Floating about aimlessly in the world of writer and author is not an effective way to build a career. One cannot simply say, “Whatever happens will happen,” because then nothing will, in fact, happen.
I know. I used to be that writer.
I thought making goals and holding myself to them meant that I absolutely had to do them, that there was no room for steering in a different direction if I so decided I needed a different focus. I thought that marking down “eight rough draft manuscripts” on a year’s calendar meant I absolutely had to do them or I was a failure. Goals felt like a cage rather than a wide open door.
And then I realized that goals are not set-in-stone things but more guideposts-along-the-road things. Which meant that if I didn’t make goals at all, I was not going anywhere. I existed like that for a while, blogging on a book that I’ve released recently, but I wasn’t really going anywhere. I didn’t have any direction. I didn’t have clear-cut goals. I didn’t have much vision beyond this one small thing.
So now, every year, I spend the last week of the old year and the first week of the new year making a plan, listing out all my goals, piecing together my time, because as a parent writer there is a limited amount of it. I estimate how long it will take me to do certain projects, and I map out the year. I have a direction, and that doesn’t mean my direction can’t change somewhere along the way, but it means that I have a framework for what my year will look like. How I move around within that framework is entirely up to me.
I make word count goals. I make novel goals. I make goals for everything I need to learn (and there are so many things), and I make goals for how many books I’ll read and what types of books I’ll read and what each month will hopefully teach me. I make goals for how I’d like to see my business grow and what sorts of things I’d like to streamline and how I can possibly reach all of my goals. I set goals for goals. I have direction. I have a plan. I have the velocity that will move my career forward.
Sometimes it can feel like making these goals will only set us up for disappointment if we can’t, for some reason or another, meet them by the year’s end. I like to shoot high in my goals (I overshot my last book release by about 20 copies—it didn’t do as well as I had hoped it would), but that doesn’t mean I’ve failed if I don’t actually meet them. Any progress toward goals is a win. If we are constantly working toward our goals, we can’t help but move forward in our career.
If we want to move forward in our writing career, we’re going to have to lay out some goals. Because goals give us direction, which gives us focus.
A writer without focus will be lost in the great, fathomless sea of What Should I Write.
What goals do for us as writers is they help us analyze where it is we want to go in our writing career. When we say we want to deliver eight rough draft manuscripts at the end of a year, we know that we’re going to have to schedule out the time it will take to get them done. If we only say that we’ll write however many rough drafts we may get around to, we’re probably not going to write any of them.
Making goals concrete can help us plan out our year and schedule deadlines so that we have the best chance of achieving all it is we want to achieve. Each goal can then have tangible steps, and we can break them down as far as we want to (this might be harder for the not-planners among us), with action steps for each month and each week and each day.
If goals change halfway through the year because another opportunity plops in our lap, that’s okay. There’s nothing written in stone that says we have to do what we originally said we’d do. We can massage our goals at any point, if we find it takes us longer to write those rough drafts than we originally planned, or if another book comes knocking, insisting that this is the right time for it to be written. Those things happen. What goals do is provide a framework of intention around our year. We are less likely to drift off-shore if we have a framework for our year.
In addition to goals every year, I choose a word for my business. This has its roots in my family’s practice of choosing a word that provides the framework for our year (this year’s family word is Play. Such a great one. We are even going to explore how to play in our work.).
My business word for this year is actually two words: Forward motion.
This phrase means a lot to me. For a while I’ve been feeling like I’m standing still, like there is nothing much happening, like I’ve done all I can and I can do nothing more, and now I have to wait for people to come and get me. But that’s not really true. There are thousands of little tweaks I can make to my content and my web pages and my blog that would make all of them more effective, and this year that’s what I’m going to be working on in between my writing times. I’ve also got a manuscript out with an agent that’s been out with her for months now, and I’m going to get it back out there in the next few weeks. I have more manuscripts to pitch, and I’m ready to move forward in the traditional publishing game. Not only that, but I’ll be self-publishing some fiction I’ve been working on for a year now.
Regardless of all that, everything I do this year that is geared toward my business will be analyzed through those words: Forward motion. If I don’t think a particular activity is going to result in forward motion, then it’s not going to make my list of things to do.
There are so many things we can do out there as writers. There are social media platforms we need to make appearances on, and there are responsibilities we have for blogging, and we can get caught up in it all. And then we find that we’ve gotten so far from the time we had to write that we have absolutely nothing left. I don’t want to be there. I want to be moving forward, not standing still.
My top three learning goals are:
1. Photography—so I can offer better pictures of my own on all of my blog platforms and social media pages.
2. Using social media well—this has been a goal for a while. I’ve slowly been making progress.
3. Graphic design basics—I rely a whole lot on my husband for graphic design, and he’s a busy man. So I’d like to learn more about the basics so I can do social media posts that are graphically pleasing. I will NOT, however, be attempting book cover design. Ever.
My biggest goal this year is to grow my business without sacrificing my family.
Other goals include:
Turning all rough draft manuscripts into final drafts (there are eight roughs right now)
Sending at least 10 manuscripts out to agents this year
Doing slight revisions on final manuscripts (there are three finals right now that need slight work)
Writing rough drafts for nine manuscripts
Turning three blog collections into books
Releasing the first season of Fairendale (kid-lit fantasy)
Releasing a free brainstorming course for This Writer Life
Starting a weekly humor show for Crash Test Parents
Writing a 365 days of poetry book
I don’t know if I’ll get around to every single one of these goals, but everything I do will be done with these goals in mind.
