Today I’m doing something a teeny bit different. I’m talking about a book, because, well, everybody knows I love to read. Reading is a definite part of my life, just as much as my kids are. And this book actually has to do with my kids.
Geek Parenting: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family, by Stephen H. Segal and Valya Lupescu was a really entertaining and fun read about what parents can learn from families in pop culture. Segal and Lupescu took everyday television shows, movies, and books and dissected what the families looked like in them, and then pulled out one important pillar of parenting that we could learn from those families.
The book included people like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, Stewie and Lois (from Family Guy), Thor, Loki and Odin, Dorothy and Auntie Em and many more. It’s a compilation of mini-essays, which I appreciated, because I could digest a few of them at a time before my kids started trying to take apart the steam cleaner I accidentally left unattended in the living room corner. The mini-essays were perfect for busy parents who have opportunistic children. And by opportunistic children I mean twins who wait until your back is turned before they pick up the dreaded plunger and go to town on a brown-water toilet that won’t flush.
What I liked most about Geek Parenting was the range of material the authors drew from. Some of the movies or books were older (like the movie Teen Wolf), which made me want to go watch them again, some were new, which meant I didn’t really know what they were talking about since I stopped watching television a few years ago. But, regardless, the lessons were always fun and wise.
What I also liked about this book is that I was reminded just how much we can learn from pop culture. Sometimes I get in these weird moods where I can feel guilty about reading instead of spending valuable time with my children. Or I can feel like Husband and I wasted our date night watching the latest episode of “Once.” But the opportunity to learn is everywhere. The only thing we really need is an open mind. Also, I am now less apologetic about my bookish nature, because I’m going to write a book like this someday.
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The authors presented a parenting style that Husband and I adopted several years ago, so it wasn’t that I learned so much about parenting. It was more that I learned to appreciate the things that we already do and the lessons that we can learn from screens and pages if we only take the time to look.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and family and what I’m reading. 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.
I used to think that writing came naturally to me. When I was in high school I won all sorts of awards for my writing. When I became an adult, those awards didn’t stop coming, they just moved to the journalism sector. I was good at what I did. I didn’t really have to work at it.
False.
While it might be true that some people come equipped with better skills—like editing and grasp of language and vocabulary and spelling—the truth is that our talent is directly related to how hard we work at it.
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When I was in journalism school, in order for any journalist to progress into the senior classes required for a degree, we all had to pass this test called the GSP. GSP was an acronym for Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation. Everybody in my journalism classes talked about this test like it was something to be feared. I feared it, too. If you didn’t pass this test, you could pay to take it two more times. If you didn’t pass it those other two times, you would have to find another degree.
I made myself sick the night before this test. It wasn’t really a test I could study for—mostly because I didn’t really know how to study for grammar and spelling and punctuation. It was too overwhelming. There were too many variables. So I didn’t study. I went in and took my test and cried (I waited until I’d turned the test in), because I thought I’d failed.
A few days later, I got a call from my advisor, who told me he needed to see me. I thought for sure I’d failed the test and would have to try again. But when I got to my advisor’s office, he had a huge, goofy smile on his face. He told me I’d only missed one question on the test—how to spell broccoli, which had always been a problem for me. It was the highest grade they’d seen on the GSP.
I took this to mean that I must have some innate talent. For the rest of that year, I sailed through all my writing intensive classes. I was a talented writer. I didn’t have to work as hard as all the others. I only had to put in minimal effort, and the red carpet of success would unfold itself for me.
Now that I’m an older adult and, I’ll just go ahead and say it, less cocky, I know that it was not innate talent I had. Sure, maybe I have the ability to read words and know what they mean and call them up in mind-pictures when I need to spell them correctly. But the foundation for that ability was the stories that I read as a child. I was always reading stories. I studied words, without even knowing I was studying them. I was never without a book, anywhere. When you have a background like that, of course you’re going to be good at spelling and grammar and punctuation and the mechanics of writing, because these are the intuitive things you pick up from books.
My 7-year-old is not a great speller. My solutions for that? He needs to read more. He reads a lot. But he will learn how to spell by reading words on a page.
I tell you all of this to say that we can often get in this place as writers where we believe that there is a finite amount of natural talent available to us—we either have it or we don’t. It’s not true. Some of us might have to work harder than others at things like spelling and grammar, but every writer grows her writing talent in proportion to how hard she works at it. Every writer can become talented—brilliant, even—if he is willing to work really hard at it.
