All Things Pankish

Breeding and Writing: Bowling your heart out

I was interviewing someone for a newspaper article at the local bowling alley this weekend when I noticed something.

In between chats with my subjects, I had some time to sit with my notebook and stare off into space. Since it was a typical Saturday morning in our small town (read: nothing much else going on here), there were a few families bowling together.

As I watched them, I saw a pattern.

The mothers and fathers posed themselves, took a moment to focus, and lobbed the balls down the lane with determination and pursed lips. Each and every time—without fail, I swear—the parent would watch the ball, shake his or her head in frustration, and turn around self-consciously, announcing to all within earshot why the throw had failed. Either the ball had slipped, a hand was twisted at the wrong time, or the shoes were too slippery. Every last adult who bowled made a loud, vocal excuse to the others who were surely watching. (And I guess I was, so there’s that.) When they did hit what they’d intended, they shrugged and tried to play it cool, high-fiving the kids and flitting their eyes around the room nervously as they dropped back into the blue swivel seats.

The kids, though?

They barely knew when their turns were coming. They were watching the lights, the jukebox, the other kids running up and down the snack bar aisle. They were asking about the arcade games and quarters and pizza and prize tickets. They didn’t give a crap about efficiency.

When they did bowl—finally—they did something very different than their parents had.

Each child grabbed a ball (maybe his own, maybe not; depended what color fit the reigning mood that frame), flew up to the line (or past it) and threw the ball with all his might. As reliably as the adults had watched the results, the kids didn’t. Ever. Not once. The children turned as soon as the ball was in motion, and ran back to their seats in celebration, yelling, “Mom, did you see that?! I did it!” and asking about pizza again.

(Except this kid, but she wasn't there.) She's committed though, yeah?

I didn’t see a single kid watch to see whether the pins dropped. Not a one. None of them cared.

For the younger bowlers, the point was to get out there and do it. To stand on the stage and throw with all their power and their will, and to make something move. That was the point of going bowling. Who cared about the little numbers on the screen?

For the parents, it was all about the score, the physical grace, or the opinions of the strangers around them who were surely grading each throw.

Who had the better experience? The adults went home without much ado and got back to their lunches, to-do lists and lives. The kids were thrilled from the moment they walked into the alley until the adrenaline subsided several hours after leaving. Possibly longer.

I knew it was a blog post in disguise even as I went back on the clock and resumed interviewing folks for the official day job.

I’m guilty of being the adult. I write what I think will sell, what will get the most comments, what will make me sound professional instead of personal.

I don’t put my heart into it like I used to, because it costs me something. It costs me that moment where I might slip and fall down on my ass with everyone watching.

It’s safer to reserve myself and chicken out. Passion is expensive, and scary.

I need to learn to jump more often and be willing to get my hands dirty. Those random kids at the bowling alley had more guts than I’ve had for a long time, and that’s not right.

All in, on three.

They’ve got it figured out.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ll hit the pins.

It matters only that you threw the ball.

Screw the statistics.

Breeding and Writing: Murder by default

I don’t want to post anything today.

I had a shitty day, a crazy evening, and I’m absolutely drained. It stormed all day and I hate storms. I ate store brand frozen pizza at 9:30 pm. My kid puked cherry Kool-Aid and peas all over the floor right after we swept it.

I have nothing witty to write for you lovely folks.

I run into that wall a lot in relation to the kiddos in the house, too. I don’t want to get up and clean the puke, but I do. I’m the mother. I don’t want to cook a real meal; I’d rather throw some Cocoa Krispies on the table and call it dinner. But (usually, anyway) I cook; I’m the mother. I don’t do everything I’m supposed to, and certainly not immediately when I should. I procrastinate. I bitch. I slack off.

Ask my husband. He’d be glad to tell you all about it.

But generally, I do what I have to do. Why? Because I’m the one who has to. It’s my job, my role. It’s the matter that makes up my life. No one else is going to do it, and it deserves to get done.

I should be that way with my own writing… but I’m not. I let it slide.

Way too often, I don’t show up at the page. Or worse: I do, but I phone it in and am really just watching Boston Legal reruns on cable over the top of my Netbook screen.  (** Seriously, I love that show! I just discovered it a month ago—why didn’t you guys tell me what I was missing? Not cool.)

But as a parent, I can’t bow out. I can’t decline. It never matters whether I want to. It’s non-optional and there’s no point in arguing. I clean. I wipe. I wake. I comb, I dress, I make lunches, I sign notes and make appointments.

I’m also a writer, but that identity usually gets brushed off. I’m just too occupied.

That’s not right. I was a writer first.

I give my time to other things, other duties, other daily stuff instead of the one passion that drives me. I don’t do the morning pages I’d like to. I don’t have time to submit stuff to the myriad of mags I wish I could be a part of. I don’t force a couple thousand words into the blank text file that represents the novel I’ve been carrying around in my head for two years. I never tell people, “No, I can’t come. I have to stay home and write.” (Well, unless I have an impending deadline for paid work, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. I mean non-client, expression-only stuff.)

I let it go. I promise “later” and I climb the stairs to start a load of laundry. I grocery shop. I play not-this-honest Monopoly with the squirts. I never do come back to the same crystallized moment of that particular creation’s potential. Hell, I don’t know if that’s ever even possible. It’s gone. I murder it by default. Then the whole nasty cycle repeats. Weekly. Daily. Hourly. Right now.

Why don’t I let myself take, well, myself as seriously as I take everyone else?

Why do I put my creativity last?

Or is that selfish? Should responsibility win since I have a family and have wound up becoming an adult?

Anyone else in the same boat?

