crying part was fake.  Yet, I could relate to that little two year old.  I want to fake cry so many days, when I feel like Fake Mommy.  Or when I have thoughts like this:  “I’m just a wannabe writer whose fate is to learn to be an ordinary good mother, good wife, good woman,” or “my life will never amount to anything other than this mundane simple life.”  Yet, on my sober, clear, happy days, I know that life to be the only life that matters. 

The problem is that this Fake Mommy feeling is fed by Ambitious Writer.  I tell my daughter often, “you can be whatever you want to be,” but how could I say that and yet not reach for my own dreams?  This world is not here to hand us a living, and while my own writing career has had a few tiny breaks, nothing earth shattering or big enough to even realistically tell people, as I do, “I’m a writer,” as in someone who really gets paid for writing.  But I have to keep striving in order to show my daughter that striving is how dreams happen, not usually by luck or faith, but by work and focus, and doing whatever we have to do in the face of Fake Mommy days or rain or cold or insanity of whatever sort.  I’m grateful for getting to write at all today.  I pray for my daughter’s spirit, to feel authentic in her own skin, to feel alive and true and whole on almost every day of the week.