This episode of On My Shelf tells the secret of how Rachel reads so many books in a month, takes a look at streamlining a schedule, and answers an often asked question about how to get started as a writer who is also a parent.
Me, to Husband: I was just telling Mom that I would rather raise kids in the time period when she was raising kids, because we didn’t have all this Internet and smartphone stuff.
8-year-old: Yeah, and you didn’t have TV.
Husband: We had TV. It wasn’t flat, though.
8-year-old: And it was black and white.
Husband: No, we had color.
8-year-old: But it was something to brag about.
Me: We are not having a bake sale.
8-year-old: But I want to make money!
Me: There are better ways to make money.
8-year-old: But you could get me Pinterest.
Me:
8-year-old:
Me: Trust me, you don’t want to get on Pinterest.
8-year-old: Yeah, I guess it doesn’t work for you.
Me: While you guys were gone, your girlfriends kept knocking on the door asking to play.
8-year-old: Did you answer the door?
Me: No.
8-year-old: That’s not cool. They might think we were murdered.
Me: Ha. I don’t think so, baby.
8-year-old: What? No one knows what’s going on in the mind of a little girl.
And a special bonus:
Husband, on text: Wanna hear a joke?
Me: Umm…Is it really a a joke? Or just bad news disguised as a joke?
Husband: The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar.
Me:
Husband: It was tense.
Me: I can just imagine you downstairs snickering into your hand.
By default, I’m a pretty competitive person. Put me in front of a board game with my husband and sister and brother-in-law, and I will try to tear it up in the winner’s circle (mostly, though, I just want to beat my husband). It’s not about proving my worth or declaring I’m best; it’s just something ingrained in my personality—doing my best at whatever I try.
This inherent characteristic can come back to bite sometimes when I sink into the comparison game. I start thinking I’m the one losing, because that person over there is so much more successful and doing so much better at building their audience than I am. There must be nothing left for me. Maybe I should just quit playing the game. Maybe I should find something else to do. Maybe I should stamp “Just not for me” on a silly dream.
When I fall into this black hole, I have to work hard to climb back out. I have to work even harder to convince myself that the only competitions we have is ourselves.
The only person we’re competing against is the person we were yesterday. The only writer we’re competing against is the writer we were last week, and the way to win this game is to improve day by day, week by week, month by month. That means getting better at word counts, at our writing technique, at the schedule we keep that maximizes all the hours we have in the most effective way we can.
There is no room for us to look at some other writer’s word count and think, “I must not be playing this game right, because he’s beating me by 10,000,” because the only writer whose word count we should be worried about is our own. Are we writing more words this week in the time we had than we wrote last week? Are we writing more efficiently today than we did a month ago? Are we expressing our ideas more clearly than we did a year ago?
Then we’re winning.
What I have to often remind myself is that we’re not playing against each other in the writing world. We’re all on the same team. And if we think we’re not, then we’re not going to make many friends in this business. And I may be a little biased, but I think writers are some of the coolest friends ever.
Some of my favorite people are the writers who so generously give away their tips and tricks for producing more words or helping me get to the next step of my career, who know and understand that we are not in competition with each other.
This can seem like a revolutionary concept, that there is no real competition, because don’t we all share products in this digital world that is overfilled with content?
Well, maybe I’m just idealistic, but I like to think that if a reader is paying attention to one writer, they will be more interested in paying attention to other writers, too. It doesn’t mean that my audience can’t become your audience or that your audience can’t become my audience. There are so many people in this world. There are enough to go around.
Let me say that again: THERE ARE ENOUGH TO GO AROUND.
There will always be someone, somewhere, who could learn something from you. There will always be someone who will find value in what you say. There will always be someone who will love you and your work.
If we can’t seen one another as fellow friends and colleagues along the journey toward lending the world beauty with our words, then we will miss out on the beauty of community. It’s in community that we become who we were made to be.
So compete with yourself. It’s a better-matched competition anyway.