I work really hard at writing. Every month, I read at least two writing craft books. I read at least six novels, three of those usually award winners, because I want to learn how to write like that. At the end of every year, I’ve read at least 120 books. At the end of every year, I’ve written millions of words, because I show up every day, no matter what I feel like or which kid ticked me off or whether or not there’s a coherent thought in my head. I do the work, all the way around.
We cannot simply ride on our talent. We have to do the work. We have to study. We have to know ourselves and then grow ourselves. Talent plus work equals brilliance in the writing world.
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Continuing education matters—and I’m not talking about higher degrees. I have a bachelor’s degree. It’s probably all I’ll ever have, because I have a husband and six kids and a career I love. But I put myself through a rigorous school of my own. And that is what, in the end, will ensure that I become the best writer I can possibly be. I have not arrived. I actually never will. But the trying is what mattered in the first place.
We can all do the same.
How to Continue Your Writing Education:
1. Read.
Read voraciously. Read widely. Read intentionally. When you think about higher education–particularly college–you think about texts. Or at least I do. What kind of texts would I need to read and study get the equivalent of an MFA in young adult science fiction? What about middle grade fantasy? What about adult literary? (These are rhetorical questions, but soon, I’ll answer them in a roundabout way. I’ve got some resources planned that will make it easy for all of us to boast of an MFA with everything but the diploma on the wall.)
How do you study the books you read? You mark passages, you fold pages, you take notes, even if it’s a novel. You take note of the passages or features you like. You try to figure out what it is that draws you in and keeps you reading.
2. Write.
Part of honing talent is practicing. And part of practicing is having a designated time, every day (I do five days a week and leave the weekends open for inspiration) when you will work on your writing. Write essays or poetry or stories. Write all of them. Make it a regular part of you day, just like any other practice. And be relentless about keeping your writing appointment.
3. Study resources.
There are so many writing resources out there. I try to provide at least on every week for you to check out. Go back through your old emails. Start with some of the writing craft books I suggest, or email me to ask about specific ones you may have missed. I’ve read close to 100 writing craft books to date–and continue my education with at least two every month. I take what I want from each book and, once finished, pick up another. But don’t just read writing books. Read business books and creativity books and books that will help you polish and target your writing so your audience will hear you.
Just don’t ever stop learning.
When we stop learning, we stop growing and improving.
Week’s Prompt
Write what comes to mind when you read the following quote:
“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.” —George Gershwin
Husband and I recently celebrated our anniversary. With the kids.
Most years we try to get at least a couple of days away from the kids so that we can enjoy a little one-on-one time and actually finish conversations instead of keeping them running throughout a whole day to pick back up in the spaces where kids aren’t talking, which is hardly ever. Actually it’s never, so you have conversations in your heads and forget it was all imaginary and then you get mad at each other when it’s time to go to that school meeting you talked about earlier this week and one of you didn’t remember. Because the conversation never happened. You just thought it did.
But this year our anniversary fell on a weekend when my parents could not take the children, because they live in a small town, and they were having a bake sale where my mom, the town library director, was expected to make an appearance. She couldn’t juggle six kids while trying to sell brownies. I don’t blame her. That would be a losing battle, unless she wanted to buy all the brownies.
So after we put the kids to bed on Saturday night, we watched an episode of Game of Thrones, season two (I know we’re way behind. Watching something together is like having a conversation together—it hardly ever happens, except in your imagination.). And then we were so tired we just went to bed at a wimpy 10 p.m. instead of the typical Friday night’s midnight hour—and it’s a good thing we did, because the 3-year-old twins decided, at 4 a.m., that they were going to climb over the baby gate barring their room for sanity purposes and go exploring the library unsupervised, which is always a scary proposition with twins.
The library is right outside our bedroom, and we totally would have heard their pounding footsteps and victory-cry screeching if Husband hadn’t turned up the “storm sounds” white noise on the computer so we could get some sleep by pretending there were no kids in the house. So the 8-year-old took it upon himself to knock on our door and let us know his brothers were “running wild in the library.”
