I am somebody’s mother. I wear that fact like a favorite dress. For a long time, there was mud or sand on the hem, and I wore that happily as well. Finger paint smudges on my nose, leaves, and mulch filling my pockets, the best ever rock that had to be saved often ended up in the bottom of my purse. Someone would ask if I had change and I would pull a toy car or half eaten rice cake from my pocket. I spent many years in the yoga pose I made up and termed, “train playing.” Living in the bliss of days with my then young son, sitting the wishbone crux of my legs while we read in front of the fireplace. From the moment I first held my son, to the day that the weight of his teenaged hand left mine, even now, the fact that I am his mother never ceases to make me fill with goofball grins. I made that. “We made that,” my husband will say — his own pride is large, too.
October is here now and in a few weeks, he will be fifteen. Pride could not find a larger place to live than in the men’s sized thirteen shoes of my fifteen-year-old child. Is he a soccer star? Kung-Fu master? Football hero? No, he’s a straight — A kid — but I don’t care much about grades, only effort. He is your average teen doing average teen things and testing every boundary he can (at least the ones he knows will not lead to severe repercussions). Still, he is the kid who, when I am upset over something, says to me, “I am not the guy who is going to tell you not to have your feelings…” He is that child right now full of compassion and rage at the horrors of humanity. Puberty is upon him, and his father and I are far from the god and goddess we once were in his eyes.
It is open season on applications to some of the writing programs that I am applying to. I have been busily filling out forms, cleaning and polishing my lines, writing essays. My child, knowing his allotted screen time is up, looks up at me and says, "Mom don't you have writing to do?" He makes me seriously wonder if I can be the parent I want to be, as well as the writer I hope to be. Are the two things mutually exclusive? No, I do not homeschool, but I am not the kind of writer that writes on a schedule. I have to feel something to be prompted to write. Writing between the hours of seven-thirty in the morning and stopping by two-thirty in the afternoon sometimes works, and other times feels forced. My best work is done in fits and spasms. A line comes to me, I write it down, and when I have time I write the poem that was meant to form in or around it.
Is it possible to be the creative person, the writer, the full-time mother I aim to be all to the best of my abilities? I realize this is a first world problem. I am blessed by every moment that I have been allowed to be at home with him. The year that my son turned thirteen, I woke to find myself not at his beck or call. He had made his own breakfast, left the dishes in the dishwasher, and was busily making his lunch for school. I decided then to apply to a writers' conference. It seemed like a good time to get back into my world. I was accepted to that conference and went with heavy suitcase and heavier heart in hand.
The conference lit me. Suddenly the larger world seemed open to me, and I was ready to embrace it. Since then I have gone to one other conference and several informal, but serious, workshops with writers I met at the first conference. I am away from home more now then ever. My husband is often away at conferences himself, and works from home, which means he never really stops working. I worry that between our comings and goings I am doing my child a disservice. If both of his parents are leading creative and busy lives is our son getting the full attention that he requires? If I stop now at fifty what I began as a child — my dream of becoming the best writer I can — what example am I setting? This is my rationalization for being less present than I would like to be. A few weeks ago while I was working busily on a four-day writing spree and applying to a conference in order to work with an instructor I have been hoping to study with for a year, my son watched me sit at my computer barely moving for food or bathroom breaks. Soon after I applied, I was accepted. I was thrilled, not only because I was accepted to the conference, but because my son was able to see my effort come to fruition. Still, I worry about those four days. Four days that I let him spend doing whatever it was he wanted to do so that I could work non-stop and undisturbed. Four days that he spent as he put it, “In the uninterrupted thrall of an electrified world.” My husband was also busy working during that long holiday weekend. I have read the studies, I know the dangers of too much screen time, and I worry that we are allowing him more time then he should have so that we can get our work done.
Whenever it is time for me to leave to go to a conference or a workshop, I go away hoping in my hopping heart that my son’s brain won’t melt from too much screen time. I hope that he will do his homework, which is ridiculous and unwarranted, but if I don’t worry for at least five minutes a day while I am away I am sure I have become a bad parent. My son and husband happily push me out the door saying, “Go, make your way.” I feel it each time I leave the joy at being back in my world. A world of words I left nearly twenty-seven years ago. Each time I board a plane, off I go to focus solely on my work, there is a deeply rooted part of my heart that feels guilty because I am incredibly happy to be making a journey back to my words, and guiltier still because I enjoy every minute of my time away and sometimes even forget to worry or call.
Beautifully put!
Posted by: jude roth | October 17, 2016 at 01:15 PM