How to compete with yourself:
1. Keep detailed logs of your word counts.
Lately I’ve been keeping logs of how many words I write for each of my projects and tallying them up at the end of every day. I’ve only done this for a couple of weeks, but I’ve steadily been adjusting my work and increasing my word counts, and this is super helpful as a writer with very limited time.
That said, some weeks we will obviously write more words than others. Those weeks we log 39,000 words are followed by a week with only 20,000 words, but that doesn’t mean that we are stalling (or moving backward) in our improvement. I try to think in terms of rough draft and final draft words. Rough draft words are easier to crank out. Final drafts take a little more time and effort. So keep track of both, and see if you’re getting better at each.
2. Learn all you can about this game.
I’m always reading books on structure and plot and characterization and business, because I believe that if we’re not always getting better, then we’re just getting stale. We should always pursue resources that will make us better writers, whatever that looks like in our lives. Compete against other weeks in how much you learn.
This is strategy. We can’t win against who we used to be if we’re not always trying to learn more and grow into better writers.
3. Set your own goals, without worrying about anyone else’s.
The reality is that your journey is your own personal journey. Maybe you have two kids. Maybe you have five. Maybe you work a full-time job. Maybe you’re doing writing full-time. Maybe you just got married. Maybe you live alone. All of those factors affect how many words you can write in any given week. So set your own word count goals, and don’t worry about anyone else’s. At the end of a week, assess how you’re meeting your goals and whether they need to be adjusted and how you feel about them (because if we’re stressing ourselves out with our goals, then they aren’t really effective goals at all).
4. Keep a writer journal.
I write in a writer journal most nights, or at least most writing nights (I don’t write on the weekends. It’s my family time). I write about how writing felt today, what I’m learning, things I really want to improve on and how I might turn those weaknesses into strengths. Sometimes I even work out plot lines in a less-formal way. I only write about 200 or 300 words every night, but those words have been great for helping me remember ideas and work out problems and analyze how that particular word count goal made me feel a little too stressed that week. Writer journals help us keep records we can refer to for years and years. I find this helpful.
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, and 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 just 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 hand. 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.
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, that is. But I did end up with a busted-up knee. Much better than a busted-up baby.
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 48 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 then 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 a lesson in the subtle practice of subtlety. Or perhaps how to be nonchalant. Or perhaps how not to get in trouble when you paint the mirror with toothpaste.
My boys are really, really bad at squeezing out toothpaste onto their toothbrushes. What inevitably happens when we remind them to brush their teeth every night (because they somehow forget it has to happen every night) is that they will either squeeze too much and eat the excess (which is why we no longer buy strawberry toothpaste. Eating toothpaste just isn’t the same when your mouth is burning minty fresh.) or they’ll squeeze too much and use the rest for mirror art.
See Exhibit A above.
For a while I solved this problem by squeezing out toothpaste on five toothbrushes myself and letting them know their toothbrushes were ready for toothbrushing. At least until the second day when I tripped over the stool someone had put right up next to the door and I caught myself on the counter and I couldn’t pull my hands back off. Someone had painted the counter with toothpaste, and it had turned to glue. There were two flies caught and held in it.
Toothpaste-smeared mirrors are better than toothpaste-sticky counters, so I let them have at it.
There aren’t many kinds of art I dislike, but toothpaste art is one of them. Probably the only one, come to think of it. Mostly because it’s virtually impossible to get toothpaste off the mirror in one good swipe. I don’t have a whole lot of time to clean my house, so one good swipe is usually all I have. But toothpaste is like, come on, guys, let’s give her a hard time and have a little fun at the same time by exploring ALL THE INCHES OF THIS MIRROR. And then on swipe two it hides in the mirror’s corners like minty webs waiting to catch the gnats hanging out by the toilet for some reason, probably because this is a boy’s bathroom, and then on the third swipe it finally realizes it’s beaten and I’m not giving up.
Usually, when this type of art shows up on the mirrors, the artist doesn’t have the foresight to sign his name, but this time someone was really proud of what he’d done. This art was proudly drawn by the son we call Asa.
Now he is cleaning the mirror until it shines, which is much better than it looked before, so I guess I should thank him for breaking the rules and using toothpaste to practice his letters.
