The other day, I was puttering around the kitchen, minding my own business, not even realizing that I was singing a song. I often do this, because I enjoy singing. I don’t usually plan to sing. It just happens.
My 7-year-old came into the kitchen, put his hands on his hips and said, “That’s not the way that song goes.” He then showed me how the song actually went. I laughed, of course. I often make songs my own—not just with the structure and feel of the song but also with lyrics. I like to make up my own lyrics when I can’t understand what the singers are actually saying.
My son said, “No, really. That’s how the song goes.”
I said, “I know. But I’ll sing it however I want.”
I didn’t realize, at the time, how profound these words would become. They tumbled about in my brain all day, until I realized something glaringly obvious but not often recognized by us.
There is a temptation we all feel when we see work we admire—-or even people we admire. We want to produce that kind of work. We want to be those kinds of people. When I read books I absolutely love, I want to write those kinds of books. When I hear music that moves me, I want to write that kind of music.
This happened several months ago, when I heard a song by Kelly Clarkson called “Piece By Piece.” I could have written this song. I should have written this song. She wrote it about my life. I wanted to write one just like it about my life. I tried. I tried for two weeks before I put the pen down and finally said, “This is not me. I don’t write like this.”
It happens to all of us. We see parents we admire whose kids do everything they say, and we want to be them. We see that person dressed to the nines, and here we are in workout clothes like we always are—-we want to be them. Or, if you’re like me, you see people who let things roll right off them—-no matter how devastating—-and you want to be them. I want to be unhindered by extravagant worry. I want to embrace whatever comes with a smile. I want to break free from the suffocating clutch of my anxiety.
But I am me, and they are them.
The best thing we can possibly do is be ourselves—neuroses and all. Weird and all. Hang-ups and all. Sure, we can always learn and grow—that’s why there’s an entire self-help market on the bookstore shelves. We don’t have to remain as we are—we can always improve.
But we can never be them. Because we are us.
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What we all have to offer the world is our unique individuality, our unique viewpoint, our unique contribution. Sing your song however you want to—it is your unique, valuable contribution to the world.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and a moment of inspiration with my boys. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
Today I wanted to talk about all the voices that writers must face. In the next several weeks, I’ll be breaking each of these voices down and sharing practical tips for how to abolish them.
I say abolish, but I started this blog with the intention of telling you the truth about The Voices. And if I’m telling you the truth, I must say that these voices will probably never go away. But we can be stronger than the voices that come bombarding us in our weak moments.
All The Voices, at the heart of them, boil down to self-doubt. Some of them are the same across the board, and by that I mean across nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Some of them are more prominent in particular genres. Some of them are louder in our weaker areas. Some of them may not bother us at all. We’ll talk about all of that in the weeks to come.
But, for now, I’m just going to introduce you to them, even though I’m pretty sure you already know them.
There is the I Can’t Do This Voice.
There is the Who Would Even Read This Voice.
There is the This is Terrible Voice.
And there is the You’re Wrong Voice.
I’m sure there are more voices, but these are the voices that visit me the most when I’m writing, thinking about writing, on the brink of hitting “publish,” when I’m lying in bed at night and my mind won’t turn off because creative work is difficult to turn off.
Now. I have written stories for decades. I have self-published eighteen books this year alone. I have a book out on submission with traditional publishers. And yet I opened my laptop yesterday to brainstorm a series that people already love, and I could not hear my own thoughts for the shouting. My heart pounded. My throat dried out. My fingers shook.
This happens to all of us. So what I first want you to know is that you are not alone. It doesn’t matter where you are in your writing journey—you will fall prey to the voices at some point. They are relentless in their pursuit. But they won’t win unless we let them.
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The voices stem from many different things: wounds in our past, things others have said about us or our writing, our own expectations, the nature of being a writer and the pervasive fear of humiliating ourselves. These voices can paralyze us if we don’t know how to battle them.
But there are some ways to face them head-on and let them know that they will not win your heart. In the next few weeks, I’ll be detailing exactly that—-how to battle the voices that can keep you from realizing your full potential as a writer.
When we’re so entrenched in our writing lives, we can often lose sight of the fact that most writers battle the same voices we do. They make it look so effortless, don’t they? So, for now, I want you to know that you are not alone.