Breeding and Writing: Awesomely disturbing kids’ books

Because you know you have to know.

There are lots of publishers out there with some nauseating stuff, but we’re not talking about Elmo or (god forbid) Spongebob paperbacks and coloring books.

So sick of those. Ugh.

Anyhow, not them.

No, what we’re discussing today, boys and girls, are some supremely messed up, real-life books for kids. These books exist. They are not photoshopped gags–I checked.

Most are even available on Amazon.

First, I give you Bedtime Stories Gone Awry, featuring such awesome titles as I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, The House that Crack Built, and Does God Love Michael’s Two Daddies? for starters.  (And um, no, they boldly predict He doesn’t. Of course. Barf.)

In a similar vein, check out 12 Bizarre Books You Won’t Buy.  It’s hilarious. Personally, I think my favorite title has to be It Hurts When I Poop… though Where Willy Went: The Big Story of a Little Sperm is a close second.

But don’t just take my word for it. (Cue Levar with some bad-ass synthesizer music. Sport that banana-clip, Gordie!)

Check out those two links above, because there is cover art to be seen. Oh, yes there is. Some if it you can’t unsee.

Incidentally, researching for this post has quite inspired me. I mean, if people will buy this crap, what wouldn’t they shell out good money for?

I’m browsing this list for my next bestseller. (Okay, it’s the first. But who’s counting? I’m only joking a little bit. Watch for me soon with a picture book at your local Barnes & Noble.) Sample nuggets from the list include You Were an Accident, Grandpa Gets a Casket, Some Kittens Can Fly!, and How to Become the Dominant Military Power in Your Elementary School.

And if you’re still not quite disgusted/amused enough (you’re not!?), check out Cracked’s version of books that should–but thankfully, don’t–exist. And believe me, they get rough. You’ve been duly warned, you sick puppies, you.

Breeding and Writing: Giving away your baby

Sending my kid to daycare by himself that first day was hard.

I could easily have shouted directions at the (very capable) teachers for longer than the school day.

How were they going to know what he meant by his nonsense syllables? What if they cut his food the wrong size? Would he go to sleep for them without a fight when they didn’t know the phrases we use to get him settled? If he choked on his lunch, would they snatch him up in time or be distracted by the roomful of other kids?

What if he came home with a bruise, and I didn’t know how it had gotten there, and we ended up in the emergency room with some kind of internal hemorrhage?

Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch. Doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.

And I wholly trusted this daycare. It’s the only one in town, out of twenty or so contenders, that my husband and I felt at peace with in the first place.

But I had created this kid from scratch. That’s a hard feeling to explain to someone who doesn’t have children, but that’s what happened. I married a guy, and just because we did the dirty one particular night, an entire person popped into existence.

This micro-person couldn’t do anything at first. I always thought that babies were nonverbal and slow to walk, but could pretty much do everything else. Unh-uh.

We had to show him not to scratch his eyes out with his little baby fingernails. We had to help him poop a couple of times. (Trust me; you do NOT want to know.) We even had to teach him to swallow; anytime we fed him pureed whatever, he would open his mouth in shock at the new texture and let it all dribble down his slimy, drooly little neck.

And apparently, for the longest time, and we’re talking months, babies don’t have enough motor control to grasp. To grasp! I didn’t know that going in. All the pictures of the infant tenderly curling her fingers around the mama bear’s pinky? Well, yeah, happens occasionally. Hanging on to things that are useful? Nope. Not this baby. He would fly into a violent rage in hopes of procuring his pacifier (we call it a “plug” at my house) and alerting us that it had gone missing. Most of the time, we found it. In his hand.

Many of our early conversations went like this:

Me: “Here ya go, buddy. Hang on to it this time.”

Him:  (greedy sucking-sucking-slobber-slobber)

Me: “Let’s just go over here and see if…”

Him: (caterwauling like a buckshot banshee)

Me: “Oh my God, calm down, it’s okay. Where’d it go? What happened?”

Him: (screaming, puffing, huffing, choking, red, pissed, raging psychobaby)

Me: (frantic pacing, tearing apart couch cushions, head verging on combustion)

Him: “AAEEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEaaaGGGHHHooooAAEE!!”

Husband: “What’s his problem? What are you doing to the pillow stuffing and the cat?”

Me: (crying, sure of my failure as a parent) “WHERE IS THE FUCKING PLUG?! HELP ME!”

Husband: “Um. Yeah. It’s in his left hand again, goober.”

At least, that’s how I remember it.

We literally taught this child everything. He came out as a GI tract with attitude, and we worked on him daily until he turned into the walking, talking, dangerously adorable, smartass, veritable child that he is today.

It was baffling to think of dropping him off for eight hours and let someone else be me. Because that’s what it was; it wasn’t that I didn’t think other folks had cool things to show him, it was that the daycare workers were my real-world replacements. They were going to do everything I was used to doing for him, and it was guaranteed they weren’t going to do it my way. There’s no way they could! They had only known him for mere hours, and now I had no choice but to trust them to keep him alive and return him in safe condition.

He was going to have experiences I couldn’t fill him in about later, and memories of things I had never seen. He was going to fall and I wouldn’t be able to reach him; he’d get comfort elsewhere. He was going to learn words I didn’t teach him, try snacks I hadn’t made him. I was going to miss some major firsts.

He was going to live without me.

That’s the real fear for any parent; that our child will do just fine on his own, exactly as we’ve intentionally raised him to.

Releasing a piece to an editor is not so altogether different.