If you’re struggling with making your own business goals for your writing career, here are some suggestions to get you started.
1. Decide what it is you want to do most in your career this year.
Do you want to write books? Learn more about something? Publish a book? In order to start making tangible goals, you first have to know what it is you want to do in the first place. List all the things you want to do, and know that you probably won’t be able to get to them all. Rank them in order of importance and then build a plan around them.
2. Pick between one and three things you’d like to learn.
One of the best things we can do for our writing career is to learn something new. It can be about the craft of writing. It can be about writing headlines or effective blogs. It can be about the business of writing or the psychology of influencing people or how to brand yourself. It can be learning more about social media and how to have an effective presence on your handles. There is always an abundance of new things we can learn if we’re intentional about them.
3. Adjust your schedule according to what your top goals are.
I would suggest only having between three and four overarching goals. I have several more than that because I’m an overachiever, but that’s not really ideal. (You can also increase the number of goals as you get to know yourself. I’ve been writing full-time now for a year, so I know what my weekly production is like. That helps me make even more specific goals.) On the other hand, sometimes having a goal that seems way out there in the realm of impossibility is just enough motivation to help us almost make it. Don’t be afraid of large, seemingly impossible goals. If we write it down, we’re more likely to reach it.
4. Share your goals with someone else.
One of the most helpful things we can do for ourselves when we are setting goals is to share them with someone else. It creates accountability, and some of us need a whole lot of accountability. My husband and I always talk about our business goals, not only because we work really closely together but also because it helps having a spouse on the other end of it. We can ask each other daily or weekly about our goals, and we can see how far we have to get there or how close we actually are. Not to mention, it boosts our confidence to have a person we love who is interested and invested in what we’re doing.
Every year Husband and I sit down to make some goals for the New Year. And, of course, this year was no different, although six boys make it a little hard to have any stretch of uninterrupted time to write out goals and make them look remotely pretty. So if these don’t make a lick of sense, I’m sorry. We’re drowning here, and my life preserver has a hole in it.
1. Stop having homicidal thoughts toward my children.
I’m kidding. Or am I? No, really I am. I don’t ever have homicidal thoughts toward my children. Actually, if I’m being candidly honest, the thoughts that tend to come sometimes are, “I wonder if I could give these two away to that one family member and then just keep the rest.” And the “these two” part changes every day, because the easy ones change every day, too. That’s a lie. “These two” are almost always the twins in the terrible 3s. They’re the most consistent team in my house. But in the new year, I would like to make it my goal to not let any of those I’d-like-to-give-you-away thoughts come. This is a tall order, but the twins will turn 4, and I’ve heard 4 is a turning-around point for kids like them. At least that’s what I hold tight to when another twin catastrophe comes swinging in.
2. Make one meal where no one says, “I don’t like that” before they even taste it.
Maddening. Here I’ve slaved over a damn stove all afternoon, and I put that yummy chicken soup with the ingredients I threw together, because someone ate all the carrots and someone spilled the oregano and someone else was snacking on the chicken while I wasn’t looking, and, also, I’m not the best at planning meals, but still, it took an hour to cook, and before they even taste it, someone says, “Aw, I hate that.” Yeah, well, I hate you right now, too. I’m kidding. Or am I?
3. Never watch another episode of the following shows: Pokemon, Octonauts, SpongeBob SquarePants, (fill in your own blank).
I’ll say what we’re all thinking: Kids’ shows are the worst shows ever. Not only do they have theme songs that will get caught in our brains for a thousand years, but they usually feature a whole slew of children’s voices. I don’t know about you, but I have enough children’s voices in my house trying to get my attention. I don’t need another little-kid voice trying to explain what a vampire squid is, because I’ve got plenty little-kid voices pontificating about how they didn’t have milk today and so I have to get them some right this very minute and make it a double portion and informing me that their poop was green today and sharing everything they learned when playing Plants vs. Zombies for their 10 minutes of technology time. I feel like murdering my TV, that’s what I feel like. We don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but when we do, my God. I would like those characters to disappear forever.
(Kids shows that are an exception in my book: Fresh Beat Band and Yo Gabba Gabba. If anyone knows how to stream those shows, spill all your secrets. We don’t have cable, so I don’t get to watch my favorite kid shows anymore. I’m dying to know what’s happening with Marina and Shout.)
4. Make our home a Kidz Bop-free zone.
Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about. That perfectly fine Taylor Swift song that’s sung by a little girl in a particularly nasally way, and instead of the lyrics, “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane” the words are changed to something kid-friendly like “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame,” and even though it’s almost a little bit clever the way they changed it like that, there is something maddeningly annoying about a kid putting the song on repeat, and now all you hear is “Got a list of old friends, they’ll tell you I’m to blame” when the song plays forty million times on the radio (two months ago, at least). I almost bought my kid a Kidz Bop CD for Christmas, because they really do love them and have been checking them out from the library for months, but then I remembered the songs and the kids’ voices and how they can drive me up one wall and right back down the other.
Nope.
5. Put the kids to bed once and have them stay there.
I know, I know. They should be staying in their beds every night. They should stay put, because I’m the parent. I’m probably not putting my foot down quite forcefully enough. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you for a day, let you take care of six boys for twenty-six whole hours and we’ll see if you feel like putting them back to bed three million times at the end of your day. Husband and I are done by the time bedtime rolls around. We’ve gotten really good at pretending not to hear footsteps and laughter and knocking. We lock the little ones in their room, where they can’t get out and terrorize the house or, worse, DIE (they ate a whole tube of toothpaste at 3 a.m. one morning while the rest of the house was sleeping. Husband happened to hear a thump and went to investigate. Twins and a squeezed-empty tube of peppermint delight, also smeared all around their mouths. The clues were hard to ignore.) And then we ignore the rest.
