Brambles guarded the wood. He could not see her, but he could hear her calling for him. So he ducked and cut and walked inside. He did not notice those vines closing behind him. He did not feel the trap.
Ongoing challenge: Find (or take) a picture. Write exactly 40 words about it. Post.
(Great practice for brevity.)
Every morning at 4:30 I crawl out of bed and reach for my glasses (usually knocking a book or two off my bedside table) and trip to my blue wing chair, where I turn on the lamp and open my morning notebook.
And then I write three pages—about 900 words—on whatever comes to mind.
I have no agenda. No purpose. I just write.
It’s an idea I got from Julia Cameron, a creativity teachers and author of The Artist’s Way. Cameron calls these writing sessions “morning pages.”
When I first read about them in one of her books, I was skeptical. She advocates that you get out of bed half an hour earlier than normal, and, good grief, I already got out of bed at 5. I wondered how I might possibly benefit from less sleep and more writing, when I already wrote nonstop between the hours of 12:30 and 5:30 p.m. Wasn’t that enough?
Still, I decided to give it a chance.
I’m hardly ever completely awake when I’m doing my morning pages, but I have never had to search for anything to say—mostly because the point of morning pages isn’t really to say something profound or true or worth using later (although sometimes that will happen naturally).
The point is to clear a cluttered mind.
I think of them as my writing meditation.
In my morning pages, I unload all the stress that weighs on my subconscious—that payment a client has yet to make, my little boy’s complaint about his tummy hurting last night, how I really don’t want to take on that assignment but feel a little pressured to.
Every now and then a new story idea or an essay topic will find its way into my pages, but that’s never the goal.
The goal, at its simplest, is to clear a mind of it unnecessary weight so we will have more room to create and move and make beauty for the world.
When we are so weighed down by worries and concerns and things to do, we cannot freely create our art.
So writing first thing in the morning, to break free of those weights, is not just for writers. It’s for all artists.
Creativity begins with writing.
When we write, whether it is a record of our day or a 100,000-word story we’re trying to sell, our world becomes clear. We find ourselves in words, in all the poetry that finds its way into choppy sentences or long, flowery ones that say something or nothing at all.
Writing opens up space in our minds so we can envision more and dream bigger and create in a new dynamic.
It’s up to us how that writing is done. I do it in a composition notebook, by hand—mostly because studies show that the motion of our hands gets our brain thinking more creatively.
But also because when we write by hand, we have a record of our days. We can see our handwriting and how it changed from day to day and mood to mood—how in those days’ records right there, the baby I was holding kept kicking my hand in the middle of a word. And right there is when I felt so passionate about what I was writing that the passion showed itself in hurried handwriting and water splotches. And right there—that’s where I couldn’t write fast enough for the speed at which my brain was working, so all the letters run together in excitement.
My morning pages tell a story of exhaustion and worry and excitement and gratitude and joy and motherhood and creativity and hope.
It is the place where I have written, “I’m tired of doing things for free,” and those words helped me realize I was giving too much of my writing away and not asking enough compensation for my value. It is the place where I have worked out how I would most like to use my gift. It is the place where I have renounced the fear that I will do all this work only to see nothing come of it.
I don’t look back through those early morning pages often, but I plan to. Because there are jewels hidden in my stream-of-conscious writing, and I want to find them.
Writing can make a world clearer. It can tell us more about our true selves. It can help us work out the places where we feel stuck and trapped and too heavy to fly.
All of this informs our creativity.
So get out a notebook and write.
Challenge: Try morning pages for the next month. Set your alarm clock half an hour early (I know, I know how hard it is!) and write without stopping until you have filled three pages. Don’t worry if it sounds petty or trite, or if it doesn’t even make sense because you’re half asleep. It’s better that the petty and trite get down on paper instead of clogging your creativity.
Every morning when I get him up to eat and every night before I put him to bed, I tell my 11-week-old that I love him.
I say it over and over and over, knowing that one day he will say those magical, heart-effectively-exploded words back to me.
It’s one of the best parts of being a mother—hearing that baby voice coo in a way that is surely “I love you,” listening to the toddler echo, treasuring the spontaneous words from big-kid lips.
My boys rarely go a day without saying they love me, mostly because I can’t go more than a few hours without telling them, and they can’t just ignore me every time.
But even if they didn’t tell me in words, I would know in a million other ways.
