I don’t think I’ll ever run out of words to write about my boy. Someday he’ll probably be embarrassed by that.
Time Philosophizing
I need to remember this. How you fit so neatly in the space between my arms, legs tucked like they were in the womb, then stretching, searching for walls that aren’t there anymore. You smile as sleep arrives trailing unknowable dreams.
I wonder what secrets God whispers to you in sleep
In the morning your face scrunches to filter the sunlight. You contemplate my smile like a philosopher does a tree, fist to cheek and scowling brow. You don’t know any name except the one given to you before time, the one you’ll have to find again once you grow up, when all that time spent philosophizing will finally pay off.
Your skin waits for scars to tell its stories Your wide eyes catch the runoff of the world
I need to remember because someday your hands won’t be this tiny. I’ll hold them for now while they fit in my palms but someday you’ll pull them out of mine and your legs made of boy-bravado will carry you away to the swing set and beyond.
I was talking to a writer friend the other day. We were talking about writing, as writers do. Both of us have blogs, and I happen to be painstakingly working my way through a novel that I started back in high school, if you’d believe it.
On the topic of stories, my friend mentioned that it’s a little vulnerable to write fiction, because readers might be able to discern the kinds of dreams you have by reading your words. She said that maybe fiction is a way to live vicariously through stories, and she wasn’t sure if that would be good or bad. I joked that writing is the perfect creative outlet for a control freak like me; you have all these characters who have to do whatever you want, and you can make anything turn out perfect, just the way you think it should be.
Immediately after saying it, I found myself experiencing an ethical dilemma, because I can’t not take every joke seriously (God help me, I’m becoming my dad).
In my mind I asked myself the question, is it ok for me to try and control my characters’ lives? Which is dumb, because they don’t exist except for in my mind, and they wouldn’t exist in any manner if I hadn’t dreamed them up. Fictional characters don’t have free will.
And yet… do they?
I can’t tell you exactly how I conceived of the main character of my book, but the more I think about it, it doesn’t feel like my idea. It started with an image, just a simple picture in my head of a person I might find interesting if I saw him on the street or in the desk next to me in Creative Writing class. I wrote a sketch of him for an assignment in said class, and it felt more like getting to know him than making any kind of decisions about who he was and what he wanted.
I’m definitely not saying that I received my characters from some kind of divine revelation. That would be narcissistic. And a little bit wacko. But I feel there’s something more to it, in good writing anyway (oof, now I’m presuming to say I know something about good writing). In all the good writing I’ve read, the characters feel more real than not, and in my most fruitful writing experiences, the writing of my characters’ stories is almost like reverse reading. One step at a time, one layer at a time, each character’s story unfolds. And you can’t write it down all at once. You can’t know how they’re going to change, how they might surprise you down the road. To make them fit into a small and manageable box limits the story you can help them tell.
You have to get to know them. Date them. Ask questions about their family, their childhood, their fears and their motivations. What do they want? Whom do they love? What is wrong with them? Writing is a study in psychoanalysis.
In that way it kind of feels like fictional characters do have some agency. And if I want to write something good, something interesting or relevant or meaningful, I have to be careful not to make all of my characters me, but with magical powers or bigger problems. I have to let them be themselves. Make the choices they’d make. Say the things they’d say (even if those things include expletives). I have to forget, sometimes, the story I wanted to tell, and tell the one they’re telling me instead.
In that way, writing means leaving myself behind. Maybe that’s just what this control freak needs.
Now that I’ve held my own son in my arms, listened to his sweet sleeping breaths, seen the tears run down his frantic face, I can’t get this sadness, mingled with joy, out of my mind.
Sadness for the silver-tongued irony of evil. Sadness for the babies so like my son, so innocent and pathetic, that have been and will continue to be treated wastefully by those who should have recognized their value.
This is not my story. It’s the untold tragedy that takes place, re-cast and re-staged, every day in our broken world.
