Archive for the ‘Family Notes’ Category

Good morning from California!

I know it’s almost not morning where I come from and that means it is definitely not morning in Germany, Thailand or Australia! 🙂 Hello everyone.

I spent Friday night at UCLA at an event that featured two authors whose work I admire and enjoy: Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the juggernaut best-seller Eat, Pray, Love) and Anne Lamott (author of my favorite all-time writing book Bird by Bird and two books on her faith journey called Traveling Mercies and Plan B). They shared the stage and asked each other questions while the audience of thousands of well-dressed, beautifully coiffed, nails-painted women laughed till they cried. My main purpose in attending this event (besides the obvious – I get to go to UCLA for a weekend all by myself – thing) was to soak in the presence of two authors whose writing styles match my own and who’ve been sources of inspiration and modeling that mean a lot to me.

In fact, I’m in the process of writing a book about home education (shhh, don’t tell) which I’m writing in that same genre: creative non-fiction. Creative non-fiction is the type of writing that features autobiography, but puts it into a novel-like format (or a collection of personal essays connected by theme). These two women are masters. And they are funny!

I’d love to share more, but I have to get on the road to my mother’s today. I hope to get more writing done for you this week on the blog once I’m there. The whole environment oozes inspiration and quiet – the right stuff for writing.

Posted in Family Notes, General | 5 Comments »

What I forget to do for myself…

  • To take a shower… a long one, without interruptions, to think as well as to soap my hair.
  • To read the whole article in a magazine instead of quickly flipping from the beginning to the end hoping to grasp enough of it to get the gist.
  • To drink my tea while it’s hot (how many mugs of cold tea do I leave around the house while I’m cleaning, homeschooling, folding laundry…?).
  • To take a walk when the sun is out (instead of letting the habit of grey skies keep me in).
  • To pay attention when my husband gets home from teaching and comes up behind me to give me a hug and kiss on the neck while I’m washing dishes.
  • To put on make-up even when I’m running errands because it makes me feel like I’m present to the world, not an invisible schlub.
  • To actually twist into a few yoga stretches each day in between the weekly class.
  • To start the morning without email.
  • To appreciate my warm, colorful house; the stocked refrigerator; happy, cuddly children; a supportive, affectionate husband; and a reliable cable modem because today I have all those things and they each make my life happier and easier and more fulfilling.

What do you forget to do for yourself?

Posted in Family Notes, General | 9 Comments »

Johannah


She called today.

Me: How was the first day of spring classes?

J: Good. I’m looking forward to today’s sociology class.

Me: What will you study?

J: The Salem Witch trials, child molestation, pornography and Satanists. So I’m really excited about it.

—

Well, who wouldn’t be?

Ahhhh. My little anthropological sociologist.

Posted in Family Notes, General | 4 Comments »

My amazing mother

While in Grand Rapids, one of the moms asked me how I came to teach writing in this way. If there really weren’t writing materials that approached writing with this emphasis on relationship, how did I stumble onto the idea, the process? Well, the journey is more complex than a soundbite answer.

Still, there is one towering influence on how I see the relationship of writer to parent: my mother.

Karen O’Connor, my mother and author of over 60 books (juvenile non-fiction, adult Christian, devotionals), was my first writing teacher. Scratch that. She was my writing ally, my primary educator. A lover of books, my mother read aloud to us regularly. I remember snuggling in bed listening to her voice wrap itself around each of the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories.

Trips to the library were highlights of each week. My mom would walk through the children’s section with each of us pointing out favorites like the Carolyn Haywood books, or Ramona, the Pest by Beverly Cleary. I snapped them up. Each day during the summers between school years, my mom expected us to spend time after lunch reading quietly to ourselves. She sometimes ran through flashcards with us for math or musical notes, too, because she believed that education was year round and didn’t want us to lose what we had gained in school over a summer.

She took us to museums, plays, and movies. She sewed Halloween costumes and dress up clothes. She indulged our need for tea parties with miniature tea sets.

And when I risked writing (as I did from a young age), my mother’s delight made me want to do it again, and again, and again.
In 7th grade I wrote a short story for my language arts class. We were supposed to pick a plot model: Man v. Man, Man v. Nature or Man v. Himself (sorry about all those masculines, but that’s how they framed things back then). I chose “Man v. Himself” for my story. I wrote about a girl getting lost in Mexico on a family trip, drawing directly on a recent family vacation in Guaymas. I still remember the purple marker I used to copy the final draft.

When I presented the original to my mother, she appropriately gushed over the development of the primary character (a direct rip-off of myself), the anxiety the reader felt when the girl got lost and the resourcefulness of that same character to solve her own dilemma. Then, she did what any good editor should do: “I love your idea. I would love your opening to grab me. How about adding a dialog here that shows me how she’s getting ready rather than telling me?” My mom then asked me to imagine in my mind what the family room scene might look like.

I closed my eyes and saw bottles of RC Cola, Cheeto’s spilled on the floor, a TV turned on, and a mother scolding the two main characters to get things cleaned up so that they could start packing for the trip. My mother enthused that this would be a far superior way to get the ball rolling. She helped me to translate these images into conversation. Then we worked our way through the story as she helped me to beef up my verbs, to add dialog in a few other places, to heighten the danger at the climax.