Sometimes, when we are wading through a week and there’s really just not enough time to get everything done and we’ve barely had a chance to sit down and talk about anything important, and we start feeling more like a maid and a shoe-finder and a diaper-changer and a laundry-doer and a cook and a story-reader and a do-your-homework nagger and a get-back-in-bed-dang-it-yeller and an invisible piece in the world of husband and children, it can feel difficult to remember that we are loved and appreciated.
Our children, every moment, are loving us in a thousand different ways. Just like we show love in the little ways—sorting socks and applying dish soap to that stubborn stain on his favorite shirt and keeping those art treasures in a closet box—they are showing love in the little things, too.
Love doesn’t always need words. It just needs eyes.
There is love in those shorts left on the floor—but not underwear, because he knows you hate it when he comes to dinner with a naked lower half.
There is love in those crayons spread all over the floor, because he was coloring a picture for you.
There is love in the “I hate you” he throws out so recklessly when you say it’s no longer time to play with LEGOs, because he trusts you enough to share how he feels instead of locking those emotions tight.
There is love in his picking that first bloom on the peace lily that hasn’t flowered since kids came along, because he wanted to give it to you.
There is love in that twelfth knock on your bedroom door after lights are out and they should be sleeping, because he spent all day at school and just can’t get enough of his time with you.
There is love in the hug he gives you in the middle of the second- and third-grade hallway, because he didn’t have to do it.
There is love in pulling the dishwasher open and accidentally dumping out all the silverware, even though you’ve told him a billion times not to touch the dishes. He just wanted to help you.
There is love in the stuffing all his clean clothes into his underwear drawer, because he knows you like a tidy room.
There is love in the way they get up at 6 a.m. on the weekend and you have to drag them out of bed at 6:30 on the weekdays—because they know one means they have all day with you and the other means all day apart.
There is love in the note slid under the door, the one that says you’re the meanest mama ever, because he feels safe enough in this home to express himself.
There is love in those forty cups lined up on the counter, waiting for washing, because he knew you wouldn’t want him to drink from a dirty cup.
There is love in the egg smashed all over the floor, because he was just trying to bring you breakfast.
There is love in that unexpected mural on the wall, because he wanted to make you something beautiful, and this bare white wall looked like exactly the right place to do it.
There is love in the stuffed animal left in your room after fifteen reminders to get it, because he just doesn’t want you to be lonely.
There is love in his asking you to carry him downstairs, even though he has perfectly capable legs, because, deep down, he misses those mornings when you would do this all the time.
There is love in the running away, because he knows you care enough to come after him.
There is love in the toddler attachment weighing down your leg while you’re trying to take laundry out of the dryer, because he really just wants a two-arm hug. PUT THAT LAUNDRY DOWN, MAMA.
There is love in the interruptions that somehow find their way past a locked door, because you’re just his favorite person in the world (even though he’s not really yours right this minute).
There is love in all the carpet stains and all the broken dishes and all the scratches on the walls—because they mean children felt comfortable enough in your home to really live.
This is how children love a mama.
I got a new shoe.
Remember that time I wrote about how my husband cleans? How he puts things into neat little stacks and LEAVES THE STACKS ON THE STAIRS?
At least he cleans, right?
WRONG.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEAVE PILES OF CRAP ON THE STAIRS.
Early one morning, before anyone was up, I was taking a load of laundry down the stairs. I saw the pile of crap and thought, I need to avoid that. Somehow, my body didn’t get the message. Instead of stepping over it, I stepped off the last three stairs and fell. Hard.
Laundry flew everywhere. My limbs flew everywhere. Little bubbles of spit flew everywhere as I cursed on the way down (how stupid is it when you know something’s happening but you can’t do anything to stop it?).
I heard something crack.
I wish the story ended here, but it doesn’t. See, I had my cell phone with me. So as my vision was getting black faster than I could dial numbers, I blindly called my husband. I needed so much help. He didn’t answer. I called again. No answer. Again. No answer. EIGHT TIMES AND NO ANSWER. I think I passed out for a minute or two.
I had to crawl back up the stairs with black spots dancing in my line of vision. Then I had to military crawl-it down the hallway and into our room and pull myself up onto the bed before he woke up enough to say, “What happened?” It’s a good thing women are tough, that’s all I can say. If this had happened to a man? Well. I’ll save that for another post.
I now have a broken foot.
So, fair warning. Don’t leave piles of crap on the stairs, or this might happen. And then your Messy Monday will be How the Hell Do I Take a Shower In This Thing?
So much of what I do, as a mother, goes unseen.
