Dispatch #33: Other Mothers, Other Writers

Honor Your Process

I have a few koan-like phrases that I repeat in my writing classes. When I’m talking about setting, I quote Elizabeth Bowman: “Nothing can happen nowhere.” Or, when discussing style and subject matter, I echo Annie Dillard’s inspiring line from The Writing Life, “You were made and set here to give voice to your own astonishment.” I like to say that revision is not about judging your work, but understanding it and its intentions.

And, whenever I’m asked about writing process, or how to create better work habits, I say, “Honor your process.”

What I mean: Although you might be able to make changes to be more focused and disciplined, your general preferences and habits are distinctly yours, and are part of you, and, even, part of what makes your work yours. Some of us peck out a specific number of pages every morning. Some of us might not write for days on end, and then stay up all night to finish a chapter. Some of us might write whatever random scene that comes to us, while others might write in the order they believe the book will be read.

There isn’t one way to do this work.

Of course, the demands of life influence and change the process, as do specific projects, and we might learn other modes by necessity until they feel intuitive. Nothing is static. The important thing is to pay attention to what is helpful to you, what feels good. What makes the work happen? Use that.

Many young writers flail about as they try to match the ideal “good writer” model, be it Stephen King, writing every day, even on his birthday, even on Christmas, or Joan Didion, drafting all day and then having a drink after dinner as she marks up her draft. Rather than finding joy within the confines of their specific process, new writers might learn of how these masters do/did it, and then feel bad about their own habits and rituals. They might feel like frauds, like bad writers.

What am I talking about? Why am I saying “young” writers? I’m not young, I’m not new to this, and I still feel like a bad writer sometimes!

This fall, I met with a student who described her frustrations with her writing, her fear that her story was getting worse. She said that what was on the page wasn’t matching what she had envisioned in her mind.

I remember she paused, as if I might have a solution.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s always how it feels.”

*

I was thinking about this idea—honor your process—in relationship to mothering. As with the “good writer” image, there is the “good mother” image. This image is obviously weightier, and more pernicious because the stakes—a child’s life—are higher. It also isn’t the same image/ideal for everyone, and it changes over time: it’s generational and/or cultural, and it’s personal. Whatever the ideal might be, it’s a presence in a mother’s life, a shadow at the edge of the frame, a comparison waiting to be made.  

Sometimes I’m haunted by the mother I’m not, and, because of various factors, the mother I can’t be. This isn’t about motherhood influencers online (which, frankly, I don’t care about or even follow), but maybe it is that for you. My “good mother,” like my “good writer,” is a sort of fantasy version of myself, mixed in with other mothers I know or have known, and various cultural ideals at once impossible to measure up to, and also, if I do X and Y and Z, seemingly in reach.

We all have preconceived ideas (pun intended!) about parenthood before we even step into the role. They persist as reality topples them, again and again.

There’s the mother I want to be and the mother I am. Sometimes they’re the same. Other times, they aren’t.

*

I was thinking about this with my second child, Ginger, my only daughter between her two brothers. She is eight years old and prone to anxiety-induced rages that include a lot of tears and profanity. Just the other day, she yelled, as she has many times before, “I wish I had another mommy.”

Obviously, the fiction writer in me knows that the most cutting reply, the meanest one, would be: “Well, I wish I had another daughter.”

I have never said this. For one, it’s cruel. Two, it’s not true, even when I am shaking with anger, even when I feel totally ill-equipped to parent this sensitive child.

I want no other daughter but her.

The more honest answer might be, “I wish you had a different Mommy too.” Not for my sake, but for hers. I also don’t say this, but I think it.

I think: Perhaps she would be better off with a different mother, one who is capable of handling a kid with an anxiety disorder, someone who is adept at helping her through these storms, someone who isn’t so reactive, who is more patient, who doesn’t have two other children (with their own complicated needs) to attend to.

Maybe she needs the “good mother” hovering at the corner of my imagination—and at the corner of hers.

I tire of my daughter’s invectives, and this particular one stings a little, but, also: doesn’t everyone, some of us all the time, some of us only occasionally, wish they had another mother? I do not actively long for another mother (hi, Mom! I love you!) but I think everyone can relate to this desire, this wish, this fantasy.

I always loved being around the mothers of my friends. I’m thinking of irreverent, gregarious Mary, taking us to her bikini wax appointment, to Malibu. I’m thinking of calm and tender Antoinette, with her watercress soup and her English restraint. I’m thinking of grumpy yet kind Rena, ever the realist, and of Davia, with her gaggle of sisters and her self-help bent, how she let her daughter stay home from school for a mental health day, and of Shira, a women studies professor with a sort of valley girl lilt. The list goes on. These are women who were different from my own mother in personality and history and manner, and they also looked different from my own mom: they smelled different, dressed different, had a whole different vibe.

What would life be like, who would I be, with that mother? Or that one? It’s a seductive thought experiment.

Once, when Ginger and I were in the car, we drove by a gorgeous woman with long hair and a cool strut. Ginger pointed her out and said, “I wish she were my mother.”

She wasn’t mad at me, it was just her first thought and she expressed it. That she felt comfortable voicing it—I’ll count that as a win.

“For sure,” I said. “I get it.”

*

I toss out writing wisdoms in my class, and I have some words I cannot stand (“gift” as a verb—ugh just shoot me; and unless it’s about a rodent, “scurry” makes me want to barf), and, okay, I get annoyed by telling dialogue tags like, “he complained.” I like setting texture, and intriguing character gestures, and I am weak in the face of specific, sensory detail, just as I love an unexpected, extraordinary character action and a tighter POV that lets consciousness bend language. My students know my rants (and raves).