6. Put items in the recycling basket and not have them come climbing back out when the 9-year-old is on trash duty.
My 9-year-old is an environmentalist, and he likes to save things and re-imagine what in the world they could be used for. This is a great thing, except I’m not so keen on climbing into bed with a mascara container he thinks I could reuse if I “just think hard enough.”
7. Stop expecting my children to remember our nightly routine—even though it’s been done every night of their lives.
There are routines we have set firmly in place in our house. Some of them we’ve been doing for as long as the oldest has been alive—nine years. One would think this would be more than enough time to establish that as an every-single-day routine. And yet our kids act like it’s a surprise every night when story time rolls around and it’s time for them to sit quietly in their spots (they thought it was jump-on-the-couch-naked time, but that’s doesn’t even have a time slot on our schedule.). They act surprised that it’s time for lights out when 8:20 rolls around and they have no more time to silently read or write in their journals. They act surprised that they have to take a bath and brush their teeth and put on pajamas because we’re parents who care about good hygiene (mostly).
So, rather than expecting them to remember that this is a routine and we’ve done it every single night, I’m just going to start expecting that they will put up a fight and be pleasantly surprised when they don’t. Optimism and all that.
8. Leave the house once and not have to search for shoes or cups or jackets or kids.
It never fails. Every time we try to leave the house, someone is missing shoes. Or a jacket they remember hanging on their hook when they took it off (yeah, right) is not there. Or someone needs drink real quick. Or someone went missing. Our kids make us late more times than they make us on time, and in the new year, I would just like to leave once without searching for something important, just to prove we can.
9. Take the argument time from two hours to one.
We have one of those strong-willed kids (actually we have a few of them, but two are too young to be skilled at it, thank God). He also happens to be a sticky-brained child, which is, as you might imagine, quite an easy combination to parent. He doesn’t fight about everything, mind you. But he fights about at least one thing every day. He’s become quite skilled at picking his battles. The things that are really important to him—say, building with LEGOs when it’s not time to build with LEGOs because it’s time for him to get in the bath—he will push and push and push until we’re too tired even to breathe anymore. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve told him that “the answer is no,” he will fight. I would like to lessen the amount of time we spend arguing every day. (It’s not really two hours right now. I’m kidding. Or am I?)
10. Go a whole week without hearing a blood-curdling scream.
I live with a pack of boys. Screaming is what they do, mostly because they prefer to live dangerously. They’ll jump from the tree house to the trampoline and scream when their leg gets caught wrong beneath them. They’ll try to jump from the trampoline to the rock-climbing wall on their play scape and scream when they bonk their head. They’ll slide down the stairs head-first at the same time and scream when somebody got going a little too fast and kicked him in the nose as if kicking a brother in the head would stop his trajectory down. All that to say, I’m not really sure how realistic this goal is, but I’d really like to try.
As you can see, I have big plans for 2016 in my parenting life. It’s a good thing these goals depend on really fickle, unreliable little humans, because otherwise, they’d be way too easy. Goals are supposed to challenge us, right?
I only recently discovered Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle series, the first of which was written in 1968. I read The Wizard of Earthsea quickly, since it was a beautifully written book, and I was immediately hooked on the story of Ged, who is a wizard chasing a darkness he unleashed when he was a foolhardy boy with only a limited knowledge of magic. So last month I picked up the second in the series, The Tombs of Atuan, which was written in 1970.
The Tombs of Atuan follows the story of Tenar, a young girl who is taken from her family because she is chosen to become high priestess to the nameless Powers of the Earth. She loses her family, her possessions, her name, becoming, now, Arha. She lives alone in a drafty house near the dark tombs, where no light is allowed. She forgets beauty and hope and identify for the sake of serving the Powers of Earth.
But then her story collides with the wizard Ged, who has entered the labyrinth of her tombs to steal its greatest treasure—the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. He introduces her to light and magic and urges her to reach for freedom.
This story was not only a fantastic, spell-binding tale, but it was also one of the most beautifully written fantasy stories. I knew it would be, because A Wizard of Earthsea was much the same.
Take this passage, for example:
“Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat.”
LeGuin has such a poetic way of describing things. Here, the image of boredom rising like terror is something we’ve felt but never really thought about. We are afraid we will always be bored. Tenar is afraid she will always be bored. And that fear grabs her by the throat. It’s a great image.
Imagery is something that comes easily for LeGuin in The Tombs of Atuan. She showcases her skill in passages like:
“‘Here we must be beneath the Stones,’ the girl said, whispering, and her whisper ran out into the hollow blackness and frayed into threads of sound as fine as spiderweb that clung to the hearing for a long time.”
The idea that it’s a spiderweb of sound, and that it clings to the ear—I think of the way it feels to walk through a spiderweb you didn’t see, and how you can’t really shake it off. It’s a fantastic image, like the sound was something that could not be shaken off but remained, like a ghost, like a presence.
“Touch was one’s whole guidance; one could not see the way, but held it in one’s hands.”
No light is allowed in the tombs Tenar must guard. So she moves through them by touch. I loved the way LeGuin spelled it out here—that one held the way in one’s hands, as if there is a deeper meaning to this holding than what Tenar will at first understand. When one cannot see the way with one’s eyes, one can be assured the hands hold it. It’s an interesting life-commentary and also a great image for a place that is so dark there is no seeing at all.
