This November, in the waning months of the 2010s, my goal
was to finally write 50,000 words during the annual November National Novel
Writing Month. Only I did not want to write a novel. And was not even sure what
I wanted to write about. Only I was certain that words were circulating in my
brain, penetrating into conversations, distracting me while I tried to work,
begging to get out on the keyboard or paper or in whatever form was the
easiest.
I have always loved to write, but, as I have had children
and they have grown, my desire to write about the process of raising children
grows ever stronger. My current writing rhythm has developed into pounding out
short, quick blog posts that I then post to Facebook. I love the instantaneous
feedback to my writing, but feel it has cheapened my topics and restricted me
from going deeper. Whenever I write, I am cognizant of the voices of potential
readers, and I can hear them in my brain like a steady chorus, pounding at me,
requiring that I revise and omit and water down anything of substance I have to
say. This November, I want to write from the heart.
My children are currently midway
through their 16th and 12th years, one a sophomore in
high school and the other on the tail end of elementary school. When they were both
in the earlier stages of elementary school, I thought our family had entered
the “sweet spot” of parenting – past the extreme physical exhaustion of the
early years but not yet to the crushing mental fatigue of the later years. I
was right. With older kids, I think of the time as the “Loneliest Years” of
parenting – a time when we are all in over our heads, but the need to shield
our children’s privacy makes it much more difficult to share our struggles. Part
of what has restricted me in writing has been the fear of overstepping the
boundary between what is safe for public consumption and what should be
confined to the private sphere. This November, I want to write about these
struggles now and worry later about whether any of these words should be
shared.
I am often a late adopter, so, unsurprisingly, I started
blogging in earnest just as blogging was fading away and society’s attention
turned to quick memes and Instagram posts. My earliest blog entries were a
journal for family members living across the country of our growing family.
Over time, this diary log turned into a series of lists and attempts at snarky
commentary. Somewhere in the last few years, though, I began to find my
blogging voice. My posts began more earnest, thoughtful, authentic, and from
the heart. It is that kind of writing that I wish to continue, even as blog
entries with this voice have largely died out.
When I began blogging, I was petrified someone would
discover it and, even worse, happen to learn my opinions on matters that I had
not shared with them before. Consequently, I went undercover. Rather than
following the latest fashion and naming our blog after our family’s last name,
I used a pseudonym – “Four is More,” in honor of the recent addition of my son.
I did not index my blog in Google. Instead, I had it listed as private so that
only those who knew the blog address would discover it. In the first few years
of blogging, only family members and close friends knew the URL; I guarded the link
to my family’s diary like the royal jewels.
What is most interesting to me about these early years in my
blog was how worried I was that someone would discover my postings – combined
with how bland, vague, non-confrontational, and mild its postings were. It was
as if someone might infer I liked strawberry jelly, and then took an array of
security measures to protect that secret. Consequently, I lost on both fronts.
I did not gain any practice in writing in a genuine voice, but also failed to
connect with others in any sort of writing community.
In late 2012, I began posting my blog entries on my personal
Facebook account, a social media platform I embraced more and more with each
passing year. The first time I linked to a post, a short entry about gymnastics
class for the kids that evening, my hands shook and my breath trembled. I
wondered about people I knew reading my writings and I felt my throat close.
Even though these writings were weak links to my inner soul, I still worried
that someone might find a path to my inner harbor and judge me accordingly.
My blogging took a huge turn in
2014. One of my favorite then-bloggers, Glennon Doyle [then Melton] at
Momastery, challenged readers to post a blog entry of their “Messy Beautiful” –
their inner most terrible secrets and truths – and link it to her national blog
roll. My blogs to this point were light, breezy reports of daily family life.
With this April 2014 entry, though, the words poured out from the keyboard as I
shared about my Messy, Beautiful Truth: That I secretly suffered from
depression and anxiety and needed anti-depressant medication to function. I
thought I was going to vomit when I first published the entry. Instead, I was
greeted with a groundswell of support from close friends and distant
acquaintances alike, feeling a connection with a larger sense of community than
I had ever been a part of. This experience changed my life. And I was hooked on
writing and sharing from a vulnerable, deep, authentic place.