This is how we teach lessons in our house.
And I’m sure next time he thinks about painting his artful flourishes across a mirror with toothpaste he’ll think twice and remember how long it took him to clean off this artwork and how his friends were knocking on the door and he couldn’t go outside with them until the mirror passed Daddy’s inspection.
Or maybe he’ll just leave off his name. Which, in all honesty, is what I would do.
You’ve been telling me how to be a woman all my life. You, with your glittering perfection and your attractive bar of expectation and your promises for love and acceptance and significance, if I’ll just do this.
Just this being perfect. Just this juggling everything—home, love, family, career—and making it all look easy. Just this flaunting your definition of a perfect body.
I see your expectations in the eyes of my sisters. I see them in magazines, where models have hourglass figures and smooth skin and sculpted limbs. I see them in the heroines you splash in the plot lines of television shows and movies—those strong women who are always great business women and yet loving mothers and caretakers at home with their perfectly groomed and well behaved children.
I see your expectations everywhere, because, somewhere along the way, we all bought into your idea that perfect is synonymous with woman.
Perfect body, perfect life, perfect job, perfect careers, perfect husband, perfect home. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
The story you tell is an alluring one. That I could be loved and celebrated for being perfect is an attractive thought. That I could do it all and do it all well enough to call it easy is a daunting yet coveted dream. That I could be made to feel desirable for wearing a perfect body even after six babies have stretched and torn and marked this one is a lovely idea.
But what you don’t always say, what we have to often discover for ourselves in ways that feel disappointing and terrifying, and, sometimes, shameful, is that your story is no more than a pretty little lie.
Being loved and celebrated for a perfection that doesn’t exist is nothing more than being loved and celebrated for wearing a fake skin and fake smile and fake attitude that everything is just fine the way it is, even if it’s not. We reinvent ourselves, sharing only the parts we think the world will find worthwhile and beautiful, and our real selves with its thoughts and mistakes and black struggles are buried beneath the weight of a life that wears perfection like a shell but cannot hold up to the shaking storms. Hiding our imperfections means we lose, all around.
Doing everything and doing it all well is an impossible feat, so of course it will never look easy, of course it will never look simple, of course it will never look as wonderful as we’re promised it will look. Because there are always snotty noses to wipe and dishes to wash and toilets to clean and emails to send and a partner to please and time to give and papers to sign and work to do and hearts to mend and sleep. This kind of life, trying to find balance and make it look easy, will mostly make us want to sleep.
The perfect body, what might this look like? Glowing face, dolled-up eyes, unlined neck, stick-thin arms, perfectly symmetrical breasts, tiny waist, wide-but-not-too-wide hips, muscular-but-not-too-muscular legs, pedicured feet? Maybe more? Who gets to decide the dimensions of this perfect body? Men? Women? Unconfirmed masochists?
Your expectations are just like your story. Pretty little lies, all of them.
So I have come here today to tell you this, societal expectations: Thank you for your standard, but no thanks.
I QUIT.
I don’t need your dazzling ideal of what a real woman should be, because I know that who I am is a real woman. I am a real woman with my imperfection and my imbalance and my body that doesn’t look like all the magazines say it should. My sisters, with all their different pasts and all their different realities and all their different sizes, are real women, too.
We are much more than false realities and easy achievements and bodies that fit into our jeans today but may not tomorrow.
So what if our story holds some pits along its path? So what if we’re falling into those pits right this minute, because danger and disappointment and mistakes are often hard to see until you’re right down in the hole of them? So what if our lives don’t look like all those fairy tales because we have to work really hard at choosing love every single day?
So what?
So what if our career isn’t quite where it would have been had we not gotten married when we did or had kids when we did or just chosen to quit when we did? So what if our home has dust on every surface and dishes piled in a dirty sink and enough lint on the floor to clog four vacuum cleaners? So what if we just yelled at our kids because they were being really annoying and we just couldn’t take it anymore and then we had to apologize and agree that, no, it wasn’t the proper way to talk to each other?
So what?