We want to send a five-page cover letter explaining that Mom isn’t really like that, it’s just a piece of fiction, and by the way, we were drunk when the piece was written, so if some things sound a bit stupid, please be gentle. We want to qualify our work with bio credits and educational abbreviations, and make sure editors know we are the experts we pretend to be.

We know our writing better than anyone else ever could.

We were there the day it came into being, and we know the thousand other ways the ending could have gone, the phrase we didn’t pick but almost did, the names and where they came from, why they mattered. We want to qualify our decisions, so the editor will see things our way and make them the way we would.

It takes an editor two seconds to delete a line you made with your blood.

You send off a poem or a story and hope for publisher approval, but what you really want is just that: flat approval, not criticism or reworking. You want it to be the best, most perfect thing ever and to wow the publisher in charm and wit. After all, if it wasn’t perfect, you didn’t send it, right?

It’s hard to let others show up out of the blue and insert themselves. The piece changes. It’s almost always an improvement, if you can look at it objectively, but of course you can’t (well, not without some serious practice.)

The problem with change? Even when changed well, things which are changed are never the same. That’s so obvious, so self-defining to say, yet we fight the concept all the way. It’s a hard thing to step up and be edited, and I’m not gonna lie, it hurts to take your hands back off of something you’ve fashioned from clay. Sometimes a lot.

But is the piece—is my baby—better for it in the end?

If you’ve done your job well, it’ll stand. If I’ve taught my kid enough about how the world works, he’ll make do and form his own relationships with the new folks. It’s the broader sphere the writing/child has to exist in, not the creator’s own.

Yes, letting go is hard as hell. It’s terrifying.

But that boy came home from daycare yesterday singing “Wheels on the Bus”, which I’ve never taught him; talking about Dora, which we’ve never watched; and asking for marshmallows, which I’ve never fed him for fear of choking.

And he was smiling all the way.

Breeding and Writing: Mother-friendly places to submit

Parenthood takes a lot out of you. (Today, for example, it took most of my time today, so I’m just now writing this.)

Between cooking, feeding, the subsequent and never-ending cleaning, bathing, reading, Band-Aiding, diapering–and oh yeah, squeezing the suckers out in the first place–there’s not a lot left at the end of the evening for mom and dad, of energy, nookie, or anything else.

It’s rather all-consuming.

But in that consumption, those of us who were writers before engaging our wombs in the “on” position have found whole new worlds of emotional and personal pleasure and baggage (yes, both) to be blessed and/or plagued with.

Add to that, motherhood can be rather isolating. Very few moms ever say what they really feel, because quite a lot of it is frightening, truth be known. Commiseration is a beautiful thing; thus the major-dollar, let’s-parent-together, hive mind sites like BabyCenter and CafeMom.

It makes more than a little sense, then, that mama-magazines would pop up to publish the diatribes of those who feel a little more literary.

Here are some of those, for anyone inclined, and what they want:

First, my personal favorite, Literary Mama.

They’re not just my favorite because they’ve published some of my poetry, either. They rejected me many more times than they accepted, believe you me. This mag is highly selective, always incredibly gut-wrenching, and the strongest of the bunch, in my opinion. (This is a blog. I get to give opinions, right?)

From the site:

Literary Mama features writing by mother writers about the complexities and many faces of motherhood. We seek top-notch creative writing: fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction. We also publish book reviews, and profiles of mother writers and artists.

Literary Mama submission guidelines are here.

Another contender for your parental rants and poetic waxing is Brain, Child, which caters intentionally to intellectual mothers and fathers.

I’m not as personally familiar with this one, but in digging out the link for this blog post, I had no choice but to read ten or eleven articles on the spot. The titles are just that good, and the piece beneath each title are equally worthy.

They say:

There were plenty of outlets for child-rearing tips and expert advice, but not a source of smart writing that delved into the meatier issues of that life-altering experience: motherhood.

and:

[Essays] are the signature pieces of the magazine, the heart and soul of our endeavor. We’re looking for essays that share certain qualities–specificity and insight primary among them. These pieces should employ illustrative anecdotes, a personal voice, and a down-to-earth tone. We will avoid essays that fall back on big concept words–”magic,” “joy,” “wonder”–to get across the transformative nature of motherhood. Poignancy is fine; sentimentality isn’t. Humor is a plus. Important points to remember: We aren’t looking for how-to articles or essays that focus more on the child than on the parent.

Submission guidelines for Brain, Child are here.

Another, though less my style, is The Motherhood Muse, which focuses on “natural” earth-mothers types and offers essays, tips, and more.

From the site:

The Motherhood Muse literary magazine and blog features original, brilliant creative writing that explores motherhood through the lens of nature, the female body, mind & spirit, and our children’s relationship with nature. We publish creative nonfiction essays, articles, fiction, poetry, columns and photos. The Motherhood Muse goes beyond a walk in the woods to rejuvenate our creative writing minds. We seek writing that explores the nature of motherhood on a deeper level to open our minds to the wonders of mother nature and our place in it.

Their submission guidelines esta aqui.

A fun one I’ve just seen for the first time today–but will certainly be visiting again–is errant parent. They go for the humor pieces, and apparently have just turned a year old. Go, them.

Check out this blurb:

Created in the spring of 2009, errant parent is devoted exclusively to irreverent parenting humor. We strive to be a welcome alternative to traditional parenting magazines (which usually aren’t funny) and online humor sites (which usually aren’t parenting-related). At errant parent, we know parenting is ridiculously hard. Or is it hardly ridiculous? Either way, most parents appreciate a good laugh.