But, also: everything I teach is a suggestion—and I like to be proven wrong.

I’m generally suspicious of how-to writing books that tell you how to structure a story or novel, how to create a character. I joke that telling me to give a character a desire and then an obstacle to that desire only makes me imagine a stick figure heading toward a carrot, and then a boulder between the stick figure and the carrot. Not exactly inspiring.

Even solid writing advice is only helpful to a point. Sometimes you’re in the muck of a specific section that’s eluding you, and no understanding of scenic arc or characterization or voice is going to save you. You just have to sit in the muck and figure out this story, this problem, which is like no other. And that’s why you’re writing it.

*

Just as I’m suspicious of how-to writing books that tell you how to structure a novel, or how to create a character, I’m suspicious of parenting content, and of parenting styles that seem to imply that an adherence to specific methods will make parenting more comprehensible, make it easier.

It all feels too general, too limiting. It feels absurd in the face of the muck of parenthood. As I’ve written before, I admire certain aspects of gentle parenting, for instance, but I find any kind of parent-child script demeaning to all parties involved. It feels fake. It feels derivative: Say this, get that, solve your trauma and prevent your child’s, voila. Some of it is indeed wise and useful…and some of it is simplistic and strikes me as bullshit, impossible to implement. Either way, it’s trendy and pervasive, and it doesn’t feel true to me.

Gotta honor my process.

*

The other day, I had lunch with a friend I haven’t hung out with since she became a mother two years ago. She was talking about her kid, how she can’t get him to fall sleep without being rocked, how she can’t get him to sleep more than a few hours in his own bed.

“I can do the gentle thing,” she said. “I just can’t do the stricter, boundary-setting thing.”

There’s some other mother in her periphery, in her mind, who can do both. But that other mother is a fiction.

*

The “good writer” myth is as enraging and useless as the “good mother” myth in part because it flattens the specificities of experience and reality.

These days, so much of my writing life is dictated by the time I have or don’t, my childcare schedule, the pressure to make money and the brutal facts of the marketplace, holiday obligations, my obsessive need for every sentence to be pleasing, my distaste for outlining, my resistance to writing out of order, my desire to embroider and/or complicate every scene, my requirement of time, space, good coffee, my (newfound!) inability to get up early, the problems my kids are having that are taking up all my brain space, this poem I just read, this novel that bored me, and on and on…

My writing life is particular to me in this exact moment. I bring to it the history of my other books, what’s worked before, what isn’t working now, the angst I’m carrying, the hope, the wariness, the excitement.

I keep telling myself: Just wait for 2024. I keep telling myself that’s when I’m going to be a “good writer” and finish my new book in six months. I will. I’ve never written that fast before. But I’ll do it!

Maybe that’s me, or maybe that’s the just the shadow me, haunting reality.

The question is: What can I do to create this novel? My flaws and constraints and, yes, my gifts, will be part of this creation.

*

Parenting content flattens particularities in the same way that the “good mother” ideal flattens the daily complicated experience of mothering real, complicated children. Ginger’s “good mother” has no other children, she doesn’t work let alone have a vocation, she doesn’t have any upsetting moles or bad breath in the morning.

The parenting story, like the writing story, is one of types, tropes.

*

This isn’t a clean comparison. Writer as mother, child as manuscript. I’m not writing my daughter. Or: she’s writing me as much as I’m writing her.

*

“Behavior is communication,” Ginger’s therapist tells me and Patrick. It’s like a writing koan, and it’s one I like, one I repeat to myself like a mantra even though, in the thick of a meltdown, it doesn’t really change the reality of the moment.

And what do I make of my own behavior, then? I’m writing this instead of opening my novel draft. What is it I’m communicating to myself?

*

In my class, I talk about “furniture catalogue” writing—that is, writing that seems to take place in some neutral living room. There’s a couch, there’s an end table, perhaps there’s a mention of the mirror on the wall. But it’s an otherwise lifeless, unrealistic setting, devoid of specificity and emotion, devoid of mood, vibe, feeling, humanity. There’s no tchotchke carried home from Vegas, no blanket your grandmother sewed you before when you were a baby, no sense of how the light bathes the room as the sun rises. It’s just a general idea, a “place” instead of a place. It’s a failed attempt at objectivity. Nothing is objective, and no one reads to explore the objective, anyway. How dull.

To borrow a phrase from Phillip Lopate, I’m after the specific and legible. Give me this specific living room and give me a sense of what it means to the people in it, and make it emotionally comprehensible.

*

So here we are: a mother, age 42, and a daughter, age 8. Not “a mother” and “a daughter,” not generic, not objective representations, not bad, not good. Just us.

My daughter sits on the couch (blue-gray, stained with marker ink, metal legs digging holes into the red and brown rug that’s unthreading at its edges ). The sunlight filters through the cypress tree across the way and it hits her face (round, cleft-chin, peaches-and-cream complexion), and lights it up like an angel’s. She’s watching Zoey: 101, fast-forwarding the romantic scenes because other people are present.

She may tell me to go fuck myself at any moment. She may tell me she wishes I were some other mother.

(Behavior is communication.)

I’ll probably do/say the wrong thing.

But I do know that this person is specific, that there is no one like her in this universe or any other, and all I want is for her to understand that she is legible. To me, at least, she is.

I’m just trying to honor this process.