So what if we carry a little weight around the hips because we really like chocolate and it’s coming up on Halloween and the holidays, and there’s really no point in trying to lose it now because it’s just a losing try? So what if we don’t every day painstakingly apply that makeup because we don’t really care about standing out in a crowd or being seen for the beauty we can paint on our skin? So what if we didn’t get around to working out today because the baby was a little fussy or a friend called and wanted to talk or we just wanted to sit out in the cool air of fall and soak it up while we could?
So what?
We’re tired of living up to your standards, society. So we’ll make our own.
The real story of our lives is way better than the fake one.
Today’s work is enough for today, even if we did absolutely nothing.
Forget the beholder, beauty is in the eye of us.
We will bare our imperfections with fear that steps around fear and shares those scary pieces anyway. We will do what we can, right now, today, without agonizing about what someone else is doing and how they’re doing so much more than we are. We will wear our yoga pants and our unbrushed-hair ponytails and our naked faces with pride, because we believe we are beautiful, and that’s all that matters.
We are woman. Hear us roar.
This episode features a look at modern Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, a product launch guru and the music of Fallout Boy.
The last few weeks writing has felt really hard. I’ve been maintaining large word counts, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s felt like work. I find myself fidgeting and my mind wandering, and the focus just isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be.
So I set up a standing desk in front of my dresser, with books stacked to make the computer sit at a proper height, and when I feel my mind wandering, I do a little sway or I stretch my muscles or I just bounce a little on my toes, because movement gets the brain working much more efficiently than sitting sedentary for four hours a day.
But still, even though my makeshift standing desk has been helping me write faster, it hasn’t made the writing feel any easier. I thought maybe it was because I was coming up on a much-needed Sabbatical, but then I realized it’s more than that.
Right now I’m working on four fiction projects. I’m writing one of them in first-person point of view, but I’m writing the others in third-person point of view. I’ve never written in third-person before, so this is something that feels really hard to me as a writer. I don’t like doing things that feel hard, and that’s why my focus has been everywhere all at once.
Maybe I would get more words written if I switched those three projects to third-person point of view, and maybe I would be saving time with those projects, but I also wouldn’t be growing as a writer. It doesn’t serve me and my craft to only remain where I’m comfortable. If I only wrote in first-person point of view for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be growing at all as a writer. I might be getting better at first-person, but I wouldn’t be a well rounded writer. And mostly I just want to be a well rounded writer.
So I forge on. Every week I write in that third-person point of view for each of those projects is another week I get better at it.
We don’t gain anything as writers by staying where we are comfortable, in that small little space of comfort where we feel we can be good. Maybe even the best. Sometimes we have to write something bad—really bad—to grow as a writer. Sure, I write mostly literary fiction, but I’m trying my hand at some young adult romance and a mystery romance thriller and some sci-fi and fantasy, because I’m not really sure which one I’d like to do best. I just know what comes easiest—literary fiction in first-person point of view.
Writing will always feel hard when we’re trying something new, whether it’s nonfiction or new fiction ventures. But what we can know when writing feels hard is that we are getting better, as long as we don’t give up. It’s like when our first-grade teacher asked us to do a description of a vase of flowers, and we said all the normal things that first time—the flowers are yellow and the vase is white and the water is clear. And then, as we grow and practice and continue to write, we begin to notice that the flowers aren’t just yellow, but they’re the color of our sister’s hair, and the vase isn’t just white, but it’s white with tiny veins cracking it, and the water isn’t so much clear as it is sparkly, because of those bubble breaths the stems take.
Description, when we were kids, felt hard. I know, because I have an 8-year-old who doesn’t always like doing these exercises when he’s in school, because it’s not all that fun to try to describe something when you can see it right in front of you and so can everybody else. But you keep at it because you want to get better. You want to turn a picture in your head into a picture in someone else’s head.
We keep on, because we want to improve as writers.
So when writing feels hard, here are some things you can do:
1. Remember that it won’t always feel this hard.
Things feel hard when we aren’t used to doing them. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean we’re bad writers. I let my hard time with writing third-person point of view make me feel like maybe I wasn’t quite as good as I thought, but it’s not true. If something feels hard it only means we’re learning and growing as writers. It won’t always feel this hard, because the more we practice, the better at it we will get. One of these days, it will feel so easy we’ll have to move on to something else.