LeGuin is also a master of description. When she is describing the place where Tenar and the other girls live, she says this:
“They learned how to spin and weave the wool of their blocks, and how to plant and harvest and prepare the food they always ate: lentils, buckwheat ground to a coarse meal for porridge or a fine flour for unleavened bread, onions, cabbages, goat-cheese, apples, and honey.
“The best thing that could happen was to be allowed to go fishing in the murky green river that flowed through the desert a half mile northeast of the Place; to take along an apple or a cold buckwheat bannock for lunch and sit all day in the dry sunlight among the reeds, watching the slow green water run and the cloud-shadows change closely on the mountains.”
Though this world is entirely imagined by LeGuin, she describes it so that her reader can fully imagine it. We know what the girls eat and how they spend their time and what the landscape looks like and what kinds of things they enjoy doing. It is a perfect picture of a day in the life of a young priestess. We see the color and the sunlight and the way shadows change over the mountains.
This descriptive passage took up a space in my imagination in a beautifully haunting way:
“The barren land was just past its flowering. All the small desert blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing and quick-flowering, were going to seed, scattering tiny plumes and parasols of ash white on the wind, dropping their hooked, ingenious burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard was a drift of bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green trees within miles of the Place. Everything else, from horizon to horizon, was a dully, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had a silvery bluish tinge…”
We get the idea that the place where Tenar and the other girls stay is a bit barren, but out, beyond the mountains, there is the hope of life. It is symbolic of what is to come.
A characteristic of LeGuin’s writing is also the symbolic life commentary she often throws in as the thoughts or words of her characters. Here Tenar is reflecting on the world:
“She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. She felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which gods did not matter.”
She is a little girl, and she is growing up, understanding what it really means to live in a world that is big and different and wide and largely unknown. It is a whole new world for her.
“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”
Tenar is just discovering this world, having been kept in a place without light and human interaction beyond the other girls chosen as priestesses. Hers is a profound statement about a child’s passage into the adult world. It is much greater and stranger than anything we will ever do.
LeGuin is both skillful in her story telling and creative in her word choice, and the combination is a style that is unmatched in its poetic resonance. Here, Tenar is finding her way out of the labyrinth:
“There was a weariness in that tracing of the vast, meaningless web of ways; the legs got tired and the mind got bored, forever reckoning up the turnings and the passages behind and to come.”
It feels almost like that is a commentary on life, because there are twists and turnings and passages, and sometimes our legs get tired and the mind gets bored at the endless traveling. I love the poetic flow of “web of ways,” and the image it strikes up of a web, one thing leading to another, is simply brilliant. It is such a maze that the mind gets bored, because the mind must know it backward and forward. Those passages are endless, and they are sticky and they are difficult.
“Echoes died away, quarreling, down the corridor behind her.”
This image of echoes quarreling with one another is fantastic. One can imagine what it would sound like in a cave, with those echoes disappearing into the distances as if an argument were chasing the wind.
“The dead silence closed in upon her whisper, ate it.”
Sometimes there is a silence that can be louder than sound, and I love this image of a silence eating a whisper.
Some of the images invoked feeling of nostalgia when reading, reminding me of the days of my youth when I would lie on grass and stare up at the sky:
“Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world.”
Others used description in metaphorical terms that were too lovely to loose from memory:
“Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did not understand.”
“The sun beat in her eyes like a hammer of gold.”
And still others haunted me with their beauty and truth:
“He did not move. He was still as the rocks themselves. Stillness spread out from him, like rings from a stone dropped in water. His silence became not absence of speech, but a thing in itself, like the silence of the desert.”
“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
Ultimately, this is a story about dark and light, about a girl who wakes up to a world she has never known existed, of a passage into hope and joy and freedom.
“You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light,” Ged tells Tenar as they escape from the tombs.”
It used to be “I love you.” My boys used to say those words all the time, every time they saw me. They would come and kiss me and lay their head on me and wrap their arms around me and whisper the words in my ear, and I would melt every time. Or maybe that’s just how my mind remembers those early years of parenthood.
Whatever. All I know is lately that used-most-often phrase that used to melt me has been replaced by another that melts me in a completely different way: I’m hungry.
The other day we were leaving for the annual family Christmas party a whole 4.5 hours away, which was already ratcheting up the anxiety, because who in their right mind likes to be shut up with six boys in a car for 4.5 hours (one way!)
When Husband and I woke that morning, we decided, in an effort to preserve the relative cleanliness of our kitchen for when we returned late that evening, to grab something at the store for breakfast. Sure, we could have gotten up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday to leave on time for a Christmas party 4.5 hours away so we could have fed them breakfast in our kitchen, but we also wanted to arrive alive. And, honestly, we’d stayed up too late the night before catching up on Game of Thrones. So it was in the interest of all that we slept an extra hour and a half.
Still, we were feeling a little testy, which is usually the hangover of not-enough-sleep. So after we’d explained to the boys that we were going to pick something up for breakfast at the store and strapped them all in and turned on The Red Badge of Courage, because we’re a nerdy family that enjoys audio books, and the firstborn called from the backseat, “Okay, I’m ready to eat now,” when we weren’t even out of our neighborhood yet, we looked at each other and tried hard to tamp down the crazy. Sometimes crazy can’t be tamped, unfortunately.
“Oh,” Husband said. “Oh, you’re ready to eat right now. Well, I’ll see if I can stop at this tree and get something.”