I plan our healthy meals and read the labels of everything I put in my shopping cart, to make sure our home stays toxin-free, and I mix our own cleaners and make note of when we’ll need to reorder those essential oils we use for healing.
I carve out a schedule that protects our family playing time, and I craft a budget that means we have food and shelter for another month, and I make sure all the art supplies stay stocked.
I manage Amazon subscriptions for ingredient-approved vitamins and count them out every single day and line them up next to my boys’ breakfast plates, and instead of “thank you” I hear about how they didn’t want these scrambled eggs this morning because all their friends get to eat cereal for breakfast, and why can’t they?
I clear out their closets when their old clothes are too small, and I buy them new underwear when the old ones cut off circulation and I buy new socks when the old ones have too many holes, and the only thing I hear for it is how they wanted red socks instead of the white ones I bought.
I turn off lights and flush toilets and remind them to brush their teeth and mend their blankets and find their lost library books and read stories until my throat hurts and send them back to bed a thousand times every single night, and I don’t even think they notice.
There are so many days I can feel downright invisible.
Welcome to being a mother.
///
When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped a magnet dry-erase calendar on the front of our white refrigerator.
“Dish schedule,” she said.
Our names were written on it in black, Jarrod, Rachel, Ashley and Mom switching places on all the squares.
Every month she sat down with a school calendar and the dry-erase one and wrote our names on the schedule in a way that wouldn’t interfere with our lives.
The schedule got more complicated when we got to high school, because there were volleyball games and every-night-of-the-week practices and football games with the marching band and National Honor Society and Wednesday night church and homework after all that.
I didn’t appreciate all the hard work that went into a schedule as complicated as that. All I did was resent that I had to wash dishes two nights a week.
I resented that I worked so hard at school all day and then slaved away at volleyball practice and rode a bus to the pick-up point and finally got home after dark to finish what homework I couldn’t do on the bus, because I cared about handwriting and the bus was too bouncy, and then I still had to do the dishes.
So unfair.
My tunnel vision didn’t let me see that she worked all day, much harder than I ever did at school, and then she cooked dinner and tried to keep it warm for me and drove to meet the bus and stayed near while I finished my homework so I’d have help if I needed it and, on top of all that, she planned meals for the month and did all the shopping and budgeted our very limited resources and wrote out a schedule for doing dishes so one person was not overburdened with the responsibility.
She was a mother.
She was invisible, too.
///
Now that I have children of my own, I know just how selfish children can be. I know just how thankless motherhood is. I know how no matter what we do behind the scenes, there is still more they want us to do.
It’s just the nature of children. I know this. They don’t see their own selfishness or the way those ill-timed complaints can make a mama not ever want to cook a hot breakfast for them ever again or how just the thought of tackling eight loads of laundry that come back every week is enough to keep her in bed when the alarm chimes.
They only wonder why they’re having oatmeal again when today was supposed to be pancake-day. They don’t see that Mama ran out of time to flip pancakes because she had to turn every male shirt right-side out before sorting it into laundry piles she’ll spend all day washing.
It’s completely, developmentally normal for them to not make those connections yet.
Someday they will.
But that means nothing for this day, this day you stripped all his sheets and blankets and spent half the day he was at school vacuuming and washing and putting a bed back together because he woke up with ant bites all over his legs and you’re afraid there might be ants in his bed because they were eating popcorn up here yesterday even though it’s against the rules. This day he comes out of his room complaining that his blanket is still a little wet.
This day when you loaded the washer with that first pile holding his Spider-Man shirt, because you were sure he’d want to wear it on his birthday, and there’s just enough time to wash and dry it before he has to leave for school. This day he comes down the stairs crying about how he can’t find his workout clothes to wear on his birthday, and you know they’re lying at the bottom of another pile you planned to wash later today.
This day you woke up to find three lights left on all night and you can’t help but mentally calculate how much that’s going to cost you.
The promise of someday does not make this day any easier.
///
After I married and had an apartment of my own, my mom came visiting with a box.
“What’s that?” I said, because I had just finished unpacking, and I hadn’t missed anything important.
“All your old stories,” she said.
“What stories?” I said.
“The ones you wrote when you were little,” she said, and she pulled out one that imagined what I would do if I had a million dollars. I’d written it when I was 7.
“I’d buy a car, and I wouldn’t share with my brother,” I’d written.
We laughed about it.