You can do this.
Someone will read it.
It is not terrible.
And you are not wrong.
Exercise:
Write down the voices you hear in your head when you announce that you’re going to write something or publish something or you’re simply thinking about writing or publishing something. (And don’t worry. I’m not asking you to write them down so they win. This is so you will win against their attack. We first have to know our enemy to defeat him (or her).)
Week’s prompt
Write as much as you can, in whatever form you want, on the following word:
Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job as a parent. Relationships are good, all those consequences we’ve put into our Family Playbook—a list of infractions and their expected consequences—are well understood, the house is in almost perfect order.
And then my children wake up.
It only takes seconds to realize that they are completely different people today. Not only have they forgotten all the new infractions and consequences we brainstormed yesterday, but they also no longer care about getting to school on time or wearing clean clothes or keeping their room even the slightest bit tidy.
Yesterday my two older boys came down for breakfast fifty minutes before we had to leave for school. Today they were still not eating breakfast 10 minutes before we had to walk out the door, and I had to shout my last you’re-not-going-to-get-breakfast warning above the volume of an audio book, because I’m too lazy to walk up the stairs for the sixteenth time (I blame my laziness on my broken foot. And Post Traumatic Stress, which I feel every time I approach stairs).
Yesterday they liked the grilled broccoli and cauliflower and carrots we brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and roasted in the oven. Today they gagged just looking at them.
Yesterday they all sat perfectly still in their separate spaces while their daddy read two picture books and I read a Narnia chapter book and again while we engaged in our ten minutes of Sustained Silent Reading time and then again while we did our meditation breathing and prayer time. We didn’t have to remind them once to get back in their spots or stop talking or that, no, an art journal is not a book you read and, no, the pen in your hand is not necessary during reading time (unless you’re taking notes—which he was clearly not).
Today they think reading time means chase-your-brother-around-the-library time.
It’s enough to drive a parent insane.
I’ve often joked that parenting is like living in an insane asylum. But the joke is usually true. Insanity is defined by Albert Einstein as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
THIS IS WHAT KIDS DO, EVERY SINGLE DAY.
They try to write during story time, even though we’ve told them a billion times it’s not allowed. They try to sneak that LEGO toy into the bath tub, thinking this time will surely be different and we won’t object. They seem surprised that 8 p.m. is lights out, even though nothing has changed in their thousands of nights.
The problem is, our kids are the least consistent people on the planet. Every single day they wake up completely different people. The bigger problem, though, is that they give us that one little taste of expectation realization, and we think they CAN sit still for two stories and a chapter book.
And we keep expecting it every other day.
For as long as we’ve had twins, I have fantasized about two boys napping in the same bedroom for more than an hour and a half. We were spoiled, because our older boys took three-hour naps and could be trusted to sleep in their rooms with their doors closed.
The first time we left the twins for three hours with the door closed, they pulled down the forty-four shirts in their closet, painted the walls with poop and ate the cardboard pages of Goodnight Moon.
So the next time I set a timer for two hours (because surely they’d just woken up early) and I sat outside their door to work on some deadline material. I could hear them shrieking, but we’d baby proofed everything, and there were only two mattresses on their floor (not even beds, because the twins could destroy furniture in 3.4 seconds). Nothing they could get into. Nothing that would hurt them. Nothing to occupy them for two hours. They’d fall asleep eventually.
They got really quiet, but I didn’t worry. We’re all quiet when we’re sleeping.
When the timer went off, I opened their door and found them sitting on clouds, all the stuffing ripped out of the lone Beanie Boo someone had left in their room.
The next day, I opened their door. I sat right outside. I corrected them when they so much as moved.
AND THEY FELL ASLEEP. FOR TWO WHOLE HOURS.
Oh, thank God, I said. It is possible.
So, of course, the next day, I did the exact same thing. Except as soon as they were asleep, I went to my room to do some more involved work and make a few business phone calls. Two hours later, they had knocked their closet doors off the hinges, strung all their ties from the ceiling fan and neatly lined up all their shoes under their mattresses.
Oh my word.
It’s maddening and confusing and impossible to keep up with these every-day-different children.