The 9-year-old looked out the window. “But I thought we were going to eat.” And then, when he realized we were still in the middle of nowhere, because it had been 48 seconds since we left the driveway, his panic infused an extra “But I’m hungry!” just to make sure we knew.
As if we’ve ever NOT fed them. But this doesn’t matter to children, because they don’t know how to look back on all that has come before. They only know RIGHT NOW, not the other three thousand three hundred seventeen days they’ve been alive, when we fed them three (mostly) balanced meals a day and even (bonus!) two snacks.
All this talking was distracting me from the story. “Should I turn the story off?” I said.
“No,” the 9-year-old said. “It’s just that I’m hungry.” This caused a maddening chorus of “Me too” all around.
“I’ll see if I can pull over this H-E-B truck up ahead,” Husband said. “Maybe they’ll give us a sandwich.”
I shot a warning look at Husband. “There are no stores around right this second,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to stop until we get to a store. But don’t worry. We are going to feed you.”
“But I’m hungry!” the twins whined from just behind our seats. Clearly my words were not clear enough.
“We’ll feed you as soon as we can,” I said. “As soon as we can. Ass soon as we can.” That’s not a typo. Sometimes, when the crazy comes calling, I take it out on words so I don’t have to word-wound my kids.
Husband looked at me and shook his head, smiling. The boys were quiet until we got to the store. And then, of course, their daddy was taking too long. He was never going to come out. They were never going to eat again. They were going to die of starvation, before he got back out of the store. I told them to count the cars in the parking lot, but that took all of three minutes, because no one else was out this early on a Saturday.
Finally, finally, finally, Husband came out and saved the day. I guess they were too busy stuffing their faces with blueberry bagel to say thank you.
My boys are always hungry. There are six of them, and they aren’t even teenagers, but they can inhale two dozen eggs in a single morning and punctuate the inhale with an “I’m still hungry.” They can eat five pounds of chicken and not bat an eye. Two of them sneaking into the freezer while I’m otherwise occupied cleaning up the last mess somebody “askidentally” made can eat a 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli—frozen—and still go looking for more. The most opened door in my home is the refrigerator one. They’re always looking for something else to pass the eating time.
Well, there’s nothing left, because the schools are STILL ON CHRISTMAS BREAK. They have eaten me out of house and home. I can actually see what color my pantry shelves are now, because they’re empty. The only good thing about it is I gave the refrigerator its first scrub-cleaning the other day, because it was the barest it’s ever been. There’s nothing left in our freezer. I have no idea what we’re going to have for dinner tonight. Looks like popcorn, some chia seeds and…a handful of old edamame the boys won’t touch once it reaches “leftover” status.
Thank God school starts back up tomorrow. Oh, also, hey, teenage years: Stay far away, please.
I still remember the first time you showed up at our door, three pizzas stacked in your hand, because you knew you were coming to a house of teenagers, and what teenagers don’t like pizza? Except you were coming to a house where a girl didn’t want to eat, period, because she didn’t want the pounds to show up in unexpected places and she wanted, above all, to prove herself beautiful and exceptional so she could win back the dad who had left without looking back.
You showed up and ruined that plan. I ate the obligatory piece, because it smelled so good, and then I holed up in my room, angry at my mom for bringing you home to meet us, angry that she was giving up. I knew what it meant, her bringing you home. It was the first step into a new marriage. A man had to want the kids, too, if he wanted her. The kids had to want the man, too, if she was going to marry him.
I didn’t want to agree for a time.
It took you a long time to win our hearts, because our hearts had been trampled by the one who had left, and we didn’t trust ourselves and we didn’t trust you and we didn’t trust love, mostly. We didn’t trust love to change anything. We didn’t trust love to make a difference in our already-messed-up lives. We didn’t trust love to lift us out of the pit.
We didn’t know how it would all end up. We didn’t want to get our hopes up and then be proved stupid for the hoping.
But you were brave. You didn’t let our hesitation stop you. You kept coming, those pizzas stacked in your hand and that goofy smile on your face, and you acted like maybe you liked us and maybe we could be your children and maybe this could work. Maybe.
And then Mom married you, and I sang at the wedding, and still we thought this probably wouldn’t last long, because we didn’t like you, or at least that’s what those protective walls around our hearts told us. But somewhere along the way, dislike turned to like and then like turned to love and then love turned to a father-love strong enough to walk a daughter who didn’t share blood down the aisle to her beloved.
I just want you to know that I’m so glad you stuck around. Three teenagers in the house of a single mom is a whole lot to take on, and you did it with strength and courage and the most selfless love I’ve ever known in a man, with the exception of my husband. It’s not easy stepping into that tender minefield where you will have to pick up the pieces that another man left. Thank you for taking us as your children. Thank you for showing us we were worth something.
Thank you for being our dad.
Even though we don’t share blood or name or any part of our DNA, you are a dad all the same. Sometimes our dads come to us when we’re born and sometimes they come to us later, when they find us beaten down on a gravelly path and they decide we’re worth the risk so they bend down and set us right side up, on our feet again. Thank you for deciding we were worth the risk.
There are a million reasons you could have left. The times I mouthed off, the times I didn’t listen, the time I punched you in the arm for kicking my dog away from your hunting dog, because I hated that hunting dog, and I hated you. You could have left every time, but you chose staying. You chose love.