Who is errant parent for? It’s for anyone who believes it’s barbaric to ask a toddler to whip up dinner — without first giving him a cookbook and a cute little butler’s outfit. It’s for anyone who dreads sitting next to a baby on a plane — especially if that baby belongs to you. It’s also for parents, or people who have parents, or people who once had parents. It is not, however, for pageant mothers or aardvarks or Nazis, as history has proven they typically have terrible senses of humor.

Submit to the funny gods here.

And of course, if you’re in it for money and not a Pushcart, you can always sell out to the national glossies and watch the dollars come rolling in.

I know I’d go yuppie in a heartbeat for the right chunk of change. Come on, try me. Please.

Oddly, fatherhood literary magazines seem to be missing from the picture entirely… but that’s another blog post for another day.

Breeding and Writing: Sally Mann and the ethics of being a parent artist

Most of us are committed to our art. We are diehard creators.

And of course, those of us who have offspring are wholeheartedly devoted to our kids.

If they’re ever pitted against each other, who wins?

Many accused photographer Sally Mann of choosing one over the other. Ironically, depending on which critic you read, she either chose her craft to the exclusion of her kids or her kids over her artistic credibility.

Tough place to be.

Mann’s most controversial work was Immediate Family, a book comprised of pictures of her kids in the twilight of their childhoods as each teetered between innocence and adolescence. (This article covers the basics pretty well.)

The alarming bit? Many of the photos are nude shots.

They are all breathtaking, arresting pictures.

The real question is whether that makes it okay to publish them.

One shows us her daughter, fast asleep in a bed she has wet. It’s a beautiful, almost spiritual vignette of the moment between oblivious rest and the bodily shame at having let go. Another of the photographs, and the one which is frequently cited as being more disturbing than the others, is a full-frontal of her young son with popsicle drips running down his inner thigh. There are also photos of her children running, playing, scampering, swimming, jumping; some have clothes separating them from their world, others do not. It’s honest childhood at its best, even as the kids are burgeoning into their own eventual sexuality, which she does not shy away from for a second.

It’s as if she sees them as future adults in the making, and never as children of her own possession. I try daily to see my son that way, too. I admire that. I constantly remind myself that I’m just a stop along his way, and that I’m not the end-all-be-all to him that he is to me. He is not mine to own. I am only his carrier to the future. He belongs to himself, no matter how much of my soul I invest.

As Noelle Oxenhandler put it, and more eloquently than I can:

Looking through the black-and-white photographs of these children, I get the same feeling I’ve had looking at certain long-ago photographs of Native Americans, portraits that managed to preserve that fleeting moment when a conquered people still rest so deeply in their own dignity that they can stare back into the eye of the conquering people with a look that says, There is something about me that will never be yours.

Is that what Mann means, too? Or are we being fooled?  Does she, in fact, see these half-grown people as her personally-made, fully-owned children, and therefore grant herself the absolute right to take pictures of them as she pleases?

When Time Magazine named her America’s Best Photographer in 2001, they said:

Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care.

Is it responsible, though? Or should art even try to be?

Mann’s Wikipedia entry includes this contrasting snippet:

One image of her 4 year old daughter (Virginia at 4) was censored by the Wall Street Journal with black bars over her eyes, nipples and vagina. Mann herself considered these photographs to be “natural through the eyes of a mother, since she has seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked.”

Are these moments of purity which a loving mother carefully froze in their innocence?

Or are they salacious child porn taken only for shock value and career-furthering?

Those in either thought camp will swear they hold the only viewpoint.

Personally, I don’t know. The shots are inarguably beautiful, and I’d like to believe they were taken for the right reasons. I wasn’t there; I don’t know her intentions, only what I’ve read after the fact.

If I view them from the perspective of the kid I used to be, they are amazing and exactly accurate of how I remember my world feeling at ten, twelve, fourteen. It’s proof of the minute between when I was allowed to run freely around the yard without a shirt (and without a second thought) in front of my cousins and when changing clothes in gym class started to terrify me.

And as a mother, I want to document every opportune moment of life with my son, be that beautiful or messy. (Ask my poor, inundated Facebook friends. Sorry, guys.) They’re all worthwhile to me, and later on, I want to be able show him bits of our real life together, not just a polished scrapbook of Sundays in Pleasant Valley.  I have photos of snot, of food clinging to his face in disgusting ways as he smiles beneath the muck, of his terrified expression during his first ER visit. I’ve photographed funerals we went to, injuries he’s had, funny things he’s puked on, and crying fits. Yes, I have bathtub pics, too.

But I do know that in today’s climate, I’d be afraid to publish photos like that of my child, mostly because the laws become so fuzzy and so immediately drastic, especially in the area of nude photos. And Mann has certainly gambled on dodging those laws.

I read not too long ago of a family who lost custody of their kids, ages 5, 4, and 1, and endured investigations and public name-bashing for having their toddlers’ naked bathtub pics developed at Wal-Mart. They eventually won their case (just barely!) but were not allowed to see their children for a month in the meantime. A month! That’s forever when your child is that young—a baby changes every week, every day. Eighteen months of age in particular, as this baby was, is exactly when separation anxiety hits, too.  But sorry, you can’t live with Mommy right now. You just go live over here now while we do all the paperwork.

This mother missed a block of her child’s infancy because of a bath pic. You don’t get to go back and live those days again. They’re just gone. Lost forever. Not to mention the fact that the parents were both listed as sex offenders on the online registry, and the mom lost her teaching job for a year while everything was being settled. A handful of playful bathtime pictures ruined their lives, careers, friendships, and some of their children’s earliest memories of stability.

For those reasons, I’m even nervous writing this blog post and linking to Mann’s images. I’m that paranoid now. We are supposed to deny that part of parenthood, and we are told that overwhelmingly every day.

