Brave Writer

Years ago, my mom gave me a piece of advice I want to pass onto you. When you receive any written communication (particularly a handwritten note, card, or letter) from one of your family members (kids, sure, but especially aging parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles), save it. Put it in a file until the next one comes. Always keep the last note you’ve received (even if it’s mundane or only has the words, “Talk to you soon. Love, Mom”). If, by unhappy mischance, your mother dies, you’ll have her most recent communication to you, in her own hand. There’s something about being able to know that you have a handwritten note, particularly from a parent, after that parent dies that brings comfort in a way that other mementos (even photos) don’t.

I remember sitting in my aunt’s living room with a stack of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during their several years in the nursing home. My grandfather had died several years earlier and now my grandmother had passed on. As we read his annual love letters aloud, tears streamed from our cheeks. Not all sad ones either! Sometimes we burst out laughing, too, as my grandfather’s personality echoed through my voice while I read his writing. The treasure of his recent words, his affection for my grandmother, the comfort of seeing his fountain pen cursive curl across the page, made us feel like he was hovering above in the space my grandmother had only recently entered. I felt the community of our family in that living room, deep in tri-folded vanilla stationary.

I also save last emails or any communication that expresses love, pride in me or a moving expression of that person’s affection for me or our family.  Writing brings a unique comfort and connection to someone you love and lost. If you save what they write, you can return to those expressions when you hit that low that requires a parent’s support and care. If your parents aren’t those people in your life, save the writing of the person who does that for you! It matters to have writing to reread, to return to. Words are sacred, and when they come from the heart of someone who loves you, they have magical powers to heal, empower and nurture.

In The Writer’s Jungle, I share the story of a friend’s son who died of leukemia at age 19. He left behind journals that became a cherished source of connection for his parents; they were gifted with a way to hear from him even after he was gone. Writing outlives us. It’s the one thing that really does and still reflects us as we really were. Writing communicates who we are. It also has the advantage of conveying those thoughts and ideas with authority. Put it in writing, and we believe it.

So as you think about all that writing you’re requiring from your kids this year, remember: keep their voices in it, help them to recognize its value, love what they offer you (whether it’s a short couple of sentences churned out because they do what you say, or a genuine act of spontaneous word play that streams from the end of their pencils). Save it. Write to them. Write to your parents. Save what your parents write back. Cultivate a life where writing is valued, even beyond this life, and slowly but surely, you’ll discover that you’re not teaching writing, after all. You’re teaching each of your children and your family members to value what lives inside us enough to save it, to preserve, to share it… in fact, you’re teaching them to write it down.

I used to read a magazine designed to help mothers of large families with the typical problems they faced in a day: how to get a toddler into shoes that needed to be tied while a baby crawled over spilled syrup in clean clothes and ants marched in a beeline (ha!) for the last crumb of pancake on the floor while the older two children hunted through the 600 square foot apartment for their math books… again. And, of course, this very common scenario always included an 8 month pregnant belly. The solutions to these ordinary life problems varied from “get shoes without laces” (I did that so well in southern California, my oldest daughter didn’t learn to tie her own shoes until, I kid you not, 10th grade) to never eating pancakes. Having fewer babies? Never floated as a viable option.

My life with five kids has been busy and crazy and messy and disorganized and noisy like that. I’ve noticed that people who have two kids? Their lives are busy and crazy and messy and disorganized too… at least at times. No matter how many kids you have, they fill up your world, taking it over, hijacking its order, demanding your total absorption. There’s no recipe for child-rearing that creates both control and energy. Seems that depletion is part of the gig, no matter whether you follow a schedule or live life without a clock.

I’m suddenly aware that my life has shifted gears. My youngest is turning 13 in the fall. When I get up at 9:00 in the morning (!), I’m the first one awake and the kitchen is shockingly tidy. I can hear the wind, birds and cars that drive by. (I’m pretty sure I forgot what those sounded like for about a decade.) The quiet is more distracting than the TV in the background, that’s how good I got at tuning it out so I could work and be in the same room with the kids.

