And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
This week, my daughter Olivia turned 23 years old. 23 is amazing to me – at 23, I’d been married for a few years, and had a baby on the way. And while that marriage made me happy at the time, and that baby, my oldest son, Christopher, had me over the moon (and still does), that is definitely not what I want for my youngest daughter, or what I wanted for my oldest daughter, or for my boys.
I was so freaking young.
I am at both ends of the spectrum for motherhood. My first three kids were born when I was 23, 25, and 26. Olivia was born when I was 40. For a large part of my first three kids’ lives, I was a stay-at-home mom, sometimes working part-time, not working full-time until my youngest (then) was in kindergarten. With Olivia, I gave birth, and an hour later, I was sitting up in my hospital bed, husband sleeping on the pull-out sofa, baby sleeping in one of those clear plastic bassinets, and I was working on my laptop. I didn’t have the studio yet, but I was teaching everywhere, and when I returned to teaching, baby Olivia came with me, parked in the center of the workshop table in her car seat, and later, I brought a portacrib and she napped in the little kitchen just off my classroom. When I started AllWriters’, Olivia came with me every day to “Mama’s building”, and when her father arrived after work, I drove them home and then I returned to my building and kept on going.
And of course, I was writing all the while.
Now, I have these adult children. Christopher will turn 40 (40!) in January, Andy 38 in March, Katie 37 in April, and Olivia is 23. We talk a lot about diversity these days, and at least in representation in the work force, my kids ARE diversity. Christopher works at QuadGraphics. Andy is the assistant manager of a large grocery store. Katie is a math instructor at a university in Louisiana. And Olivia is currently getting her Masters in Art Therapy at Mount Mary University. One child did not go to college, three did, and one has advanced degrees and one is working on obtaining that advanced degree.
I value a college and graduate school education. But I also value individuality and excelling at who you are. As far as I’m concerned, my kids are the most brilliant creatures on this planet, and my granddaughter is following in their footsteps.
I feel under the gun right now because I’m working on my new novel, and for the first time ever, I have a deadline to finish that novel. It already has a release date, and I’m not even done with it yet! I’m enjoying the writing, but I’m not enjoying the pressure. I’ve always taught my students to keep their eyes on their words and not their word count or the page count. I tell them about the musical, You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, and about the character Schroeder who sings while writing a book report that has to be a pre-determined number of words. “I liked this book very, very, very, very, very, very much!” he sings and writes, and then anxiously counts the words. In a similar vein, I am writing with one eye on the calendar.
I don’t like it.
So while working on the new novel this week (it’s called Don’t Let Me Keep You, by the way), I came across these lines:
“Hildy still remembered her mother saying to her, when she arrived home from her elopement to Hank, and when she informed her parents of her very first pregnancy, ‘You only want to be a mother? Just a mother?’
There was no just in being a mother, there was no only. Hildy remembered looking at her mother then and realizing that just and only explained so much about her own upbringing.”
And I felt jarred. I felt like my own character, Hildy, reached out through the pages and throttled me.
Did you know that writers are in constant conversation with themselves? We are, and we are the worst possible nags. In my case, with this book, I sounded like Hildy’s mother when I talked to myself. I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, ever since I touched on this topic a bit in a chapter in my novel, All Told, about a young woman who loved the Disney princesses, loved watching them, playing with toys based on them, wanted to be an artist and a dreamer, all while being pushed to play with Rubik’s Cubes and learn about science and math (which she hated), because her mother so wanted her to be a part of stepping up alongside men in predominantly male-oriented careers.
But when I started writing this book, with all my other books standing behind me and the storylines covering issues such as abuse and rape and body image and suicide and misogyny (I sound so cheerful, don’t I? Well, my work has been described as dark and disturbing, but also edgy, brave, and honest.), I heard myself saying to myself, “You’re just writing about motherhood? Just motherhood?”
And I struggled.
And then this week, my character Hildy shook her finger at me from the page, and said words that I wrote, but don’t remember writing: “There was no just in being a mother, there was no only.”
All alone in my office and in my home, I looked up from my computer and said out loud, “Oh my god. Are you listening? Did you just hear yourself?”
And then I got to work.
I prize my role as mother (“Mommy” and “Mom”, by my older kids, “Mama”, by Olivia) above everything else that I do. I enjoy being with my children more than anyone else; I loved talking to them as kids, I love talking to them as adults. They are adults, but I am still Mom and Mama, and Christopher is my boy, Andy is my boy, Katie is my girl, and Olivia is my baby. There is a lost little one in there too, before Olivia came along, and while I didn’t have the opportunity to raise him, I did house him for a while, my body the only shelter he ever knew, and I hold him dear as well.
There is no just in motherhood. It’s a lifelong role. My Moment this week was hugging the stuffing out of my youngest, wishing her a happy birthday, giving her gifts, and then watching her head off confidently back to her apartment at graduate school.
Amazing. Thanks, Hildy. I think I have it now.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