But does that make ignoring it right?

As artists, shouldn’t we document life as it really happens? Are all things to be filtered for political correctness? Does that change when we become someone’s parent, or are our lives still our own?

Is Mann a brave pioneer? Or someone who selfishly sold her kids out to make a name for herself?

What do you think?

Breeding and Writing: Why nobody cares about your relevant crap

I pulled out a grey hair today. It’s not my first, but it made me think.

(And yes, “grey” with an E. I just like it better.)

I was sitting in the bathroom sink (I do that, I’m weird) when I happened to notice the aforementioned grey hair, and I suddenly found myself wondering whether to feel old.

At the moment I’m in my 30s, and not far into them at all. I had my first biological kid a couple of years ago, but in these days of fifteen-year-olds popping them out left and right, I suppose I’m an older mother. Blech.

Gained too much weight to be a MILF, even. Dammit.

But all that aside… let’s talk just about the numbers.

Like I said, I’m in my 30s. And now I’ve got grey hair. Now my stepkids think I’m too old to know any decent music (somehow Jackson Browne and Bon Jovi can’t compete with The Bieber) or to be worth listening to about clothing issues. They hate that I decorate the house in beige; they react to it the same way I did to my mother’s avocado fridge and orange countertops.

The rub? Ten years ago, I was in my 20s, and no one thought I was worth listening to because I was too young. I was just a kid who didn’t know shit and hadn’t experienced enough yet in life to have any advice that could be proven.

Ten years? That’s the span from “you don’t know anything because you’re too young” to “you don’t know anything because you’re too old”?

That’s practically nothing.

I mean, think about your grandmother. Within her lifetime, chances are, she saw the Berlin Wall go up, and the Berlin Wall come down. She might have seen the birth of movies, then TV, then cable channels, then VCRs, then the Internet. Even the Civil War was only two lifetimes ago, if you really think about it. That’s one generation removed from us, exactly. That was practically yesterday in the grand, ten-million-year scheme of things. That just happened.

Chances are equally good, regardless of whether your personal grandmother was alive for bits of the stuff mentioned above, that during the different stages of her life, no one understood her, either.

When she was fifteen, other people thought she was melodramatic. When she was twenty, they probably thought she was naive and idealistic. When she was forty or fifty, they may have thought she was a passed-up parent who wasn’t in touch with the times anymore. Now that she’s your grandmother, well, she’s a grandmother and all that the stereotype implies.

She probably likes music that was popular when she was a young adult. Probably picked the clothing she liked from some era or another and stuck with it, because she thought it worked for her. Probably doesn’t have the time to keep up with changing trends every decade, every two years, every season.

But aren’t we already on the same path, too?

As Thoreau said:

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I have discs and downloads of the same songs I’ve loved since I was a teenager, and I play them loudly when I clean the house. I have a favorite shirt from my (albeit brief) college life that’s existed for ten or twelve years, and I still wear it occasionally—in public, without embarrassment.

I didn’t run out to see Twilight: Eclipse—and I probably won’t—but I watched The Blues Brothers for the millionth time the other day. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is next in the Netflix queue because my kids have never heard of it. I can’t believe they’ve never seen it. They can’t believe I’m going to make them watch it.

Thanks to an offhand comment from a teenage cousin, I just realized last week that boys’ shorts are supposed to be cotton, plaid, and below the knee now, and that I’ve been dressing my tyke in ’80s garb up till now. Oops. (Sorry, kiddo. I’ll hide the photos.)

I am already irrelevant.

We all are. We always have been. We always will be.

Know why?

It’s because, generally speaking, we’re naturally selfish creatures, and we only truly care about the people who are at our own exact level in life, be that age, social status, geographic location or whatever else we secretly measure people by.

It’s okay that Random Relative X doesn’t grok what I do for a living (or that reference.) She’s not a writer or much of a reader, so her opinion on publishing doesn’t matter to me.

Maybe some guy in Iowa disagrees strongly with what I wrote on a motherhood board the other day. He’s obviously not a mother, so his opinion doesn’t apply.

That random swoop-haired emo kid in the line behind me at Wal-Mart is an idiot. Why should I care if he hates my shirt?

However unfair and politically incorrect it may be, we only value the opinions of those we either see ourselves like or hope to become. Everyone else need not apply.

When you’re thirty, those younger than you don’t care because you’re not young. Those older than you don’t care because you’re not old. Those you are thirty with are your closest allies, your commiserators, your siblings through life.

The cruel reality of it is that when you’re seventy, then eighty, then ninety, there will be increasingly fewer of them left. The generational conspirators will die off and leave you in a swelling world of new children and younger-than-you adults who make no sense and don’t remember anything you do.

Right now, judging by the folks who usually comment here, I could say, “Hey, remember when moonwalking was such a big deal?”, and I could probably get a glowing, nostalgic response or three along the lines of, “Yeah, I know, right? I remember that! We used to practice it in gym and land on our asses because we had non-slip shoes on…”

I’d bet it’d be different if I wrote, “Weren’t sock-hops just fab?”

Nobody cares about sock-hops anymore. We didn’t have them, don’t remember them, and they don’t matter.

We’re past that.

But that’s the whole thing: everybody, at all times, is going to be past everything.

That sounds so weird and nonsensical, but really, it’s what I’m getting at.

You’re only living as the one person you’ve ever been, and it’s a new world every ten years or so anyway, not to mention a whole new “they” to contend with. So how do you write for a crowd of changing, aging, widely-varying people, who come from different backgrounds and don’t necessarily match a single characteristic or viewpoint you have?