They weren’t in there for long, but already one of them had eaten nearly a whole tube of toothpaste that he climbed a cabinet in the bathroom to get and emptied out a bottle of essential oil Husband had left next to a diffuser. His whole mouth smelled like Peace & Calming with some strawberry thrown in like an afterthought. So we took Strawberry Shortcake back to bed, along with his probably-not-innocent-either-but-we-couldn’t-find-any-evidence brother and closed their door, which has a lock on the outside (because twins. That’s all I’m going to say. You can judge if you want. I don’t care. Because twins.).
Husband and I really wanted to go back to sleep, because we still had two more hours until we needed to be up to get everyone ready for church, but the problem was, the shrieking banshees who had been set loose in the library minutes before had already woken the rest of the boys. We told them to read in the library for the next two hours, because they love to read and we love to sleep.
When we woke up at 7, everyone was crying. The 8-year-old was crying because he was starving, and he was going to die if he didn’t get anything to eat RIGHT THIS MINUTE. The 6-year-old was crying because his older brother, in a fit of anger, had taken a book right out of his hands. The 5-year-old was crying because he’s 5 and that’s enough explanation in his mind. The 3-year-olds were crying because they were up at 4. The baby was crying because he heard all his brothers crying, and he decided he should probably be crying, too.
We explained to everyone that it was our anniversary and they should be the ones fixing us breakfast, but no one seemed to like that idea, so Husband went downstairs to cook a feast of toast with jam, while I showered and put on a little makeup, because I’m not a big fan of scaring church people away with my nakedness. Naked face, that is. Geez. The words aren’t coming out right. I’ve been up since 4.
And then we left for church half an hour late and blissfully handed the boys off to the nursery workers and Sunday school teachers, not saying a word about how they’d probably be really grouchy because everyone had been up since 4, and then we went out with the baby into the service. Two minutes in, the baby started happily shrieking in the middle of the pastor’s talk, so all the heads (smiling mostly) turned toward me while I tried to gracefully exit the row and, in typical Rachel fashion, tripped over some chairs and nearly crapped my pants because I didn’t want to drop the baby. This story has a happy ending, because I didn’t drop the baby or crap my pants. But I did end up with a busted-up knee. Much better than a busted-up baby or a pair of smelly drawers.
Baby and I danced in the entry-way of the church while I counted down the minutes until the boys would be ours again.
When we got back home, the house was a wreck, because the day before we’d taken everybody to the city zoo and Husband and I didn’t feel like enforcing any of the normal cleanup rules when we got back home, because six kids out at the zoo sucks enough energy to last a whole forty-eight hours. So after we wrestled every crayon we own—about a billion—out of the twins’ hands and put them down for their naps, the 8-year-old found his way to our room and said, “Because it’s your anniversary, I’ll do whatever you want me to do for you. And the rest of this week, too.”
Which was sweet and all, except “whatever you want me to do for you” doesn’t actually mean whatever you want me to do for you, because I asked him to cook dinner, and he said that probably wouldn’t be safe, which is probably true, and then I asked him to watch his brothers so his daddy and I could go for a walk around the cul-de-sac, and he said he could do anything but watching his brothers and cooking dinner, and then I asked him to clean up his room because it was a mess, and he said he would do anything for me, and cleaning his room wasn’t for me, so I just gave up after that.
We cooked our dinner of pasta in Vodka sauce and sat around the table telling stories about the early days before Husband and I were married, while the kids listened with silly grins on their faces, because what’s better than watching a mama and daddy who love each other tell stories about how they came to be? And after all that we put them all to bed so we could stuff our faces with the salted caramel cupcakes we’d hidden in the pantry.
It was divine. Truly. Best anniversary ever. Except for the one where we ditched the kids and went to Disney World. But this one was a very distant second.
This is an excerpt from Parenting is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s humor writings, visit Crash Test Parents.
I read Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby, several months ago, but, for some reason, I wasn’t quite ready to talk about it. I think it’s because this book takes a lot of digesting. It’s got so many layers that you need some time with it once you finish it.
Bone Gap is the story of Roza, a girl who is mysteriously taken by an unidentified man. Finn, the only one who saw her disappear, can’t get over the guilt of not being able to identify the man who took her. What makes it worse is that his older brother, who is basically his guardian, was in love with Roza.
As you can see, from this short description alone, Bone Gap was full of everything that makes a book worth reading—romance, tension, horror, and even a bit of science fiction. I think what I probably loved most about it is that while it had a small-town feel about it, which reminded me of my own teenage years growing up across the street from cornfields (they play a large part in the book), it also felt large and important. The emotion of it was raw and heartbreaking and tender.