You were at every one of my kids’ births, saying the same joke over and over so the new people there would laugh: “Yep. They look just like Poppy,” and I can’t tell you what it means to me that my kids love you so much, that they want to be with you and Mom as much as they possibly can and that they think of you only as their grandfather, not their step-grandfather. I can’t tell you what it means to see you love them like they’re yours, just like you loved us. You have adopted us all into the fold of your heart, and this is remarkable and significant and life-changing.
We have adopted you into the fold of our hearts, too. Even though you’re a step, my heart calls you dad. And today, especially, I wanted you to know that.
Thank you for being who you are, for accepting us for who we were and are, for being a little crotchety at times now that you’re getting older, for being a nitpick sometimes, for being funny and fun and mostly full of love and honor and heart. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for waiting patiently back in those early days so we could find our way into love, too.
Thank you for your light. Thank you for your son, who is like a brother to us. Thank you for the way you love our mom and the way you love us and the way you love all your grandchildren.
We love you. Happy birthday. May there be many, many more.
This week, as we wait in expectation for the hope and light of the world, I am thinking, nearly nonstop, about a dear friend who just lost her husband to suicide. I think of her with such a profound sadness in my heart that it almost feels like a betrayal—because it is nothing compared to what she must be feeling in these days after. Walking about her home that is now empty. Remembering. Grasping for understanding. Raging. Hardening. Weeping. Hardening again.
It can feel nearly impossible to understand a thing as complex as suicide, and the world doesn’t make it easy on us, with its glib “suicide is a sin” and “suicide is a choice” and “suicide is cowardly.”
There are people who say they’ve battled depression all their lives, but they made it through by choosing joy and faith and the great big God we serve. There are people who say they have never, ever, not in the least little bit, felt like sticking a gun down their throat and pulling the trigger, even in the worst of their depressive episodes. There are people who don’t believe depression has varying degrees, sometimes keeping a person chained in bed, sometimes sending them raging out into the world, sometimes chasing them right to a ledge where tying a rope around their necks and dangling from a ceiling looks better than trying to wade through another day.
These people have never known this depression.
They have never been down so deep inside the dark that they can’t see the light that could lift them back up. They have never wondered whether the world might be a better place without their depressing self taking up unnecessary space and ruining the lives of all those around them. They have never heard the convincing lies depression can whisper.
There is no simple answer to this kind of depression.
People say that depression is a spiritual battle, a torment of faith or lack of faith, and yes, maybe it’s true. I have, after all, read the journals of Mother Teresa, full of her own walk in the dark, and I’ve read Julian of Norwich’s mystical messages on trying to find love in the deepest of sadness. They wrestled with the dark, too. But to say that the Bible or Jesus or faith and joy in a great big God are the best ways we can heal this kind of depression is to be sadly mistaken.
Depression is a disease we did not choose, and it wraps its poison around us, and it sucks all the air right out of a room and summons its most convincing lies. This world has nothing left for you, it says. They would be better off without you, it says. You’ll never beat this, it says. You are worthless, it says. There’s a gun, it says. You’ll feel better, it says. Just do it, it says.
And if depression whispers those lies often enough, we start to believe them. We start to become them. We start to lose who we are, beneath all the black. And no “God works all things for good” or “We can do all things through Christ” or Come to Me all who are weary and heavy-laden” will pull us back from that ledge.
Suicide is not a choice. It’s the only thing left for those who can’t find their way back up and out and through.
I was just a girl, 14 years old, when I got off the school bus on a Tuesday. There were eight of us who got off the bus that day, and when the last footfall touched the gravel road leading to my house and two others, we heard the phantom gun shot.
It wasn’t really a gun shot. It had happened hours before, but the noise of it, the stench of it, the pain of it still hung in the air, still clung to all the trees and the weeds and even the sun that day. None of us heard it, but we all heard it.
I was in the middle of slicing cheddar chunks for my saltine cracker snack when I heard the neighbor girl screaming down the road. She was flying, or at least that’s what it looked like, her red hair whipping out behind her, feet bare on all those rocks like she couldn’t even feel them.
“Help!” she was screaming. “Help!”
My brother and sister and I came out of our house, and her cousins, who lived just beside us, came out of theirs, and we pieced together enough information so when her cousin dialed 9-1-1 we could state our emergency. Her brother, just 13, had found their dad in the backyard, the back of his head blown off by a shotgun he still held in his hands.
In the days after, the story started to make sense, but, then again, not really. He’d been on anti-depressants. He’d changed doctors. The new doctor thought he was fine without those anti-depressants, because God was enough and he could beat this with enough joy or whatever, and took him off, cold turkey. In the confusion of withdrawal and a raging depression that clamped chains around him faster than he could think, their dad pulled a trigger on the rest of his life.
Why on earth would he do a thing like that? Why would he leave four children and a wife he loved? Why would he choose to die rather than live? Those were the questions people whispered in the days after.
Even at 14, I knew we were asking the wrong questions. Because a depression like this doesn’t choose to die. A depression like this becomes the killer. This kind of depression kills a mind and a heart and a soul, and it is what pulled the trigger. There was no choice anywhere near that shotgun or his head.
I say this because I knew him, a man who loved his family more than anything else in his life. I say this because I have known more than just him. I say this because people I love have tried to jump out of moving cars on busy highways and take whole bottles of pills and slit their wrists, and some of them just didn’t cut deep enough.
Life hurts. It can wring us dry of hope and grind us into dust and blast us into bits. Sometimes we get back up. Sometimes we stay down for a really, really, really long time. Sometimes we don’t have the strength to rise again. Sometimes the dark swallows us whole. Sometimes the only way out is a way out forever.