You write truth.

It’s all about the underlying emotional truth.

You don’t have to like Bon Jovi or Jackson Browne to have read that sentence earlier, nodded to yourself and said, “Yeah, my kids hate Nirvana, I totally get that.”

The details don’t have to match. Sometimes it’s more fun if they don’t; I like borrowing an 18^th century head to run around in when I’m reading a novel, or browsing a yellowed textbook that’s missing a few countries. But the spirit has to be there; the guts have to go in, or it’s all empty and wasted.

We all age yearly, and we’re moving in tandem, so we’ll never catch up with each other. Even so, we all have some of the same experiences, feelings and inadequacies as we move through. Bits of our lives have all been lived from start to finish before—just by other people.

If you write flashy, pop-culture stuff or humor that only one set of humans will find funny, more power to you, but it’s over as soon as that culture is, and it lasts for mere seconds.

But if you write The Great Gatsby, even despite all the highly-specific jazz age flavor, you’re writing the hard truth that sometimes the one you love wriggles permanently out of your grasp—and we’ve all been there, done that. That’s timeless.

It’s cotton candy versus steak.

Regardless of how cool of a parent I try to be or how many crazy “this one time” stories I can add up while I’m here, my kids are destined to think I’m a loser. Because they’re my kids. That’s what they do.

Right now, I am God to my son because I control the Cheerios and the Disney Channel. That’s a very limited gig, and I know it. Any day now, he’ll resent and/or be embarrassed of me for a good fifteen-year chunk, and sometime thereafter he’ll have a couple children or a grey hair of his own and realize the real scoop.

Does that mean I’ve changed in all the meantime?

Most likely, no. It’s only his perspective that’s changed—not the world itself. I’ve been sitting here happily listening to Sky Blue and Black and Bed of Roses in my beige room all along. After all, he’s just a twenty-something kid, what does he know?

So here’s my question:

How do you write to and for a world of readers who are not you, haven’t lived your life, and eventually will find you totally outdated? How do you matter when it’s all so impermanent?

I have my thoughts.

What are yours?

Breeding and Writing: Teaching your baby to swear

My child learned how to swear a week or two ago.

He’s one and a half.

About a month ago, he dropped something accidentally and exclaimed, “Oh, SHIT!”

Of course, he’s still mostly baby and not so clear on enunciation just yet, so those particular syllables sound exactly like various other phrases he uses daily, namely “See it,” “Wassup”, and “Sit”. We chalked it up to that, figuring maybe he was asking to see (i/e/, be given) the thing he’d just dropped.

Sure. Whatever lets us sleep at night, right?

Well, yeah, not so much. The Saturday before last, all illusions were shattered.

My husband was doing some laundry down the hall from our living room, where the kiddo rediscovered a zippered bag of blocks he’d loved before but lost to the couch cushion abyss. He can’t open said zippered bag, and therefore has to get help.

He said, “Daddy, blocks.”
The daddy in question said, “Hold on a minute, buddy, Daddy’s gotta do some clothes first.”
Kiddo: “Daddy, blocks now.”
Daddy: “I heard you, I said hold on. Just a second, ‘kay?”
Kiddo, slamming bag to his feet: “Daddy! Blocks, DAMN IT!”

Any pretense of moral integrity, gone. Whoosh. Watched it fly by past my hair…

But you know what you might have thought when you read that?

Not, “Oh, that kid should know better.” Probably not, “Wow, what a disobedient child that boy seems to be.”

Nope.

You probably thought, “Huh. They must curse in front of him. They should really try to watch that.” Possibly even, “Aww, that poor thing.”

I’ve thought it of others. In my less-parental days, I’ve judged them. I’ll admit it. At toddler age, nothing the son or daughter does is his or her own fault. The blame belongs to the parents, probably for a few more years, even. Everything is all my fault until he’s at least four or five. I see that coming. There will be school calls, I’m sure. (And given the other stories I’m not even going to tell you, it should be a hell of an adventure. But that’s not the point right now.)

You know what? Our characters are like that, too.

Anything we have our fictional folks say or perform is immediately ascribed to something that is in the author’s own realm of possibility. Anything we write is something we could do. Any opinion they express must be ours. We are exactly as evil as the people we manufacture out of thin air.

Aren’t we?

I think those of us who read enough fiction get it and can make the distinction, but the public at large? Nope. They see things as either autobiographical or flights of fancy which we wish we could live. (By the way, if you’re here and you know what a literary magazine is in the first place, you’re not among that category of readers. You’re safe.)

But say, for example, I write a hacksaw serial killer in as my protagonist, and even make you like and root for him. (Or her—wouldn’t that be cool? Jotting notes.) If I lend that story to a colleague at the office, she’s going to look at me differently for the rest of our professional relationship. She’s going to wonder—just wonder—whether she should be a little more careful around me and maybe not eat that last donut on the break room table.

If I show an abusive mom-and-daughter scene to my grandmother? She’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t know you felt that way about your mother. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

If I write erotica, people will assume I’m a slut. Yet in reality, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 22. Obviously, I spent that time reading—but that’s not what anyone would assume.

The first impression, unless you are submerged in the literary world yourself, is that the writer writes life. That some shred of the story is based in fact. That the mind of the difficult protagonist lurks hungrily in some dark corner of the author’s psyche, waiting for the chance to spring forth into real existence.

It’s the same with my literary babies as it is with the person whose diapers I change.

Yes, I’ve tinged them both (the person, not the diapers. Ew.) Yes, they came directly from me. Okay, so I swear in/around them, and that seeps into the color of those worlds.