There were Little House on the Prairie imitations and the story about a girl miraculously walking again to save her friends from danger and another scrawled out on 93 sheets of notebook paper the summer I went to visit my dad.
“I didn’t know you kept all these,” I said.
My mom smiled. “Of course I did.”
Of course she did. They were pieces of me she loved. They were pieces that proved her love.
And she is a mother.
///
There is a drawer in my closet where I keep my kids’ drawings and old writing notebooks they’ve filled with words and loose papers with quirky doodles filling corners.
My boys don’t know the drawer is there.
My 8-year-old doesn’t know that when he slipped his note under our bedroom door, the one that says he feels angry when we tell him it’s bedtime before he’s ready to go to bed, the one that bears a picture of a boy with a red face and smoke coming out of his ears, the note went into that drawer.
My 6-year-old doesn’t know that when he wrote a kindergarten essay in school about how he knows his mom loves him when she reads to him, his essay went into that drawer.
My 4-year-old doesn’t know that when the amazing fox picture he drew disappeared from his drawing binder it went into that drawer.
They don’t know all the ways I love them, because they are just children who believe love looks mostly like hugs and kisses and sweet snuggles.
They don’t know yet that it mostly looks like time and service and invisibility.
What I am still learning in my mother journey is that sometimes the greatest acts of love are the ones that whisper instead of shout.
A storage container with writing treasures shoved under our mom’s bed.
A dish schedule that honored our time over her own.
A ride to early-morning volleyball practices, even though she worked late.
I want to be that kind of great.
It comes welling up in me, every now and then, when I’m tired and frustrated and annoyed that I can’t seem to find just a minute to myself. I want to be noticed. Acknowledged. Appreciated.
I forget that invisibility is better than alone.
I get to be a mama. I get to love my children through olive oil brushed over broccoli and a sprinkling of sea salt. I get to love them by sitting down and coloring a picture of Lightning McQueen with them, even though a thousand other responsibilities are calling my name. I get to love them with a secret drawer that holds treasures more valuable than what sits in our bank account.
I get to be loved by his bursting into the room while I’m working just so he can give me a missed-you kiss. I get to be loved by the flower he brings me, because its beauty reminded him of me, and I get to watch it curl up while I’m writing. I get to be loved in his request to be carried downstairs, just like old times, even though he’s so much heavier now and fully capable of walking himself.
We get to be loved in a million silent ways, and we get to love in a million silent ways.
Welcome to being a mother.
(Happy Mother’s Day.)
On my shelf this week:
Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction, by Damon Knight
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
What to Read When: The Books and Stories to Read with Your Child—And All the Best Times to Read Them, by Pam Allyn
This week I’m reading one of the masters at short fiction, one of the masters at science fiction and one of the masters at advocating for children’s literacy. All of them are fantastic.
Best quotes so far:
“Your first job is to find out your strengths and weaknesses, and your second is to learn to get the most out of what you have.”
Damon Knight
“You ought to be a generalist—you ought to have a scattered general knowledge of all kinds of things, in order to be able to see the broad relationships that are often invisible to a specialist.”
Damon Knight
“The most valuable thing you can learn is how to use your own experiences to help you project yourself in imagination into the lives of other people. Write what you know, by all means, when you can, but fill in the spaces by finding out what you need to know.”
Damon Knight
“In every classroom, there is one unfailingly successful tool for unlocking the door to literacy for all children, and that is the read-aloud: the book that is read by the teacher to her students: the shared experience.”
Pam Allyn
Read any of these? Tell us what you thought.
The light of it woke her, not the heat. The whole sky burned. She rose and ran toward the blaze, looking for her lover and son and the daughter who could not walk.
The flames had already taken too much.
Ongoing challenge: Find (or take) a picture. Write exactly 40 words about it. Post.
(Great practice for brevity.)
On my shelf this week:
Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood, by Jill Smokler
The Unwritten Rules of Friendship: Simple Strategies to Help Your Child Make Friends, by Natalie Madorsky and Eileen Kennedy-Moore
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m not sure how I’ve gone this long without reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, but I have. So it’s high time that book is on my shelf, I’d say. Also reading a humorous mommy book and a guide to helping our kids develop empathy and compassion and, as a result, be great at making friends. This is something I’ve become increasingly concerned with—not just for my own children but for all children. They are growing up in a world of screens and have become increasingly less connected in face-to-face communications. I feel like anything I can do to help my kids become better able at reading nonverbal cues and really connect with their peers will help them in their future. The Unwritten Rules of Friendship is a phenomenal book for teaching even things I didn’t know about friendship! (Also great for writers who want to write children’s literature—gives you some great insights for underlying themes to have in your books.)