That story wound up being about 12 pages of purple ink held together by a yellow folder. My teacher loved my story. She made a special point of saying so to me privately.

Thus began a very meaningful, happy partnership between my mother and me over the next twenty years of writing. Her insight and support transformed my college entrance essay into a model that my high school English teacher used for his students. She typed papers for me and taught me how to cite references. When I took my first steps toward publication, she gave me her old favorite books about writing and she helped me understand the importance of craft, not just inspiration. Then she gushed over each feeble attempt to draft a short story. She cheered when my first published article appeared in La Leche League’s magazine.

Whenever I send her my writing (which I have continued to do throughout my life), my mom is the one I can count on to notice the good stuff first, to find the gems in the mess of dirt, to help me see the value of my ideas before the writing matches. Her feedback comes from both her wisdom as a writer herself, but also as a mother: someone who knows me well and wants to pull from me the rare insights that she can see by virtue of being my mother.

I don’t need her for editorial feedback so much today. But my mom is still one of my favorite audiences. When I wrote my MA thesis last year, that she would wade through fifty pages of theological treatise just to see what my mind had been up to meant the worl;d to me. Because she’s been reading my writing since I was seven years old and wrote about a litter of kittens, I felt strangely proud of her feedback knowing it came with love and the long view of my development as a human being. And of course, as only she could, my mother gushed about my work.

So yeah: Brave Writer owes a lot to my mom who blazed a trail of what it means to create a language-rich environment while nurturing her children’s writing abilities. Thanks Mom.

And happy birthday to her. She turns 70 on April 8 and I get to spend the weekend before it with my mother, my aunt and my sister in San Francisco. Lucky me.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, General | 5 Comments »

Doing it all… almost

I have to laugh as I get this post started. I’ve been interrupted so many times that I wonder if it is possible to even address the topic of “doing it all.” That’s when I realized, I do it all, almost. I definitely don’t do it all, all the time.

For example, it’s tax season and Jon and I each own a business. We felt good that we got our papers in order and to the accountant in mid-January. At that meeting, the nice man with the mustache, calculator and friendly smile gave me a “to do” list of items and numbers he’d need to finish our taxes. I’ve almost got it done…. since mid-January. It will probably take the pressure of March to make me put aside some other task to get that one task completed.

Some weeks homeschool gets the lion’s share of my attention. Other weeks, my business does. Some days, I give in and make spring crafts for hours (like yesterday) and let the whole kitchen go to heck. On those days, we eat pizza for dinner. Other days, I make a wonderful chicken stew and set the table with candles, but don’t wash any clothes. Some months, a writing deadline (like my MA thesis last April) means the family has to pick up my slack in the meal-making, food-shopping, clothes-washing department so that I can write unfettered.

I heard Carol Burnett say on Oprah a few weeks ago that at the height of her fame when she had the weekly “Carol Burnett Show,” she only worked 30 hours per week. Oprah asked her about her family life and she said, “We were very organized.” Oprah thought she was joking, but Carol was not. She went on about how the family had a system and that enabled her to work only those 30 hours.

I wish I could hand you a similar system. All bets are off when your business and your kids’ education are both at home and both fall on you! That’s a situation few people in your life will know or understand. There really is no time when you are all alone and free from the competing pressures of dogs with vet visits, phone call polls, television drone in the background and the eternally hungry tummies of children, teens and home-working husbands.

The truth is, I’ve put my family first in every way I can. That means that homeschooling and watching reality TV, going to sports games and plays, listening to my son’s saxophone, and rehearsing lines for a scene all take priority over the other stuff. It means I have deliberately curbed the growth of my business. I’ve turned down opportunities that would cause me more exposure, I’ve resisted speaking commitments that would take me out of town, I’ve avoided advertising. I give my business time, but I’ve chosen a slow growth model deliberately.

When the business has begun to crowd into family life, I’ve hired to my weaknesses (a shipper, a registration manager, an accountant, more teachers). Still, there are days when I get overwhelmed by the self-made demanding schedule that involves family, business and education. And it’s those times that require me to ask myself the questions again: How can I minimize the impact of work on family, what can I do to relieve me of the burdens that take me away?

I have never believed in making my kids work for me or expecting that they will care about orders being fulfilled or classes being taught. They didn’t start a business. I did.

Perhaps the best “advice” I can give to those who wonder how they can add work to their lives is to be as certain as possible that your whole family can handle the increased demands on you. When I began graduate school, I really was asking everyone to compensate for my being gone once a week at night, for the hours on Saturday mornings when I’d have to write essays. We got into a rhythm that worked for us. I would never have added graduate school to my life if we had toddlers or babies.

The bottom line is that more and more of us need to work to pay for life in America. College tuition alone drives many homeschooling mothers back into the workforce after fifteen years of fulltime mothering. If you are at this place in your life, your family can handle it. You just need to be sure that you continue to give your heart and energy to your kids when you are with them. That’s the only way to balance it all out.

And as Jon likes to say when I have my doubts, “It’s great for our kids to see you work. They get to know that there is a meaningful life ahead of them as adults that extends into the community, beyond the family, but that includes the family.”

Posted in Family Notes, General | 3 Comments »