Go Fish

Nopalitos blended with a little honey nectar:  I have two girls in Yukon, Oklahoma; one girl in Long Beach, and my son who is in San Diego with me.  During the week I am most often detached and away from my family and working on San Nicolas Island. (January 2nd 2010, will mark my 20th, year of active duty service in the United States Navy). In preparation for my retirement, I am also trying to finish up a psychology degree, throw in family time, working out, and flag/fantasy football leagues. Now maybe the first sentence makes for a halfway decent visual reference point.

I love writing but most importantly I love to perform using what I’ve written.  The stage is out of the question nowadays. Logistically it’s kind of hard to perform during the week when I’m working.  On the weekends I could perform but my wife, children and professors would probably all divorce me at the same time and that might make for a big mess outside of the blender.

So what is a guy to do when there’s not enough room in the blender?

I go fishing:

1.  Writing makes me feel like I am fishing. Fishing  makes me feel like ‘what if’ and if I do hook a fish what kind will it be?  How big will it be? What kind of bait did I use?

2.  Sometimes what I write allows others a good day on the lake, because they get lost in the ‘what if’ with me.

3.  Finally presentation is so important when setting up a rig.  It’s like painting a picture. Sometimes it’s sloppy but other times it’s hook, line and sinker neat.

Granted you’ll never see me on television with the biggest fish or the most poundage caught in a day, but I keep coming back for more just because of the ‘what if’ feeling.  Since I’m only going for the feeling associated with fishing I don’t need the flashy bass boat, nor the commercial endorsements.

I fish most often on my school discussion board.  I’ve become something of the fisherman on that lake.  I Carolina Rig essay’s for school as well.  Nothing like catching an ‘A’ with 10 pound line and a deep yellow gold flaked rubber worm.

I fish with fresh bait on my iPhone.  There are book outlines there as well as poems, and maybe one day I might actually finish my own design for a man made lake fully stocked with an assortment of fish that I chose.

I know I’m not complicated, I don’t even think my vocabulary is that dense, but I’m still learning the topography of the lake most often with no  navigational device and that’s a good feeling.

I make time for fishing because I love fried rainbow trout with buttered white rice especially with a glass of blended Nopalitos and honey nectar.  This is all part of a healthy diet, I suppose.  It definitely keeps my blood pressure at par, and helps to lower my stress level when coping with the fact that I’m just a guy who will probably will never meet all his expectations but both Olga Silverstein and Peggy Papp would agree that this too is o.k. as long as I enjoy each moment within the moment and realize that even on those days when I go fishless, I can still consider myself at least healthy.

Photo Blender Fish by Nic Anzal

Have I Said Too Much?

Every other Tuesday night, three or four women sit in my living room and free-write. Tonight, the prompt is, “My lover’s penis.” When we finish writing, I start to read what I’ve written: I picture L.’s dick, shrunken and nestled inside his man-fro, protected like a freshly laid egg in a nest.

As I hear the words come out of my mouth, I stop.

“Is he gone?” I ask. “He went running, right?” My 25-year-old son recently moved back home from Chicago after finding himself still unemployed one year after his college graduation. Is he within earshot of what I’m reading about the man I just divorced? My writing makes him cringe.

“I think he left,” says Annette, “I heard the front door slam.”

I charge down the hallway to make sure he’s gone. His bedroom is empty, the computer room is dark. I continue reading: I can’t write about my lover’s penis. I couldn’t rightfully call him my lover if the word “lover” implies sex. I’ll write about his belly – a shelf on which he placed Frito pies covered with handfuls of grated cheese.

As long as my son is out running, I can “go for the jugular,” as Natalie Goldberg instructs. I can write, and read aloud, whatever I want. Over the weeks, I write about the demise of my second marriage, about how I visited my son in Chicago when he was in school to help him climb out of crippling depressions. I write about how he would stop taking the medication that kept him functional, certain that all he needed to get well was to understand his father’s violence and my emotional absence. During our weekly phone conversations while he was in school, he’d demand to know, over and over again through tears, why I’d been a cold and neglectful mother, why I’d stayed married so long to his father, and why I’d married L. But most of all, he wanted to know why I’d written about him.

When he was a young teenager, I’d divorced his father and started taking creative writing classes. My writing was about my life, our lives – my son’s depression, his father’s rage, my depression, sex after years in a sexless marriage. I published a book of poetry and performed in poetry slams. My son didn’t care that I’d changed the names. My writing made him feel exposed, angry. He didn’t speak to me for two years.

For a while, in an effort to regain his trust, I’d vacillate between not writing at all and writing fiction. I won a short story contest. At the public reading, I looked up in the audience and saw my other son weeping. I thought I was reading about a nameless woman who was trying to leave her marriage to a man who punched holes in walls. My son knew I was reading about his father.