Best quotes so far:
“Children who are physically hurt by parents, caretakers, siblings, or other children don’t learn to respect authority or to stand up for themselves—they learn that ‘might makes right.'”
Madorsky and Kennedy-Moore
“The most important thing you can do to help your child become more empathic is to help your child talk about his or her own feelings. Talking with children about their feelings not only helps them to understand these feelings better but also shows them that their feelings matter and that they will be treated with compassion.”
Madorsky and Kennedy-Moore
“If you talk about the value of kindness but then ridicule others, your child won’t learn compassion. If you talk about the importance of self-control but hit your child when you are angry, your child won’t learn restraint. If you talk about taking turns but then cut into a long line of waiting people, your child won’t learn to respect others. As parents, it’s our job to show children that relationships are about caring rather than power.”
Madorsky and Kennedy-Moore
Read any of these? Tell us what you thought.
We took the stairway all the way to the top, where we could watch the sun slip away. So we could slip away. And then, just before we jumped, you pulled back, and I was the only one to fall.
Ongoing challenge: Find (or take) a picture. Write exactly 40 words about it. Post.
(Great practice for brevity.)
(Photo by Steven Salazar)
A couple of weeks ago my husband and I had the privilege of attending a creative conference called Creative South.
All week leading up to the conference I felt anxious and a little overwhelmed, because there was still so much writing work to do, and I could not see how I could possibly get it all done when we were traveling one whole day, so that was a day lost, and we would be meeting people from our creative community another day, and that would be a whole other day lost, and we were going to be tied up in sessions for two whole days after that.
I’d look at my to-do list and everything that needed finishing, and I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
And then we spent 18 hours in the car brainstorming topics for the podcast my husband and I will be launching May 7. We brainstormed courses we want to develop about real-life parenting. We brainstormed a marriage book I plan to start writing later this year.
We spent several hours in Georgia coffee shops meeting face-to-face with people in our online community and digging right in to deep, challenging conversations and making new friends.
We spent days in sessions on creative strategies and building platforms.
My to-do list sat neglected, but do you know what?
I came away with so many new ideas for topics and projects and wisdom about how to do things that I finally just had to cut those ideas off (not really. I never cut ideas off. I have a brainstorm binder that’s just a lot thicker now.).
What I’ve found is true in my life is that sometimes we have to step away from our idea of the way things should go so we can embrace a better way we didn’t even know we needed.
There is a point in every creative life when we have been working for so long and in the same environment with the same amount of time and the same people and the same challenges that we become, maybe just a little bit, stale.
Sometimes it takes getting out of the normal routine to find new life in our old creations.
Routine is helpful in the life of a creative. It gives us specific, consistent time in which to create. Every day. Without exception.
But throwing out the routine, every once in a while, is also helpful in the life of a creative. It invigorates our creativity so we can push through to the finish or just remember why we started doing it in the first place.
Julia Cameron, one of the best teachers on creativity, calls these getting-off-routine blocks of time “Artist Dates.” She recommends that artists take one a week.
It doesn’t always have to look like a weekend conference. It can look like a 30-minute break where we get outside our house and see other human faces, besides the ones we see every day, and hear other voices and observe new beauty.
Being a creative can be a lonely life. As a writer, I hole myself away for hours at a time, just working on my craft. Sometimes, if my kids don’t barge in right after school to say hello, I can spend that whole five hour without any human contact whatsoever.
It’s good for me to get out once in a while. It’s good for me to sit beside my husband for an uninterrupted road trip and brainstorm what we’re passionate about. It’s good for me to meet new people and hear new stories and share in new experiences.
The out-of-the-ordinary informs our art just as much as our ordinary.
At the end of our trip, my husband and I had 77 podcast episodes, the beginnings of a new sci-fi novel, a dozen article topics and more. I edited a book, wrote on another novel and wrote fifteen poems.
My to-do list wouldn’t even know what to do with productivity like that.
Sometimes a to-do list can be filled with all the exact right things when we take time away from it.
After all, the unexpected can hold some of our greatest inspiration.
Challenge: Try an Artist Date this week. Take a walk. Visit a bookstore. Have coffee with a friend. Don’t think of it as work time you’re giving up but as time you’re using to inform your work. Our mental shifts can set us up for new perspectives, which, in my experience, is always a win.