Like many endeavors, my blog began to lag as I grew busier. I
occasionally wrote for a Christian site, The Chase is Real, but stopped posting
and sharing on a regular basis. But I still longed to write. What completely
revamped my approach to writing was becoming involved with the Iowa Summer
Writing Festival, a series of literary workshops on the craft of writing held
at the University of Iowa every summer. On a whim, I signed up for a
weekend-long workshop in July 2018 on getting the words down on paper. It
seemed so indulgent: Traveling somewhere not for a work conference, not to show
my children the world, but to invest in a side hobby. The advice that I
received at the workshop was not earth-shattering. But the process of investing
in this passion helped jump-start my writing life and led to a slew of blog
entries on increasingly vulnerable and sacred issues.
The following summer, I returned
to the festival, this time attending a workshop on focusing on small pictures
and images when in writing. Again, the writing advice I heard was not novel.
But the connections I made with others in the class, the practice in writing
and workshopping work, and the permission to invest in this activity filled me
with fresh energy. I continued to look for ways to grow as a writer.
One of my life dreams has been to write and publish a book.
When I was recovering last year from a slow-healing stress fracture, I pondered
putting together a book of polls and responses I had posted on my personal Facebook
page. I love asking questions and learning what others think about and how they
behave in specific situations. But I quickly soured on this project – compiling
all the polls felt too much like work, more like my day job as an accounting
professor and researcher than as any type of creative outlet that filled my
soul.
The next iteration of writing my book dream was to compile
all of the introspective blog posts I had made and to self-publish a sort of
parenting book. I narrowed this focus and thought I could just pull out the
writings that pertained to parenting. My brother-in-law helped me download all
of my previous blog writings as a text file and I pulled out the parenting
posts, which gave me a huge chunk of material with which to chisel away. But in trying to organize my parenting
writings into some sort of coherent narrative, I found that enough time had
passed that I had to rewrite much of what I had written before. And I also
discovered that my voice had changed. My earlier, snarkier comments about the
trials of parenting were no longer cohesive with the later shift to more
earnest and vulnerable writing. I attempted to organize the posts by theme and
made a goal to re-write them, but quickly ran out of steam.
In talking to my husband this fall,
I shared with I had before: I had a burning life desire to write and publish
(even self-publish) a book. But I had no idea what to write about. I said that
I wanted to write a parenting book, but it was hard to know how much to share
and what to keep close to the chest. And his observation was spot on: I did not
want to a parenting book of advice. I wanted to write a parenting memoir. Which
is exactly the case. I have no room to offer advice, no nuggets to pass on to
fellow parents, no trendy takes on the world’s second-oldest profession. I only
have my own experiences, my own battles, and my own narrative to share. Whether
anyone can glean any nuggets of advice from these ramblings is likely nil. But
that is what I have to share.
My high school daughter is currently despondent over the
death of an elderly butterfly she rescued from a strip mall last week. She and
my husband have left the house to shop for a wooden box to memorialize the
butterfly’s rigid wings and body. My son is currently on this seventh day of a
long-last fever, although his body has been at a normal temperature the past
several hours. I am sitting at the dark wooden kitchen table, sipping a
lukewarm Diet Dr. Pepper, abandoning both of my children’s needs so I can reach
my daily word count goal. The irony of not tending to my children so I can
write down my reflections on parenting is thick.
Parenting is beautiful. It is awful. It is effortless. It is
the most difficult profession in the world. And as I try to formulate what I
love and hate and embrace and eschew about my parenting job, I wonder if these
reflections make me a better parent. Or a worse parent. A more connected mom,
who is tuned in to her children and is self-reflective about her own strengths
and weakness. A more disconnected mother, one who is too busy writing on the
keyboard to offer comfort to her melancholy teenage daughter or snuggle with
her ailing son with glassy eyes and a deep barking cough.
What does it mean to document our days? To document our
lives? To bear witness to our inner struggles and wonderment? Such musings are
often criticized as navel-gazing, but I think they are much more. They are a
way to foster connection, a branch across communities. They are a key into our
inner sanctum, a window into our soul. And such a venture is undoubtedly rich
with value.
So I will continue to write as
the faint beams of the autumn sunlight streak through our dusty kitchen floors.
I will write as I hear the distant chords of piano music through the television
speakers in the living room next door. I will write as my tabby cat walks
across the plastic laptop keyboard, inserting new phrases and symbols into my
text. I will write as the mildew smell from dirty cereal bowls with curdled
milk wafts over from the farmhouse-style sink. I will write as I see my to-do
list grow longer, the demands from my job weighing on my shoulders like a thick
blanket, the needs of my children never ceasing. I will write because to do so
is the most alive I can ever feel. And that is worth almost everything.