My writing, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, closure, and connection, hurt my sons.

I started attending classes in Vancouver to complete a Masters degree. I had to keep writing, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t traumatize my sons. I’d stopped performing and submitting for publication. In this cocoon, I started to feel safe enough to write poems about my life again. After all, my sons were far away at college.

In one poem, I projected my worst fears about my loved ones. I wrote: My twenty-three-year-old jumps in front of train 324, Red Line, Chicago Transit Authority. The driver requires years of therapy. In that same poem, I also exposed my then-husband’s alcoholism. I remember telling my classmates who workshopped the poem that they must never tell my husband, who was in Vancouver with me, that I’d written about his drinking. “He’d divorce me if he knew,” I said. I changed the lines to make him a knitter rather than a drinker. And though my son was far away at school, the thought of him reading this poem made me worry about hurting him again. I altered the line about the suicide to make it about my brother. But then, certain my words could influence the future, I took the line out altogether.

As I hacked at the poem until it bore no resemblance to its original truth – that my son struggles with mental illness and that my husband was a drunk – I realized that my writing hadn’t driven my son away. The truth behind my writing had.

I still want to tell the truth as I know it. And I want to protect the feelings of my sons. I thought if I waited long enough, I could find that sweet spot where I could write honestly without hurting or embarrassing my sons. It doesn’t exist. Knowing that this piece will be posted online, I consider using a pseudonym to staunch the damage. Instead, I don’t mention my sons’ names and I refer to my ex as “L” – all very cryptic but probably pointless.

Writing is risky.

I could stop. But that silence constitutes a different sort of risk – the denial of self, the illusion that if I just don’t speak about it, the grit of my life and my sons’ lives never happened. That risk is one that I must also consider in this equation that doesn’t solve.

So what now? Each time I write, I weigh the risks. Some days I feel braver than others. Today I nervously choose to post this piece under my real name. But on other days, like free-write Tuesdays, I wait for the front door to slam, until my son has vanished down the street and around the corner to the trail next to the railroad tracks, off for his three-mile run. That’s just enough time for me to write a thousand words or so about him. But for now, when I read aloud, I read about my ex-husband: His biological mother abandoned him. His adoptive mother beat him. His penis hid, shyer than a crocus in early spring. It’s as if by reading aloud only about L., I’ve successfully bargained with the devil of writing.

Writing After Babies

I have never identified myself as a writer, though if I think about it, I have been writing all my life.  When I was a little girl I used to write fantasy stories called “The Happy Family.”  I filled notebooks with them and then destroyed them because I thought, even at eight, that they were terrible.  A friend of mine reminded me recently that I used to do people’s English papers in high school.  This was certainly not due to any superior literacy, but rather in response to a burning need to be liked in combination with the deep lethargy of a few of my friends.  Whatever the reason, it hardly seemed a burden.  Later I put forth a number of melodramatic poems, a few erotic stories (mostly because the ones I found failed to get me off), and finally an aborted novel that didn’t have all that much to it.

I was always distracted, mostly by boys.  All I wanted was a beautiful romance, a man who would die for me, and lots and lots of sweaty, forget-the-world sex.  I met the man, had the sex, the wedding, and finally the babies. Time sped up.  Now when I think about those years, I hear that zip-zippy fast forward sound. I hardly remember any of it. All I know is that I was planning a wedding, saying vows and then pregnant or lactating for five years.

Then one day, sleep deprived, shell shocked and scarred, I landed back in my body.  Writing had faded out completely, along with showers, shaving, exercise and what little self esteem I had, which, you know, wasn’t so much to begin with.  Being a generally proactive person, I tried to shake myself out of the depressive daze I was in.  It took so much effort just to give my kids what they needed that everything else felt like marrow suckage, like walking through concrete, like suffocation.

In an effort to improve myself, I bought a book called All About Me.  It was filled with questions such as, “How do you like your eggs?” and, “What country do you most want to visit?”  I remember so clearly sitting in sweat pants as my daughter, then a baby, took her nap.  I stared at page after page of questions.  Beyond my name and my incomplete family tree, I couldn’t answer a single one.  I wondered if I had ever known who I was, or anything about myself, for that matter.  I was so disturbed that I filled in all the blanks, and now when I look at it, I know I faked every answer, and almost none of it rings true.  That was how far away from myself I got.  I had nothing.

I agonized.  I had to do something to shock myself out of my paralysis. What would I do? What could I do? Maybe I should be an acupuncturist, a florist, or perhaps being a stay at home mom was my lot and I should be happy with that.  Okay.  I could be a mommy who really sucked at housework. Why not?