There’s a lot of young adult fiction out there that is surface-level fiction, but Ruby wove a story that was much deeper than the surface. A narrative actually happened beneath the surface, in a whole other realm. In spite of the outward plot, it was a story about two brothers trying to find their way through the wreckage of a mother leaving them. It was about a girl coming to terms with the fact that she was beautiful. It was about another girl circling around to the final belief that being beautiful was okay.
There is so much to say about this story, but I feel like I’d be gushing. Let me just share a quote with you from Ruby’s poetic prose. This is her opening, probably one of the best young adult openings I’ve ever read.
“The people of Bone Gap called Finn a lot of things, but none of them was his name. When he was little, they called him Spaceman. Sidetrack. Moonfaced. You. As he got older, they called him Pretty Boy. Loner. Brother. Dude.
“But whatever they called him, they called him fondly. Despite his odd expressions, his strange distraction, and that annoying way he had of creeping up on a person, they knew him as well as they knew anyone. As well as they knew themselves. They knew him like they knew that Old Charlie Valentine preferred his chickens to his great-grandchildren, and sometimes let them roost in the house. (The chickens, not the children.) The way they knew that the Cordero family had a ghost that liked to rifle through the fridge at night. The way they knew that Priscilla Willis, the beekeeper’s homely daughter, had a sting worse than any bee. The way they knew that Bone Gap had gaps just wide enough for people to slip through, or slip away, leaving only their stories behind.”
I only just finished Six of Crows, by Leigh Bardugo. This is an amazing book. It’s the story of six renegades in the city of Ketterdam who attempt a heist unlike anything their world has ever seen.
It took me a while to get into the book, because it’s a fantasy world that is really intricate. There were lots of new characters with strange names and lots of terms that took a while to get accustomed to. But once I got further into it I could not put Six of Crows down. It had the feel of a teenage Oceans 11, set in a fictional world. I didn’t expect to love it, but I did. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
What I liked most about Six of Crows is that it was so incredibly complete. When you walked into the fantasy world, there were no questions left unanswered. Bardugo wove the world right around me. I could see it all. I could smell it. I could hear it. It was an imaginary world with impossible things, but it felt real. That’s when you know you’ve found a great fantasy writer.
I also enjoyed that the romance in this book was understated. I’ve read a lot of dystopian young adult science fiction and epic fantasy books, and a whole lot of them do romance wrong—at least wrong in my opinion. They’re full of exhaling breaths and falling into arms that are muscled and strong, and feeling a warm rush in the pit of their stomach as love blooms inside. Bardugo, though, expertly hinted at the romance between characters and showed it more through looks and experiences rather than warm gushy feelings in the pits of stomachs. I found myself aching for characters who hadn’t explicitly shown they were longing for one of the other characters. It was refreshing.
The only thing I might have done differently to this book was cut the prologue. I actually didn’t even remember the prologue until my husband started reading the book and said, “That first chapter was interesting.” I racked my brain to figure out what the first chapter was. Those characters didn’t come back into play again, so it seems like the story could have done without it.
If I were going to describe Six of Crows with one word, it would be smart. The story was impressively smart. The fight scenes, the characters, the actual heist itself—it was all smart. Thrilling, even. Bardugo’s sequel, Crooked Kingdom, released Sept. 27, and I can’t wait to start reading.
I hope you enjoyed these book recommendations. Be sure to pick up a free book from my starter library and visit my recommends page to see some of my favorite books. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, contact me. I always enjoy adding to my list. Even if I never get through it all.
It’s the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch;
it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious;
it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine
the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole
the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after. We walked hand-in-hand to the building next door, on a path where deer watched our every step, as if protecting our way. And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to a hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip to Disney World, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected twelve hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started here at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we don’t.
Because even after more than a decade, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all the music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never shows he worries at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 13 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper. There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills. Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check. And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on our shared bed like the whole world was ending while he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day? Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we. Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it. Maybe it will take a year or five or fifteen, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One. But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up the so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
///
One day he and all our other band mates quit their full-time jobs. Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way. So I held on to what steady income I had, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and my dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility. There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because my dream had stayed in its place, under an increasing weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time. The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
///
It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight. And then came the night it was all too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different? Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, fourteen years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in his arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you. I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories. We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it fourteen years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, eight days from marking thirteen years of love and work, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
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.