So the real question we should be asking about this kind of depression is this: How can I make life hurt a little less for the broken ones? How can I be a conduit of hope? How can I pull someone back from the ledge or up from the ground or out of the pit?
The way we pull people back or up or out is not by misrepresenting what they’re dealing with; and it’s not by claiming we know what they feel and were just smart enough to make a different choice; and it’s not by sending them into shameful hiding with our seemingly easy answers: choose joy to be healed. Choose God to find hope. Choose life instead of death.
We pull people back or up or out by listening to their truth with compassionate understanding, giving them permission to break in our hands and stay broken for a time, heaping on them our love (without judgment) so thick and wide and warm that they can feel the hope of its relief.
5-year-old: Well, I guess Asa has to stay home today.
3-year-old #1: Yeah, because he has a throat.
3-year-old #2: No, he throwed up.
3-year-old #1: Yeah, he throwed up because he ate the oatmeal Mama cooked.
5-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Who’s there?
5-year-old: Weapon.
Me: Weapon who?
5-year-old: Weapon Nae Nae. [hysterical laugh] Get it? Weapon Nae Nae, not Whip It Nae Nae.
Me:
5-year-old:
Me: I like knock knock jokes when they make sense.
5-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Nope.
6-year-old: Knock knock.
Me: Who’s there?
6-year-old: What does a pirate say on his 80th birthday?
Me: I don’t know.
6-year-old: Aye Matey.
Me: …
6-year-old: Mama, guess whose light saber this is. Oh, never mind. Daddy, whose light saber is this?
Husband: Yoda.
6-year-old: Yes, first guess!
Me: Why didn’t you ask me?
6-year-old: Because you don’t like guessing games.
9-year-old: And you don’t know anything about Star Wars.
Husband: Mama knows about Star Wars. Ask her anything.
9-year-old: How did Qui-Gon Jinn die in episode one?
Me: He was probably killed by a light saber.
9-year-old: But who killed him?
Me:
9-year-old:
Me: I have no idea.
9-year-old: See.
In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time, and I was so excited about the possibility of writing a novel in one sitting. Or maybe a few sittings.
I write pretty fast already, and I’m fortunate to have much more time to write than I used to have, but I still have to sandwich my writing around different points of time during the day, and I knew that I would have to use my time wisely in order to finish the book. I had a Sabbath week scheduled in the month of November, so my goal was to finish the story by Nov. 15 and be done with it, and then maybe even work on another novel the week after so I could finish the crime thriller I’m working on, too.
And then I started the NaNoWriMo book, and I already had everything completely brainstormed and mapped out, because that’s just the way I work best, and suddenly, after I was well into the flow and entering the world with my characters, my internal editor came waltzing in and yelling, “THIS IS BAD. OH MY GOSH, THIS IS SO BAD. IT’S A TRAIN WRECK. NO ONE IS GOING TO READ THIS. NO ONE IS GOING TO WANT TO READ THIS. YOU SHOULD JUST GIVE UP. YOU ARE NO WRITER.”
And then that little voice morphed into the voice of my creative writing teacher from college, a pompous man who didn’t like me because he thought I was too “melodramatic” (the same thing my father had called me once upon a time). “THESE CHARACTERS ARE TERRIBLE,” he said. “NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO WANT TO READ THIS. YOU SHOULD JUST GIVE UP. YOU ARE NO WRITER. YOU WILL NEVER BE A WRITER.”
It’s crazy how quickly it can happen, and a whole writing session is hijacked by an imaginary person.
It wasn’t really hijacked for me, because I’m used to these voices coming around. And I’ve trained myself in something that is guaranteed to help you write faster and smarter, and when you’re a parent writer who’s trying to write in the margins, like I did for years, this will make all he difference in the world:
You have to silence the inner critic.
The way to do it is through practice, ignoring the inner critic when it doesn’t matter and listening to it when it does.
Wait. Listening to it?
Here’s the thing: The inner critic has NOTHING valuable to say to you in the first draft of a story. That first draft is just for getting the story out. The second draft is for making it all pretty and neat. (Or maybe a third or fourth draft, if it takes you a few.)
But sometimes the inner critic can be helpful. Oftentimes it’s not, but sometimes, in the revision process, it can have some good things to say if we’re willing to listen. Sometimes what it says about a character feeling two-dimensional means we need to do some revision work there. Sometimes when it says our plot is a little thin we can take another look and add some higher stakes.
But we shouldn’t ever listen to the critic when we’re in the first draft stage. We have to say, instead, “Leave me be.”
The best way to do that is to keep practicing, to keep writing, to keep setting a story down just as fast as we possibly can, because what also happens to this inner critic is that the faster we’re writing, the more chance we’ll have of outrunning it. (This means my first draft is usually full of grammar and punctuation mistakes, because I’m just trying to write as fast as I can.)
The inner critic usually comes to see me in the very beginning when I’m unsure, or when I’m trying to do something quickly, when I’m fully focused and he tries to steal that focus. I don’t like to play his game, because it’s just not helpful at this point.
Sometimes that inner critic can sound like old teachers or people who didn’t believe in us—or don’t believe in us still—and sometimes they sound a whole lot like ourselves.
The abuse mine was hurling sounded a little like this: You are not equipped to write this story. It’s too big for you. You really think you can get into the mindset of a boy? These characters will be completely hollow. What do you know about autism? What do you know of little boys? (Yeah, sometimes that voice can say some pretty ridiculous things.) Who do you think you are?
That last one. It’s a killer. Because who do we think we are? Did we really think we were writers? Did we really think we could craft a story as big as this one? Did we really think people would care?