Then about a year ago, I had a dream, about a boy and two angels. Throughout the day, a story followed.  I felt like it was downloading from heaven.  Every day that it didn’t fade, that it took on new shades, I literally thanked the universe.  Out loud. My brain was doing something.  Hallelujah!

A month later I started to write. My son went down for his nap every day and I wrote; tired, no exhausted, sleep deprived, crazy, desperate, whatever.  I had to do it.  It felt like a gift and I was afraid if I squandered it, it would go away.

Everything got bigger.  Magical things started to happen.  I met writers, and talked to new people on the phone. I had insane, synchronistic accidents take me down unfamiliar and unexpected paths.  I unfolded and expanded.  I had ideas. I had become so small, so faded, and once the writing started, I felt myself unfurling into my own shadowy corners.

I would say it’s because of my kids that all of this has happened.  I lost myself when I got married and had children.  They took everything.  They gave everything, too, but I had to start over.  I had a clean slate, a chance to be different and better and wiser at things, including writing.   Thanks to the responsibilities of running my family, my days are divided, hour by hour, minute by minute.  My life is disciplined in a whole new way (breakfast, brush teeth, clothes on, bath, tantrum, art projects, park, so many kisses, and on and on), and begins at an hour I could never have conceived of before kids.

Writing is a blessed relief.  It is the only place that my kids and my husband can’t touch, and after the daily six hour breast exam administered by my two year old, sometimes I just don’t want to be touched, at all. And after my daughter has been talking for nine hours in a row, a moment spent in the company of the friends living in my head is a sweet reward.  I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not infinitely grateful for my life.  I am.  My babies and my man are my soul, my light, my life.  It just wouldn’t be right to paint a false picture.  It has all been extremely trying, the best and most difficult years so far.

But now, no matter what, there’s more than a mommy in me.  There’s the story too, and that belongs to me alone.  I don’t knit, or climb mountains, or paint.  I write. The characters of my own creation are the best and most exciting companions I have when I need to get away.

Without my babies, there is no doubt I would still be tooling around, wasting my days pondering my own bullshit.  Who would stop me?  Who would need so much from me that a whole new sub-me had to invent itself? Thanks to them, if I can eke out some time for myself, it is spent visiting that internal life that has become so true, and so necessary. They are the catalysts for my mandatory illumination.  My head isn’t going in the oven, you know? Thanks to them, this time I am on the third re-write of my novel, and I think it might be okay.  They gave me that, for sure. But thanks to writing, I also shower, shave, and run once more.

Photo “Angel” by nagsoto.

Collaborating

Oprah’s talked about it enough that I doubt I need to: some people (often parents) put other people (often children and household) ahead of themselves.

For me, as a parent and partner and self-employed person, that translates to the fact that I find it hard to spend time working on poetry. For me, there’s an inherent luxury in writing poetry:  it requires time outside work, which is time ordinarily spent with family. So, how to carve out that poetry time? From family or from work?  And where does it fall in terms of other things that also need time carved out  – working out, household needs (cooking, cleaning, putting flea meds on the dog, etc.), date nights, one-on-one kid time, downloading Top Chef episodes?

Again, I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here; a lot of people (the majority?) are faced with similar choices about using time well and find ways to do what they need to. I know that, for me, writing is necessary to my sanity. (It’s a little like getting enough sleep – amazing how much more I can get done when I’m not bone tired.) But identifying what I need most is not the same as making sure I get it.

At the moment, I’m trying something new to keep myself on track with writing – collaboration.  I’m working on a writing project with someone else.  We set deadlines and while I might blow off my own internal deadlines (‘I won’t be writing today since I spent the morning getting X-rays to make sure my toddler didn’t swallow a quarter’), if I have external deadlines, where I owe a piece to someone else, I somehow figure out how to get it all done: the X-rays and the writing. I will do for another person what I won’t do just for myself.

I hate letting other people down. I hate messing up my obligations to people I care about. So, if I’m collaborating with another writer, I get more done. I won’t let my collaborator down, though I might easily have blown off my commitment to myself. I don’t know if I’m not disciplined enough, or if I’m just plain lazy, but I do know that having a partner, that being responsible to someone else, works for me. It’s like having a gym buddy. For writing.

I’ve been collaborating for about seven months now and so far, this new system is working. Despite the fact that a writer is supposed to be alone, in a garret, at a retreat, scribbling away, I’m writing more now that I’m working with someone else. I am using whatever quiet time I have in better, more efficient ways because I have external deadlines. YAY!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’re going to have a second child in early February – I hope that this system will still work once chaos settles in for good.

Photo by Prosthetics 1.