It’s impossible to know that today the 8-year-old only got seven hours of sleep but will wake up the happiest kid in the world, but tomorrow he’ll get 12 hours of sleep and will wake up gnawing on all the heads he bit off before breakfast. It’s impossible to know that today the 6-year-old will follow all the rules and help with everything around the house, and tomorrow he will wake up a defiant little monster.
It’s impossible to know that today the 4-year-old will love reading those books to me but tomorrow he will wake up acting like he’d rather eat boiled, unsalted spinach than finish the last five sentences of that Little Bear story.
What’s a parent to do?
Well, we just keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results from this insane asylum. Because, you know. Consistency and all.
Also because sometimes it does work, and those times it works might just be enough to power us through the times it doesn’t. And if they’re not, well. At least there’s red wine. And chocolate.
And a lock on our bedroom door they haven’t yet learned to pick (I’m sure it’s coming).
This is an excerpt from Parenting Is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, a humor book that does not yet have a release date. To read more of my humor essays, visit Crash Test Parents.
Another Brooklyn is a brand new release from Jacqueline Woodson, who is best known for her middle grade novels Brown Girl Dreaming, Feathers, and Locomotion, all of which have been award-winning books. She’s also written many others that are recognized in the kid-lit world. Another Brooklyn was long listed for the National Book Award. Woodson is serious about creating spectacular books.
This story is about a girl named August, who runs into an old childhood friend and is suddenly thrown into a sea of memories from when she was a girl on the brink of becoming a woman. She had three best friends—Sylvia, Angela and Gigi. They shared everything. They survived the streets of Brooklyn because they took on the city and their futures together.
This book was achingly heartbreaking because it examined that strange time between adult and child, when your innocence and childlike hopes meet the realities of the world. Anything could happen in that place—and it did in this book. Girls were damaged in their homes. Mothers disappeared. The madness of the world came for them.
Another Brooklyn seemed almost memoir-like, and had the appearance of a time-lapse video, where you watch time go by and people grow older. It was a commentary on hard life and poverty. It was also a poetic masterpiece, which is something I’ve come to expect from Woodson.
Not only that, but Woodson is a master at creating likable characters. It does not take a reader long to care about the characters Woodson creates on the page, who are all mostly poor and female. I found myself relating to them in ways I would not have expected, though I have never lived in Brooklyn and I am a white woman. But poverty is a common language, so I recognized myself in her characters.
I really liked the issues that this book explored. There was the issue of poverty, there was the issue of being black in Brooklyn, there was the issue of simply being a female in Brooklyn, and there was the issue of being a black female in Brooklyn. There was the passage of time and how it changes us. There were the unexpected turns of life that show us what we’re made of. Everything that this book explored was so much more than its slim pages would suggest. It was a short book, but it was a very deep one, too.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Another Brooklyn. Sylvia’s father has just asked August what she wants to do when she grows up:
“But listening to Sylvia’s father, I felt myself straightening my back, tilting my chin up. Law, I wanted to say, like you. I want truth, I wanted to say. An absolute truth, or if not truth, reason—a reason for everything. But the hems of my bellbottoms were tattered. My socks in this shoeless house had holes in the heels. In the winter, because of my own absentmindedness, my hands and arms were often ashy. How could I even think of aspiring to anything when this was how I walked thorough the world? Sylvia’s mother’s flick of an eye said to us again and again, Don’t dream. Dreams are not for people like you.”
I read My Name is Lucy Barton a few weeks ago, because one of my all-time favorite adult fiction authors is Elizabeth Strout, who is the author of this book and who also wrote Olive Kitteridge, a fantastic collection of short stories forming a cohesive story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. My Name is Lucy Barton is Strout’s newest release, which published earlier this year.
The book is about a woman, Lucy Barton, who is in the hospital with a sickness that remains vague throughout the story. The type of sickness doesn’t really matter to the story—only inquisitive minds like mine. During her hospital stay, Lucy’s mother comes to visit. She hasn’t seen her mother in years. They talk—-gossip, really—-about all that has happened to the people they knew when Lucy was younger. They talk about everything except for Lucy’s childhood, which was quite traumatic.
