Too busy trying to take a picture of my haircut. Not having much luck.
Why I can’t write, part IV
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Monthly Archives: November 2011
Why I Can’t Write: Part III
Because I am going to go to bed so I don’t oversleep and miss my hair appointment tomorrow.
Why I Can’t Write, Part II
The next installment of Why I Can’t Write: Because I Can’t Tell The Truth.
I don’t mean that I lie. I mean that great writers, the ones who make you laugh or cry or laughcry, tell the rawest, realest truth. I can’t do that. I love it and I admire it in a writer, but so far I have not been able to access that Truthtelling switch yet. I basically only access the Literal, Surface-Level Recounting switch.
For example. Here is Literal, Surface-Level Recounting: Today I posed along to a 15-year-old power yoga DVD on a mat in my living room with my toddler trying to stick her finger up my nose and my son using my downward-facing dog as a roomy train tunnel for his matchbox cars to have wrecks in.
(I am slowly coming to the conclusion that doing yoga in a quiet studio with a trained expert assisting your form is a pussy’s way of doing yoga. Trying to breathe deeply through your nose and maintain equanimity in a pose you have no idea whether you are performing correctly while a two-foot-tall someone takes a running leap at your back? That’s yoga. Or at least, that’s yoga at my house. I call it my “home practice.”)
(I am also comfortably familiar with Literal Surface Recounting’s first cousin, Prolix Detail.)
Here’s a true thing that is not a Truth: Once I bought a pair of red gardening clogs at CVS and they pleased me so much that I wore them to work every day for a week, pretending that no one would notice that I was wearing garden clogs from a drugstore as actual shoes.
Absolutely and embarrassingly true, but not Truth.
One more: When I was in second grade, the movie Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory scared me so much that during an in-class showing (public schools, eh?) I had to be escorted to the kindergarten classroom, where Bambi was playing, in order to not have a giant flapping panic attack, and also that to this day there are two movies you are not allowed to mention in my presence and Silence of The Lambs is the other one.
And another: When I was a senior in college and killing time, I took a course called Social Anthropology, in which we mostly watched ’50s surfing movies. My professor was a grey-haired Denis Leary type with an earring on whom I developed a ridiculous crush, which was obviously unrequited despite (as we learned in class) his recent and acrimonious divorce and probably largely due to the haircut I had at the time, which was so horrible — short, spiky, immaculately unflattering — that it outshone even my awkward personality and terrible insecurity.
So. These are all truths.
However, none of these truths is capitalized: Raw, Real Truth That Resonates With You as a Human. I haven’t found that yet, and although I know it when I read it, I still have not managed to recreate it at home.
Why I can’t write, Part I
FVCK YEAH NABLOPOMO! WOO!
Hi. So. Day two of Nablopomo, introductory expositional post out of the way. Now the real writing begins.*
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to try blogging every day this month. This is because I do like to write. I like to smash words together and type them out with my fingers. I like the feel of my fingers flying over a keyboard. I like that one time in a million when my monkey-typing manages to make someone laugh. And since I spend a large portion of my days feeling fraught and thwarted and wrung-out, I thought it would be nice to do something for myself that wasn’t running away to Toronto.
*Ha ha, I said “real writing” up there. Sorry to have misled you.
Anyway, so my theme this month is Why I Can’t Write. I thought about posting thirty pictures of Molly in a row, but that seemed kind of unfair and a little like cheating.
So here’s just one, because jesus is she cute.
Baby fish face!!
Parenting her is a full-time job. It’s like forty full-time jobs, especially after parenting a compliant baby like Owen and a snuggly one like Mac.
She is so completely herself, so smart and beautiful and chubby and cute and determined. But she is like no baby I have ever known. To come at it from the side, these are the books on my bookshelf right now: The Fussy Baby, The Strong-Willed Child, and Easy Home Repair. Girl is TOUGH. Do you know the Honey Badger? Molly is The Baby Badger. She does not give a shit.
She doesn’t brook any shit, either. She only naps for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half total each day. The rest of the time she is screaming and running and thrashing and tearing things apart and shrieking and smearing her boogie nose on things and flinging food on the floor and crying and tugging on my pantsleg and pushing her brother in the face and so on. She will not do cosleeping, she will not do snuggles. She will only stay in your arms if you stand up and let her use you like a mule to get to difficult-to-reach places. These characteristics make it somewhat (OK, unbelievably) difficult to enjoy any of the hobbies I once worked into my life of caring for babies. Even pulling out my phone to tap nonsense into Twitter means locking myself into the bathroom with her screaming on the other side of the door. My hands are full and my attention is split in a hundred directions from the time I get up until the time I go to work.
But I also know (when I am rested enough to take the longview) that this girl is going to kick the whole world’s ass when she grows older, because she is amazing, and it’s not her fault she came along when her mother was ill-prepared to parent such a spitfire. It has been said: “You are not managing an inconvenience, you are raising a human being.” I am an incredibly selfish and shortsighted person who values peace, quiet and copious free time, so when I read that I was chastened.
So what if I can’t indulge my hobbies? I’m raising three awesome little humans. My malformed knitting and incoherent monkey-babble can wait until they are teenagers and I have nothing better to do. As the old ladies at the grocery store remind me, that day will come sooner than I expect. And then I’ll be hobbling around Giant Eagle, looking for other babies to poke, and I might as well enjoy my own baby while she’s here and pokable.
So bring on the shrieking and the power struggles, because they are also accompanied by the wobbly steps and the fish faces and the big, smiling, slobbery kisses. Bring on all of it, and let this sweet and spunky little girl teach me to let go and just enjoy my crazy life, already.
Nablopomo?
I give it an optimistic but short-lived go every year, so here we go for 2011: Nablopomo, or, Blogging every day for a month!
I was thinking today as I was doing the dishes that I should play to a theme, and I think that theme, in light of my euphemistically “light” posting this year, will be Why I Can’t Write.
So! Sit back and enjoy! If any of you are still reading, that is, and if you are, then we really are best friends for life. Smooches!