Before they publish our novels and we moms even think about hiring a personal assistant, and definitely before that plush private office, we endure writing with children. Now, let me clarify that statement; I don’t mean writing about children, or writing as they write with you; no, it’s much more complicated than that. My favorite description of this endeavor entails sitting in my living room chair (the seasoned, comfy one) while my one-year-old crawls into my lap (on the laptop) and proceeds to precariously hit ten or so keys that somehow equal delete in the high tech world of Word 2007.

The first time I experienced this profound milestone of my toddler, I chucked and merely restored the escaped prose that probably should have been left in the recycle bin anyway.  However, I was truly thankful for the option to keep it, even if a ruthless editor with a red machete and a heavy finger on the backspace key was stalking just around the corner.

Well, let me tell you; I got smart after the fourth (maybe fifth) time she lovingly helped me with my book. I enticed her with her own computer keyboard, a broken cell phone, a talking penguin, and, my favorite, a Pilates thingy that has never seemed physically possible to use. I was psyched; she was happy with the thingy. The words flowed like the mighty Mississippi; I was brilliantly finishing the chapter that I had already rewritten at least ten times…then, I hear it.

It couldn’t be; no, not my child. Oh, but yes, it was with great pride, I walked into the kitchen to witness my offspring chowing on kitty kibble (at least it was the healthy variety).  And, as with her attraction to Dell electronics, she was drawn back many times to the Purina-filled bowls as some sort of right of passage — the graduation from the class How to Make Mom Wish She’d Been on the Pill.  I was miffed.  My heroine, stranded on page 155, and with no promise of a timely rescue, waited…and waited.

The Mississippi had waned to a mere babbling brook. I needed a nanny…or aspirations that didn’t require more concentration than you need to understand a lengthy Sarah Palin speech. Oh, but wait; I have older children. They’ll watch her! A sigh of relief; I could finally get some work done…or so I thought.

Silly me, I had forgotten that the other three semi-grown products of my womb (teenagers) had passed — with honors — the previously mentioned class. After all, writing my “stupid novel” wasn’t nearly as important as surfing My Space, beating Halo, or making macramé bracelets. I begged; they refused. I bribed; they caved.  This hiring, of some sort, ended up costing me almost as much as a nanny, a personal assistant, or the private office would have.  An Ipod, a new cell phone, and five video games later, I had produced a finished crime thriller— “Bahahaha,” it laughed devilishly, “Finished, you say…not even close you foolish amateur.”

Now, to the moral of this quaint, little story; there really isn’t one.  It’s just another day in my life as a writer with children. You should have seen what I went through just to get this post done. And, just in case that any of my children ever read this; I was just kidding about the “pill” thing. I love you unconditionally. On to the next project…

Kellie R. Stone is mama to six children. If she can make time to write, we all can. You can see read more of her experiences and insights at Women’s Life Link. Thanks for the inspiration (and the reality check) Kellie!

Photo by See the Duck.

I wanted a writing focus. My poetry brain disappeared about the time I got pregnant. The burgeoning being in my belly pulled me to the earth, asked me to pay attention to what was right in front of me, to look at the world for what it was instead of trying to make it into something else. No comparisons. No metaphors. No evaluative hindsight. As helpful a practice as this is for living in the present moment, I have felt un-moored since then. My way of processing the world, both by writing poems and performing them, was lost. How was I going to find my way back to myself or to who I was becoming now?

I hoped the writing group would do it. We took turns submitting work and having it workshopped. I brought poems I’d wanted to revise since grad school. Then children’s stories. Then essays. Just reminding myself every week that I was a writer, that the way I operate in the world is by putting things down on paper, helped me. Here I am, Sonya Savitri Fehér. I write. I read other writers. I offer my evaluation of their work. I know how to do this. Every week, a reminder of who I’d been for the last two decades. We set intentions for the following meeting: I will write, submit, edit …. We reviewed our goals from the previous week. Had we achieved what we’d hoped? What work was there left to do? Each time the group gave me a way of moving forward, one goal, one week at a time.

It took months for me to build up to it, but eventually I began transcribing the memoir of my pregnancy with generalized anxiety disorder. I had 300 pages. The group read some of it and offered comments. Then we started readying for the annual Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference. I read about how to pitch my book. I left my son for the longest blocks I’d been away since his birth: Friday night, eleven hours on Saturday, another seven on Sunday. I met with agents and editors. I heard all about platforms and social media. I started a mama blog.

Though five agents want to see the memoir upon completion, the revision required to take the first draft to something that is actually a book requires more of me than I had when I pitched it a year ago, and more than I have now. On a good day, my son takes a nap. During that time, I sit at the computer and work on writing or the business of writing. I submit poems. I work on articles or essays. I write blog entries. I have event spent time indexing the memoir transcription so that when I have longer than one and a half hour blocks to work with, I will be ready to work on the book again.

So, here I am on another Monday, having a writing group with all the voices inside my head. I hope you will join us.