And yes, teens and kids who come home from college generate plenty of sound and mess and energy. But not at 9:00 a.m. And I’m not in charge of it in the same ways any more. They really will hop up and empty the whole dishwasher and then load it just because they know it would help me. They really do know how to clean toilets and tie their own shoes (in time for college) and stir fry their own vegan dinners.

In that magazine I told you about, one young mother with five kids under 7 asked for advice about how to keep the house reasonably tidy. She just wanted to know: Can a mother of five little kids have that satisfying feeling of things being put away and the film of dust and grime wiped down and the laundry folded and in drawers and the children bathed and pajama’ed… all at once, ever, while they still live at home? The answer came from a mother of eight. Her response: “It gets better.” She spent an entire column describing how well her older children helped her run the family. No advice for the mom with all little kids under 7.

I was appalled. No help whatsoever. Only, I didn’t forget her words all these years later. Because each time I got overwhelmed with the chaos of my overly full life, my mind would wander back to the best advice a mother of eight could drum up, even with time and preparation to write an article. The truth: she HAD NO ADVICE. There is no answer. If you have kids under 7 or 8, you will not have a neat house, clean clothes, bathed babies, tied shoes, ant-free kitchens, enough food in the fridge, and easy-to-find homeschool materials all at once, most days. That’s how it is. That’s what normal and routine and, dare I say it, right living look like when you’re solely in charge of nurturing, caring for and cleaning the worlds of small children.

But over time, almost imperceptibly, things do change. Eventually, you won’t be pregnant any more. You really won’t. The older kids do remember their own dental appointments (eventually). Some of them will drive cars and help you with soccer practice runs for the younger kids. One of your children will clean your whole kitchen one night just to surprise you in the morning. Their bedrooms may never match the photos in Pottery Barn’s catalog, but they will be able to do a five minute sweep of the living room before company comes and make it look presentable again.

In the meantime, what I want to say this morning in my deathly quiet house is: enjoy (play with, admire, tickle, feed, cuddle, praise, forgive) your little ones as much as you can, while you can, in spite of the exhaustion. I did, honestly, know to do that. And I don’t regret it for a moment.

In fact, today? I miss it.

Oprah featured moms on her show a couple weeks ago. The two “experts” who “wrote the book” were bubbly, sharp, blond business-type women who wore chic outfits that had never seen spit up or spaghetti sauce stains. They rallied the audience into a frenzy of confessions about motherhood which variously decried the hardships of this “first order of creation” occupations.

“I hate the fluids of babies: pee, spit up, spilt milk, snot.”

“I cried the day I drove to the car dealership to buy a mini-van.”

“There were days I wanted to ’send them back to the hell from whence they came’.”

On and on the tales of woe pored from the mouths of devoted parents. Video clips of small kids on bikes, disastrous laundry rooms, “stuffed to the gills” cars with seats and sippy cups floated by, making one wonder why anyone would sign up for the task of mothering, let alone sustain it for decades. Moms confessed things, too, like the one who said she didn’t want to wake the sleeping baby by stopping the car for a potty break, but she needed to pee so badly, she took a Pampers diaper, stuck it between her legs and let it “go” as she drove. Yeah, I thought that was way more information than I needed to know about her, too.

There was a surprising lack of joy represented in the discussion of mothering. Mostly being a mom was held up as the hardest job on earth, the most demanding, the most self-sacrificing, the most misunderstood and overlooked work on the planet. A kind of shared martyrdom, underdog status united everyone and Oprah, never having mothered anyone, had to declare that indeed, they were right. Mothering equalled sainthood (which we all know implies burning at the stake and smiling through it!).

With my kids in the room, listening to the pain of childbirth and engorged breasts, the relentlessness of little voices, the demandingness of the small child’s need for food, sleep and comfort, the annihilation of a woman’s identity and sense of self, I couldn’t take it any more. After all, far from being the hardest job in the world, mothering has been the happiest, most satisfying, life-giving, joyful, rewarding, fulfilling and (dare I admit it?) easiest job I’ve ever had. Oh sure, the hours suck, there are anguishes deeper than the ocean, there are seasons (years!) of such utter exhaustion you can’t imagine ever being rested again… but all those discomforts are easily and unequivocally overturned by my children, themselves.

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