Well, yes we are. Yes, we can. Yes, they will.
Our first draft is what Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.” We’ll use subsequent drafts to shape it into something good and beautiful, and WE HAVE NO PRESSURE FOR THE FIRST DRAFT.
No pressure. Just write. Write it all down without considering any of it.
And after the writing is done, listen.
Here are some ways to silence the internal editor:
1. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Do a writing sprint.
When we’re writing fast, we don’t have to worry about the internal editor, because the thing about writing fast is that it’s just a partnership between our fingers, our brains and the story. Our internal editors can’t possibly keep up with us once we get rolling, because the faster we write, the more imperfect our story will be, and the more we’re okay with that, the softer that voice will grow. Because what the internal editor really wants is perfection. And we’re never going to get that in the first draft. I was just telling someone the other day that I’ll find all kinds of silly mistakes in my first drafts. Things like the wrong use of their or there (I made a near-perfect score on my college GSP, a grammar, spelling and punctuation test required for a degree in journalism.).
2. Try, try and try again.
We have to keep trying, no matter how loud that voice gets. We have to keep practicing. Nothing gets easier without practice, and the same is true for silencing the internal editor. If we’re not going to practice defying his words, then we’re never going to get any better. If we’re not going to try to write anyway, then this editor will plague us always.
3. Have a plan.
Sometimes it helps to have a plan for the story, even if you know some things will change in the actual writing of it. Sometimes I sit down to write essays and it just pours out of me, and I don’t really need a plan. Sometimes I have to go by my plan or I feel like I have nothing valuable to say. Don’t be afraid to make a plan. Just because we make a plan doesn’t mean we are bound by it. We can deviate as much as we want. But sometimes the plan can silence an internal editor, because even if this one scene isn’t all that great, we just have to remember the end to know that it’s all going to turn out okay.
4. Remember that the internal editor will always try to come around.
It’s not that practice makes the internal editor go away. It’s just that the more we ignore his voice, the softer that voice gets. And that’s what helps us in the end. Because the less effective he will be, the less he will try to be effective. We will get better at ignoring him and outrunning him, but every now and then, perhaps when we’re tackling something we’ve never tackled before, we can be sure that he’ll come back around to plague us, and then we’ll have to figure it all out again. But it does get easier every time.
5. Let go of the need to produce perfect art on the first try.
On any try, really. Because we will always find something we could improve about our manuscript, and if we’re just waiting for ourselves to come out with that perfect product, then we are going to be waiting forever. You should see some of my first drafts. I keep all of my journals, but someone someday is going to find them, when I’m long gone, and they’re going to be like, Wow. This is really bad. But I still keep them around, because they’re helpful for assessing how far I’ve come in my career.
There is value in imperfection. The internal editor likes to tell us there isn’t, but he’s lying. Free yourself from perfection, and you free yourself to write.
I have to get something off my chest for a minute. And it’s kind of a big something. So I’m sorry for the rant. But we live in a messy WORLD, too, not just a messy world.
You know what would be nice? It would be nice to live in a world where men didn’t get pushed up on a pedestal for “helping” take care of their children. It would be nice to live in a world where men take care of their children and it’s not considered exceptionally exceptional.
I get it. We live in a world that is still finding its way into gender equality, that is still fighting for equal rights for women in the workplace, because, go figure, some women choose to have a career outside of babies and children and home. We are still figuring all this out. Traditionally, men were the breadwinners and women the caretakers, and that meant men didn’t do such things as “taking care of the kids.” So this is a new thing for us. But I feel like maybe we should be farther along than we are.
Husband and I are very happily married. But, during prime working hours—6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.—we split our parenting duties as if we’re single parents. Weekends and evenings we hang out together as a family, of course, but on the week days it’s one parent on six. I take the morning shift, cooking breakfast, fixing lunches, making sure kids brush their teeth and dress in appropriate clothing and get their shoes, walking them all to school, walking the three who aren’t in school back home, keeping twins out of mud and toilets, entertaining the baby, reading them stories, putting them all down for naps. Husband takes over at 12:30, while they’re sleeping. He wrestles with them and sends them outside to play and invites their friends over to play so there are twelve or thirteen kids in the house (my anxiety just went through the roof) and makes them do their homework. He knows where all the kids’ school papers go and he signs all their reading logs and he marks their behavior folders and he makes sure their lunch stuff gets put in the sink and washed for tomorrow. He feeds the baby and changes diapers and makes sure they clean up their toys before dinner so the house is somewhat tidy by the time the day is through, and then he cooks dinner.
This is not exceptional. This is called being a parent.
People are shocked that we do it this way. “Must be nice to have a husband who helps like that,” they say.
Well, I wasn’t the only one who decided to have six kids. I was not the only participant, either. Damn right he’s gonna help so I can work, too.
See, what my husband understands (and I guess this is where he’d be exceptional—because it seems there aren’t many who understand it) is that I am a better mother because of my work. Not everyone is. That’s okay. I am. He gets that, and he’s happy to make sure I get to pursue a career.
But when he’s watching the kids so I can hole up in my room and write a handful of essays that may or may not change lives, it’s not babysitting. When I go out once a month with my book club friends to talk about a book for all of five minutes and then talk about our lives for another three hours, THAT’S NOT BABYSITTING. When he decides to bake some chicken in the oven or organize some out-of-control papers or take the baby for a few hours while I get a little extra sleep, he’s not just “helping.” He’s PARENTING.
Friends and babysitters and full-time nannies help. Dads parent.