Mother and Son
He sleeps amidst marvels.
This is life in its purest iteration, to touch the thrumming soul of another, to imbibe her essence and string it alongside his own, every vibration new and wondrous to unopened eyes.
She is the first sound he hears, if he hears at all. Her beating heart, her blood the soundtrack of his existence. Her voice, the song he knows best.
For him, there is no choice to be made. He has everything he needs. He will be reluctant to leave the comfort of her spirit-cocoon. Reluctant, even at the prospect of meeting her face to face, like a fairy tale prince following a melody through the forest. The sound is a certainty to him, a blessed swaddle. He loves it with naked innocence.
She may not be so lucky, Disillusioned as she is by the lovely lies she’s been told. She may lie restless entombed by walls cold and stifling.
Fear may take the form of words in the darkness. I want an abortion.
He is naive of meanings, of fear. Cynicsm can’t reach him there.
All he hears as her mouth shapes the idea is not the sentence of death but the sound most sweet to him in the world.
At some point after making my social media accounts, I got into a habit of posting a review of the past year’s most significant events every New Year’s Eve at midnight. It’s been a year or two since my last one, and that feels wrong. You can make fun of me if you want, but there’s something about having things in lists that makes me happy, especially when the list is a list of happy things, and something in the act of writing that list is incredibly cathartic.
I think I stopped posting these at a certain point because they felt self-centered and I wasn’t sure anyone but me cared about them. But even if that were true, that wouldn’t make the joy of reading it years later any less valuable to me. Year-in-review posts are as much (or more) about writing them as they are about reading them. So here goes, because I don’t really care if this makes anyone happy besides myself, though of course if you’re reading it, I hope you share a smile with me.
Last year I…
… learned how to make Russian blini (crepes)…
… actually met my goal of writing more regularly…
… bought a zoo membership…
… wrote a million letters of recommendation for the fabulous high schoolers I coached during my stint with College Possible (that number being only a slight exaggeration)…
… learned how to crack the ACT…
… brought two new kitty boys into our home to torment our first baby, Pippin…
… was hired to work as a college campus minister with Christian Student Fellowship…
… moved out of a tiny, malodorous apartment into an actual house…
… finally gave in to the cat-lady instinct and started an instagram account just for my feline family members…
… swam in a river on the fourth of July…
… spent a lovely, very humid few days in Branson Missouri over the week of my birthday…
… where I kicked Zac’s butt in our unofficial minigolf championship, despite his uncanny ability to score holes-in-one under the most desperate of circumstances…
… turned 23…
… was very surprised when my sister and friends orchestrated a surprise birthday celebration for me…
… celebrated a year of marriage with the best husband and friend ever…
… made Zac a birthday cake with crispy-fruity-rice bark topping…
… took Zac to Nebraska Furniture Mart for his first time (if that sounds boring I have two words for you: spinny chairs)…
… made my first pot roast…
… bought a full-size Christmas tree and many other delightfully festive things…
… learned how to let go when my rambunctious cats got into said Christmas tree…
… incubated and gave birth to our precious baby boy, Salem…
… marathoned the entire director’s cut trilogy of the Lord of the Rings with my husband and our newborn son (teach ’em young)…
… received the gift of a beautiful gold-plated rose from Zac for Christmas…
… and a bunch of other little things that made last year truly the best year ever.
So many things about 2020 were ridiculously hard, and I’m not just talking about the things that came standard to all of us last year, like lockdowns and elections and just being a person. At times life felt deeply painful for me and for my family as we wrestled with each other, with ourselves, with God–but it would be shortsighted to say that the hard things were bad.
If anything, the difficulties of 2020 only made me more confident in the God who never wastes a single moment, a single tear, whether they be painful or happy. And more often than not it’s the hard labors that produce the best gifts.
Cheers to 2021; may it be a year of challenging truth, persistent prayer, determined love, and foolhardy courage.