For the record, he picked up “shit” because that’s my stubbed-toe word of choice. My favorite word is actually George Carlin’s, but I can prevent it from slipping, and usually do. However, “shit” is what comes out when something’s sudden on TV, or a plastic elephant salutes into my ass on a kitchen chair, or I drop a glass and it shatters. “Shit” is for an accident, and I’m an insanely clumsy person. Believe me, he’s heard it. A lot.

And see?  I felt the need to say that. To add a disclaimer explaining my choice, my words, my actions. To tell you that, “No, I’m really a good person. I mean, yes, that happened, but here’s all the backstory so you will still respect me…”

And I didn’t even say “shit”—I’m telling you this stuff because he did.

Too often we are forced to apologize for our characters’ choices, story themes, topics, or dialogue.

Why?

Shouldn’t it just be that if people don’t realize it’s fake, screw them?

Or is there an uncomfortable truth to that whole alter-ego corner-lurker theory after all?

What do you think?

When you write, are you always in the story?

I’ve written some dark shit. I’d hope I’m not as fundamentally deranged as every character I can imagine. But obviously I’m still the person who thought that stuff in the first place then, aren’t I? And I could have (theoretically) chosen not to write those more troubling thoughts down for preservation. Right?

Who’s at fault?

The twisted author?  The ignorant masses? The collective unconsciousness, the hive mind, the overextended self-help book section, the all day CNN reports of raped children and looted buildings? What makes dark things happen in a story, and are they real if they do?

Does fiction have a moral obligation to be responsible?

Or does it save us from everyday obligation and free our minds?

What say you?

Breeding and Writing: The Uterus Monologues

So here’s a question.

Why does having a vagina mean I have to love my work less?

Does the hard-wiring of labia production in a person’s DNA prevent the development of the gene that triggers professional satisfaction?

I know we’re years beyond the feminist movement (of which I’m not particularly fond, believe it or not, though I’ll never argue that it wasn’t needed or didn’t bring about some marvelous things.) I know women in the workplace are common now and that discrimination is mandated against and that it’s no longer P.C. to admit that you think a necktie could do a better job than a pair of heels.

I know all that.

But here I am, decades after this is all supposed to have been neatly solved, and I’m still catching flack for abandoning my family in pursuit of a career.

It’s more passive-aggressive than it was in olden days, to be sure. We’ve come a long way. But that mostly-unspoken bitterness is still there:

I thought you were a mother.

I’ve heard and seen it all. The forum flaming and name-calling when folks in the mommy chat site I visit realize that (gasp) I do more than make dinner, buy groceries and vacuum. The opinion a “friend” of mine holds that I’m a lazy and disinterested parent because I drop my child off at daycare through the week when I’m “only” working from home and can choose my own hours. The pitied looks my husband gets anytime he admits to someone older than twenty that he cooks our meals about half the time. The tongue clucks when someone overhears me tell my child to wait a minute so I can finish typing a thought. The haughtiness. The judgment.

Why is it so far from the realm of natural thought that I can be a mother and a writer?  A writer who loves expletives, erotica, and mindfuck stories, even?

Is that so much to ask?

Does performing my work on my own, without a boss hanging over me, make me somehow less of a contributor? Does it invalidate everything just because I’ve given birth?

People of all types breed and make more people. Then they raise them. Where do you think all the new wave hippies came from? Mostly from old wave hippies—and I think that’s a damn fine thing.

Fathers get lauded for playing with the kids after work. Mothers are chided for having gone to work in the first place.

I never meant to have a family. My plan from age fifteen on—I shit you not—was to be a crazy cat lady. That was my childhood aspiration when everyone else was going to be a vet or a teacher or a rock star. I fully intended to have a digital-ready, log cabin in the Smokies, a dozen cats, a hermit lifestyle and royalty checks landing in my mailbox. I had it all figured out, even down to the architectural layout for my one-bedroom, two-library home.

Actually, that’s still very much the plan, but my husband and son have turned out surprisingly cool enough that I’m going to let them come, too. Never thought I’d say that.  Son. I’m not a baby person. I’m not even that much of a girl person. I’ve always been a tomboy and felt more at home in an XY crowd than an XX.

Girls are too much drama. We’re too high-maintenance. For that reason alone, more than any other, I could never be a lesbian. I don’t have the patience.

(And yes, I’m aware that I have just stereotyped my own gender unfairly. That’s called a double-standard. Women can create those, too.)

Male relationships just make more sense to me across the board. The rules are simpler. My guy friends have never been mad at me for not calling for a month. (Nor vice versa.) My boys have never whispered behind my back when I went to the bathroom, tried to steal my clothes or rolled their eyes at my lame humor. They just go with it or don’t. There are no emotional games.

I hoped, once I made peace with the fact that yes, I really, really, really, really was pregnant and there was no going back, that I would have a boy. Not for one minute did I feel like it would be a girl. I didn’t look at frilly things, or yearn for hair-bows, or even pick a girl name. I dreamed at twelve weeks gestation that a boy it would be; and a boy it certainly was. (Granted, I also dreamed it was twins the week before that, but we dodged that bullet somehow!)

I would have loved a little girl. Of course I would have. She would have been mine and I’d have probably bought into all the pinkness and lace eventually. I’m even leaning that way for next time, if there’s in fact a next time and we do all that baby-making stuff again. I think I’m ready for that. I think I’d like to meet her.

But I’ve gotta tell you, I was nothing short of absolutely thrilled when the ultrasound tech squirted that cold-ass jelly on my belly and announced that I was having a boy.

My dreams weren’t Barbies and My Little Pony dolls. They were tee-ball coaching, and Hot Wheels, and denim and rocks and mud and worms and toothless grins under mottled hair.