The reader learns of this childhood in asides, but Lucy can never bring it up to her mother, even though she’s a grown woman and it’s clear that the past is what keeps Lucy and her mother from truly bonding.
What was so heartbreaking about this story is that you could feel the emotional distance, and, at the same time, the longing that Lucy had to close that distance. She wanted to talk to her mother about what had happened when she was a child, but, out of love and respect for her mother, she never did. It was a tragic missed opportunity, but Lucy felt it was a kind of protection for her mother.
Probably my favorite thing about this book was that it felt almost like a memoir (much like Woodson’s book)—-Lucy Barton was looking back at a difficult life and writing her way into hope in spite of the circumstances. The last line of the book was “All life amazes me,” and it was clear throughout the story that all of life actually did amaze Lucy Barton. She had no anger toward her parents for giving her such an unstable childhood. She never stopped loving them.
My Name is Lucy Barton was a brilliant work of art, a commentary on life and family and the troubling pasts that serve to shape us into who we are because of how we choose to rise above them. Though it was short, it was incredibly profound. I don’t think I’ll be forgetting Lucy Barton for a long, long time.
Be sure to visit my recommendation page if you’re interested in seeing some of my best book recommendations. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And, if you’re looking for some new books to read, stop by my starter library, where you can get a handful of my books for free.
*The books mentioned above have affiliate links attached to them, which means I’ll get a small kick-back if you click on them and purchase. But I only recommend books I enjoy reading myself. Actually, I don’t even talk about books I didn’t enjoy. I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them.
I plan our healthy meals and read the labels of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure our home stays toxin-free, and I mix our own cleaners and make note of when we’ll need to reorder those essential oils we use for healing. I carve out a schedule that protects our family playing time, and I craft a budget that means we have food and shelter for another month, and I make sure all the art supplies stay stocked.
I manage Amazon subscriptions for ingredient-approved vitamins and count them out every single day and line them up next to my boys’ breakfast plates, and instead of “thank you” I hear about how they didn’t want these scrambled eggs this morning because all their friends get to eat cereal for breakfast, and why can’t they?
I clear out their closets when their old clothes are too small, and I buy them new underwear when the old ones cut off circulation and I buy new socks when the old ones have too many holes, and the only thing I hear for it is how they wanted red socks instead of the white ones I bought.
I turn off lights and flush toilets and remind them to brush their teeth and mend their blankets and find their lost library books and read stories until my throat hurts and send them back to bed a thousand times every single night, and I don’t even think they notice.
There are so many days I can feel downright invisible.
Welcome to being a mother.
///
When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped a magnet dry-erase calendar on the front of our white refrigerator.
“Dish schedule,” she said.
Our names were written on it in black, Jarrod, Rachel, Ashley and Mom switching places on all the squares. Every month she sat down with a school calendar and the dry-erase one and wrote our names on the schedule in a way that wouldn’t interfere with our lives.
The schedule got more complicated when we got to high school, because there were volleyball games and every-night-of-the-week practices and football games with the marching band and National Honor Society and Wednesday night church and homework after all that.
I didn’t appreciate all the hard work that went into a schedule as complicated as that. All I did was resent that I had to wash dishes two nights a week.
I resented that I worked so hard at school all day and then slaved away at volleyball practice and rode a bus to the pick-up point and finally got home after dark to finish what homework I couldn’t do on the bus, because I cared about handwriting and the bus was too bouncy, and then I still had to do the dishes.
So unfair.
My tunnel vision didn’t let me see that she worked all day, much harder than I ever did at school, and then she cooked dinner and tried to keep it warm for me and drove to meet the bus and stayed near while I finished my homework so I’d have help if I needed it and, on top of all that, she planned meals for the month and did all the shopping and budgeted our very limited resources and wrote out a schedule for doing dishes so one person was not overburdened with the responsibility.
She was a mother.
She was invisible, too.
///
Now that I have children of my own, I know exactly how selfish children can be. I know how thankless motherhood is. I know how no matter what we do behind the scenes, there is still more they want us to do.
It’s simply the nature of children. I know this. They don’t see their own selfishness or the way those ill-timed complaints can make a mama not ever want to cook a hot breakfast for them ever again or how just the thought of tackling eight loads of laundry that come back every week is enough to keep her in bed when the alarm chimes.