2. Take a break from the project.
It doesn’t have to be a long break. Sometimes our projects just need a day or two to breathe. Sometimes it just needs a little space to develop. So put it aside for a couple of days or a week even. Whatever it takes to look on it with fresh eyes, because the truth about when writing feels hard is that we don’t really want to do what’s hard. We don’t get any better if we’re not constantly challenging ourselves with things we don’t really know how to do.
We can use the break to learn something new. I spend time outside of writing constantly seeking knowledge and information, like how to write mystery stories or how to craft a good romance or how to best write a long-form essay, because it serves my craft to always be learning. Short breaks can be good for getting us unstuck and making writing feel a little easier. But not too easy.
3. Maybe it’s time for a Sabbatical.
If you’ve never had a Sabbatical, maybe it’s time to try one. I can always feel when my Sabbatical week is coming up, because my exhaustion is overwhelming and my love for writing is not quite as thick as it used to be. Writing begins to feel really hard. I write an average of 40,000 words every week, and that can be grueling for a writer if there is no rest between. Taking just a week away where I’m not working on any of my projects or posting on any of my blogs is enough to help me start the following week with fresh perspective and renewed love and energy for what I am so privileged to do.
I take a Sabbatical every seventh week.
4. Stare fear in the face.
Many writers have a fear of trying something new. We’re not alone. But if we’re only letting that fear rule what kind of stories and essays we’re producing, those stories will start to sound canned. Formulaic. Unoriginal. We have to be willing to throw wrenches into our projects, and sometimes that means trying something new or introducing a completely different character or picking a different point of view that we’ve never written in or giving ourselves a word count constraint. Constraints can be good for us. So can facing our fear and doing what we fear anyway.
No matter what, don’t let that fear tell you what you can and can’t do. Prove it wrong. Do it anyway, and watch how you become so much better as a writer.
We have this fancy chalkboard hanging in our kitchen with “This Night” written in wannabe hand lettering, because I’m nothing more than a wannabe artist. Beneath those words, we have each of the boys’ names and their subsequent chores listed. Those chores change every week, although if you ask our boys, they’re always on wipe-the-table duty, because it only takes 30 seconds to flick a sponge around and dump food scraps on the floor.
We’re diligent about teaching our boys how to do chores, because one day they will be married, and they need to know how to do things like sweep the floor and load a dishwasher (or whatever nifty invention is around then) and wipe down counters until they’re squeaky clean (no, that’s squeaky clean, kids. Not sticky clean.) so their significant other can take a little break every now and then. Also so we can get a break for the next eighteen years, but that’s not really the point. Okay, it is.
Normally doing the chores looks like the 3-year-old putting the silverware in the dishwasher tray and pouring the liquid soap and closing it and pushing start, but not getting to touch anything else (because glass in 3-year-old hands is like a death sentence. Also, speaking of a death sentence, you should make sure there’s not a butcher knife in the silverware tray, because even if it’s already safe and snug in its place, that 3-year-old will pull it back out. “Not here, Mama. Here,” he’ll say, waving it like he’s writing the ABCs in the air. Except he doesn’t know how to write letters yet. So he’s really just passively aggressively threatening you for all those times you took the plunger away from him even though it’s his favorite toy that’s most definitely not a toy.).
“Doing chores” looks like the other 3-year-old singing while he’s wiping down the table, which really just means he’s sweeping all the leftover food (because boys eat like raccoons) onto the floor the 5-year-old is complaining about sweeping. It looks like a 6-year-old “wiping off counters” by maneuvering the sponge around all the papers they unloaded from their school folders and spread all over the available surface space so there’s really nothing at all to wipe.
And then there is the 8-year-old on trash duty.
When this boy is on trash duty, I regret all the times I talked to him about environmental issues like saving water and recycling everything we can recycle and not wasting energy by leaving lights on. The only thing he heard was…nothing. He read in a book somewhere that most trash can be reused, and this is his mantra:
Everything can be reused. (Because he likes absolutes.)
