Climbing

A few days ago I woke up and knew it was time.

Time to put fingers to keyboard and start to write, start to move through this phase of my journey in the same way I have negotiated so many other moments.

Nadine Gordimer famously remarked that “writing is making sense of life.”

So, tonight I begin to make sense of this life of mine and write about divorce.

Divorce is all around us, if the statistics are to be believed, and it is and was certainly all around me.  My grandmother, mother, family members, friends, colleagues.  But as much as one human being can appreciate and empathize with another’s experience, it is not until you are in the throes of it yourself that you begin to truly understand.

Six months into the process, I most certainly cannot proclaim to be an expert nor do I yet have words of wisdom to impart.

What I do have is six months of learning and, fortunately, now, just as much hope.

Three weeks ago today, for the first time, I climbed a mountain–a small mountain, but a mountain nonetheless.  The boundless metaphors I encountered on that journey paled in comparison to that moment in the car, driving forward and back to my family, when I realized I had done something I never before thought possible and that there actually and still resides within me a strength sufficient to keep climbing and now to start writing.

For them, of course

But also for me.

 

 

 

 

Filter Installed

When they were little, writing about them was easy. Parenting was new. Every experience, victory, and setback a novelty and ostensibly worthy of documentation. As a new mother and one who has always processed complex emotions by writing about them, this blog was born out of necessity.

Plus, they couldn’t read. Their friends couldn’t read. The only people who knew their stories were over five feet tall and had the judgment that customarily comes with it.

But now . . . well, two out of three and the company they keep can read and read well. One is on the verge. They each know I write and write about them. And I would be lying if I said that though this blog started essentially, dare I say magnanimously, as an online baby book of sorts, I never expected it to go someplace else, to garner attention beyond my immediate circle. It’s the wish of all writers . . . that their mere words resonate with others. It’s what fuels them and compels them to click the “publish” button.

My sons will be eleven, ten, and six this year. And the experiences, victories, and setbacks are no less frequent. In fact, arguably, they’re more interesting than ever. They engage with one another in ways that regularly and alternately impress and confound me. In terms of pure “material,” there is no dearth.

And the wish to write is no less palpable. The longing to tell the story of what happened last Saturday or even this morning insistent.

Yet I won’t. I can’t. A filter has found a spot on the tips of my fingers—one that keeps me from writing anything that may compromise or embarrass them today or, as much as I can predict, tomorrow. A filter that will allow some stories to come through, but not all of them.

My children have been my muses. I have trusted their voices.

May they always be able to trust mine.

 

 

Dialing It Back

Navigating the divide between your personal goals and what is in the best interest of your children is a constant work in progress.  It’s never complete; and each new turn brings up previously unforeseen complications.

That I love to write is no secret.  What may be “the secret,” however, is why I do it.  While occasionally what I have written has garnered the attention and interest of others, the reason I am compelled to sit down at the keyboard every night is simple: I write for my children.  Every letter I type, every sentence I string together is with the thought that I am in some small way making their lives easier.

We are an adoptive family; and because of that fact we face challenges different from those faced by biological families.  Our son has epilepsy and ADHD; and because of those facts we face challenges different from those who are not contending with those conditions.   I write about the life we live because I want to share a reality that would otherwise be shrouded from others and by doing so hope to dispel misconceptions.  I write to remove some of the brambles and stones that line our family’s path so that when my children walk it, it can be with a higher head and a firmer step.

The fact that this work has led to other opportunities has been largely positive.  Reaching a larger audience means the actualization of my goal is enhanced.  The more people who read or hear my meager words, the more who will potentially understand the beauty of adoption, the trials and tribulations and tremendous victories that exist when your child is battling serious health conditions and learning differences.

What is not always positive, however, are people’s comments.  While I am always interested in what people think and appreciate the boundless support and camaraderie I have experienced through my writing, I don’t write about my family to hear other people’s criticism or, worse, diagnoses from afar.  Our twenty-first-century world has allowed the great mass of the anonymous to pontificate immediately and readily from behind a keyboard, brandishing whatever vitriol suits their fancy and never even having to sign their name.