They only wonder why they’re having oatmeal again when today was supposed to be pancake-day. They don’t see that Mama ran out of time to flip pancakes because she had to turn every male shirt right-side out before sorting it into laundry piles she’ll spend all day washing. It’s completely, developmentally normal for them to not make those connections yet.
Someday they will.
But that means nothing for this day, this day you stripped all his sheets and blankets and spent half the day he was at school vacuuming and washing and putting a bed back together because he woke up with ant bites all over his legs and you’re afraid there might be ants in his bed because they were eating popcorn up here yesterday even though it’s against the rules. This day he comes out of his room complaining that his blanket is still a little wet.
This day when you loaded the washer with that first pile holding his Spider-Man shirt, because you were sure he’d want to wear it on his birthday, and there’s just enough time to wash and dry it before he has to leave for school. This day he comes down the stairs crying about how he can’t find his workout clothes to wear on his birthday, and you know they’re lying at the bottom of another pile you planned to wash later today. This day you woke up to find three lights left on all night and you can’t help but mentally calculate how much that’s going to cost you.
The promise of someday does not make this day any easier.
///
After I married and had an apartment of my own, my mom came visiting with a box.
“What’s that?” I said, because I had just finished unpacking, and I hadn’t missed anything important.
“All your old stories,” she said.
“What stories?” I said.
“The ones you wrote when you were little,” she said, and she pulled out one that imagined what I would do if I had a million dollars. I’d written it when I was 7. I’d buy a car, and I wouldn’t share with my brother, I’d written. We laughed about it.
There were Little House on the Prairie imitations and the story about a girl miraculously walking again to save her friends from danger and another scrawled out on 93 sheets of notebook paper the summer I went to visit my dad.
“I didn’t know you kept all these,” I said.
My mom smiled. “Of course I did.”
Of course she did. They were pieces of me she loved. They were pieces that proved her love.
And she is a mother.
///
There is a drawer in my closet where I keep my kids’ drawings and old writing notebooks they’ve filled with words and loose papers with quirky doodles filling corners.
My boys don’t know the drawer is there.
My 8-year-old doesn’t know that when he slipped his note under our bedroom door, the one that says he feels angry when we tell him it’s bedtime before he’s ready to go to bed, the one that bears a picture of a boy with a red face and smoke coming out of his ears, the note went into that drawer. My 6-year-old doesn’t know that when he wrote a kindergarten essay in school about how he knows his mom loves him when she reads to him, his essay went into that drawer. My 4-year-old doesn’t know that when the amazing fox picture he drew disappeared from his drawing binder it went into that drawer.
They don’t know all the ways I love them, because they are only children who believe love looks mostly like hugs and kisses and sweet snuggles. They don’t know yet that it mostly looks like time and service and invisibility.
What I am still learning in my mother journey is that sometimes the greatest acts of love are the ones that whisper instead of shout.
A storage container with writing treasures shoved under our mom’s bed.
A dish schedule that honored our time over her own.
A ride to early-morning volleyball practices, even though she worked late.
I want to be that kind of great.
It comes welling up in me, every now and then, when I’m tired and frustrated and annoyed that I can’t seem to find a minute to myself. I want to be noticed. Acknowledged. Appreciated.
I forget that invisibility is better than alone.
I get to be a mama. I get to love my children through olive oil brushed over broccoli and a sprinkling of sea salt. I get to love them by sitting down and coloring a picture of Lightning McQueen with them, even though a thousand other responsibilities are calling my name. I get to love them with a secret drawer that holds treasures more valuable than what sits in my bank account.
I get to be loved by his bursting into the room while I’m working just so he can give me a missed-you kiss. I get to be loved by the flower he brings me, because its beauty reminded him of me, and I get to watch it curl up while I’m writing. I get to be loved in his request to be carried downstairs, just like old times, even though he’s so much heavier now and fully capable of walking himself.
We get to be loved in a million silent ways, and we get to love in a million silent ways.
Welcome to being a mother.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy: Essays, which does not yet have a release date. For more of my essays, visit Wing Chair Musings.