This mantra is a little overly simple, to my mind. I remind him of this every time he’s brushing his teeth and walks out of the bathroom with the water faucet still running because he’s thinking about how he could reuse his toothbrush and all his brothers’ to make a little toothbrush family with drawn-on faces and homemade clothes and handmade arms and how about we get started right now. I remind him every time I run upstairs before we leave for school and four lights are blazing because he was trying to find that one book to show me what someone made out of old shoes. I remind him every time I throw something away and it ends up back on my bed.
Take, for instance, the baby’s old pacifiers. Pacifiers are pretty gross. These things have been through five boys, and the last baby decided he didn’t like them, so we thought we’d just toss all the old ones. I didn’t really want to give them away because five boys and all that slobber and who in the world would want them? I tossed them all in my bathroom trash can and thought I was done with that.
Imagine my surprise when I wanted to go to bed and there were four pacifiers staring at me from my pillow.
“What in the world?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Oh. Those pacifiers can be reused,” said the 8-year-old, who always seems to be behind me, even if it’s time for lights out.
“I threw them away for a reason,” I said. “I do not want to reuse your old pacifiers.” I then explained that we didn’t want to pass the old pacifiers along to another family when they had already been used by him and four of his brothers, because sometimes people can be a little weird about that kind of thing, since pacifiers go in boys’ mouths and, if the twins have anything to say about it, other unmentionable places.
“Then I’ll take them,” he said. He held out his hand.
“I don’t want old pacifiers all over the place. We’re already fighting a losing battle with tidying up,” I said, because I’m a positive person like that. “And we’re not having any other babies.”
“I know,” my boy said. “But I can use them to make something.”
And he did. He made a pacifier yo-yo that lasted all of three days before he got tired of playing with it.
When the environmentalist is on trash duty, we can’t throw anything away. The leftover food scraps can always be used to feed the birds out back. The plastic strawberry cartons can be used to hold cloth napkins and keep random things organized (just get out of my house, random things. I don’t even want you here.). The old socks with holes in them can be reused for cleaning cloths—except they’re my infant’s socks that the 3-year-olds cut holes in and are about as big as my thumb.
I’ve come up to my room to find old makeup boxes and papers I no longer need and soap-scummed shampoo bottles lying on my bed because he thinks I can “find a way to reuse them if I just think hard enough.” Problem is, I don’t really have much of a brain left to think outside the box, because children are like zombies except way cuter, so you don’t suspect that all they really want to do is eat your brain out.
I know I should be glad he cares. But when you’re slipping into bed and find an old pair of mangled underwear because he saw it in your trash can and decided you probably needed it and didn’t really mean to throw it away, and you know exactly what the skivvies were touching in the trash, I think it’s time to close up the environmentalist shop.
But the thing is, I don’t want to squash that spirit. Because the way he can so clearly see something new out of something old is a great quality to have. It doesn’t happen for all of us, and many of us lose that ability, anyway, when we become practical adults and too much stuff is a very real thing. Right now, he loves seeing what he can do to create something new and fun out of something old and worn. This is valuable experience he’s getting with play and invention and creativity. I don’t want to discourage that.
I also don’t want to try to imagine what I could possibly do with my Physician’s Formula organic mascara container that you’d never be able to clean out. Just get rid of it, son. Trust me. That thing will start smelling worse than your feet in six months.
So we’ve reached a compromise. As long as his reclaimed items have a place, he can keep them. As long I’ve put something in the trash, he’s not allowed to put it back on my bed with his “imagine what else it could be” challenge.
It’s working, for now. At least until the next time I throw away a pair of blown-out soles shoes and he decides we can probably figure out a way to use all that rubber for something like a homemade Honda Odyssey tire. Which is just around the corner, I’m sure.
Photo by Stefanus Martanto Setyo Husodo
She looked lost, he thought, like she was in way over her head. Her eyes met his.
“Fletcher Agency?” she said.
“Yes,” Reid said. “I just happen to like music, too.”
She blushed.
He gestured to a chair. “Sit. Please.”