The issue, indeed the problem, though, is exacerbated when you are writing for your children, when your writing is the legacy you are choosing to leave to those you love most.  My sons, in reading the words I have written for them, to them, won’t be able to escape the accompanying comments—the comments that occasionally question their mother’s parenting, the attempts to analyze anonymously and from afar their complex circumstances.

My skin is not so thin that I seek to avoid criticism at all costs.  I understand if you put something out there, you open yourself up to commentary.  I understand that when people are permitted to respond immediately and namelessly, the potential for ill-informed if not malicious commentary is very real. And I understand that it’s in any writer’s best interest to ignore most comments and to persevere.  I understand that if you walk away, the denigrators win.

But, you see, this is not a contest—a me against them struggle of sorts.  This is one mother writing for her three children who does not want her sons to read the nastiness that some people feel passes for intelligent commentary, one mother who does not have the inclination let alone the energy to take on every unfortunate remark.  Yes, I could explain to my sons that this is the cost of sharing our story, that these things happen.  I could tell them that years ago if someone had an opinion on an article they read, they had to write a letter, put it in an envelope, stamp it, and walk to the mailbox.  They had to sign their name.  And even then there was no guarantee it would be printed.  I could tell them that today articles get linked on Facebook or other sites and anyone can comment—impulsively and, as long as they don’t swear or otherwise violate the terms of use, malevolently.

And as I sit here tonight listening to my sons playing in the other room, I think that though this is their world, they did not ask for my participation in it.  This isn’t just my story; it’s ours.

I will continue to write because I have to.  My blog will exist because it belongs to my children.  But beyond that—the world where it’s all about how many “Likes” you have, how many visitors have clicked on your page—is no longer for me.  Today comments that would never have been published in the past because they did nothing to advance any conversation, intelligent or otherwise, are allowed to subsist online for all to see—all in the name of acquiring and hanging onto followers.  And if you want to write, it seems as though you have to live in this world.

That is, of course, unless you refuse.

And I refuse.

Maybe we all should.

My Future Biographer(s)

I just finished reading Diane Keaton’s recently published autobiography Then Again in which she diligently pays homage to all that was–all that is–her mother, Dorothy Hall.  The book prompts plenty of questions:

How does one continue to create art without an audience?

How can someone who resides in the throes of insecurity still have so much to offer to others?

Why do we think we must be happy all the time?

But the question that lingers, the one I can’t seem to shake is one that Keaton may not have intended and one that her mother certainly never asked:

Of my children, who would I choose to be my biographer?

There is an incredible and narcissistic assumption at work in this question, of course.  Who’s to say any one of my three children would choose to chronicle my life–either beside theirs or separate from?

But narcissism aside, as a parent, it is a curious intellectual exercise to envision which child would do the “best” job, provide the most ‘accurate” assessment, create the most “flattering” portrait.

Keaton mentions her siblings from time to time in her book and makes a passing comment that each loved their mother in their own way.  That prompted me to consider what her siblings would have written had they authored the book, had they the same name recognition as their famous sister.

Keaton’s (auto)biography is a tribute in no uncertain terms; her mother is mythologized despite Keaton’s pointing out her idiosyncrasies and shortcomings.  Would Dorrie, Robin, or Randy, Keaton’s siblings, have done the same?  Would the love they felt for their mother prompted similar musings?

As I sit here chronicling my children’s lives, I aim to be a reliable narrator, to report accurately what I see and observe.  Would my children do the same were the roles reversed?  Or would they put me on a pedestal, memorializing me with flattering words that may or may not reflect reality?

I can’t say.  If, upon my demise, they discover anything I’ve written that prompts them to write, as was the case with Keaton, then so be it.  I trust each of them equally to do the job that makes sense to them, that brings them comfort.  Dorothy Hall may not have been perfect, but she gave her children the permission and space to always be themselves.  And for that reason alone, perhaps, she deserves her daughter’s lauding.

I hope my children can (and will) say the same of me.