Though it didn’t figure into my own reasoning for desiring a son, one of my father’s favorite things to say has always been that boys were far easier to raise than girls—and this was coming from a man who had six kids, so I suppose he should know. “You can’t yell at girls,” he said. “Boys, you can tell to sit down and shut up and they’re fine with it. Girls will cry and make you feel bad and ask you why you don’t love them anymore.”

Females tend to be catty and vindictive. (Me, too, so don’t get huffy. We just are.)

Guys don’t judge each other that way.

Women, why do we? Why aren’t we kinder to each other?

Why the hell do you care whether I breast-feed or buy bottles? Why does it matter if my son, a random child who you don’t know, colors happily with some other kids while I bring home some bacon myself? Why does it personally offend everyone if I’m my own damn kind of mother?

I’ve never gotten it, and I doubt I ever will.

But one thing I do know… I’m whoever the hell I want to be, regardless of whether a mini-person once burst forth from my loins. You choose your own mantle. You pick your own path. If nothing else, I hope the one human I’m in charge of raising for a while learns that for himself and has the courage to live it.

Even if his mama’s a little off her rocker.

And even if she’s more “person” than “girl.”

Breeding and Writing: The fast-food joint at the end of the universe

As a parent, I worry for the future. Not my own so much; I have my life arranged the way I want it, and I’ve made my choices. But what is the world going to look like by the time my toddler is paying a mortgage? What will have changed by the time I’m a hundred years posthumously famous? (Yeah, well, a girl can dream.)

What happens if the foil-wearing pyramid people are right, and something drastic happens in 2012, leaving all of our technology obliterated? Who would we be?

Say we all survive and start over. Could you help your kid with a science project without Google? Stand reading a single newspaper once a day, or worse, once a week? Could you permanently remember how your favorite songs go, even without being able to listen to your iPod for the rest of your life?

I’m a little weird, spiritually speaking. Let’s just get that out of the way now so you’ll humor me. But one of my core beliefs is that we’ve all done this before. The whole thing.

Ancient people were smart. They had the same genes we have and their entire lives to mull over ways to make things easier. We aren’t any more advanced than they were mentally, we’ve just gotten better at respecting the need for preservation of ideas. We pass things down on paper more often; that’s about it.

Sure it sounds moronic that they didn’t know how to solve the problem of the plague by using clean water. That’s hindsight for you. Do we know how to solve cancer? It’s probably some little stupid thing we’re doing and just don’t realize yet. We’re tomorrow’s idiots, make no mistake.

We’ve learned important things and lost them many times before.

There was the library at Alexandria that’s now been shown to have had blueprints for computer-style calculation machines, modern medical inventions and best practices, and steam-powered toys. In the third century B.C.

We just forgot.

The Native American Hopi nation is said to believe the world has been destroyed four times, and that we’re working on the fifth. The legend tells that the earth was ruined once by fire, once by ice, once by water, and is next going to bite it by weather and human violence. In light of, respectively, the fireball death of the dinos, the Ice Age, the Great Flood talked about in every major religion, and any given headline in the New York Times, I can buy it. It’s at least as plausible as global warming.

Even the Christian Bible talks about a “Tower of Babel” which men built to raise their knowledge to the heavens, only to be struck down and scattered into different nations who could no longer collaborate. (Pangaea, anyone?) The funny thing to me there is that they must have been dangerously close to getting it right–you know, to threaten God and all. Must be reachable, then, yeah? Maybe they had the Internet, too.

Anyhow, I digress. The point is this: assume for just a moment that if something catastrophic did happen and there were human remnants left of us, we’d rebuild.

What the hell would our kids know of the real world?

Which pasty techno-geek teenagers would survive hard labor in a universe that suddenly lacked a Home Depot or plastic bins or bottled water?

What if they couldn’t call the electric company for service, or reach their government in any way but by two-week-delivery letter–if that?

There are articles everywhere on parenting skills getting totally screwed over by Internet addiction. Kids who never go outside. Text speak being allowed in the classroom–on final exams, no less. Social habits we have totally, irrevocably lost. (That last link is actually really funny. You should click it.)

Yet the Internet, the holy bank of our collective knowledge, has doubled every five years since it started. We’re supposed to be smarter now, aren’t we? More information, I’d think, has got to be a good thing. We swap ideas now regardless of geographical boundaries, we can look up the already-discovered solution for any problem we’ll ever have. Some guy in China can tell you why your bread won’t rise, a lady in India might know the best way to fix your bike. Pictures of anything you’ve ever seen are on the ‘Net. That’s pretty much a given. Everything is there. That is beyond cool to try to comprehend. It’s so futuristic it sometimes still baffles me.

So what kind of generation are we? Are we getting better, or worse?

I say this not as any kind of high-and-mighty call to action to become Amish or bust. (I’m writing this on a blog, aren’t I?)

I love being online. I work exclusively from home on my computer so that I can spend more time with my family and manage my own employment. And then, hypocritically, I take my son to daycare in the mornings so I have time to make business calls and finish my work sans background Elmo-music. Have I really made any extra time? If I had a regular day job building whatsits, the kid would spend the same number of hours at daycare, and I’d be less mentally drained by the time he got me on the living room rug with the Legos. I could leave work at work and not feel the need to check my email on the hour. Am I just kidding myself by thinking our setup is good? Am I selfish?

I cuddle up, when I can, on the couch with my kids–but to watch a movie on Netflix, not to take them on a nature walk or tell them a handed-down story. I do that, too, but not nearly often enough. Even our quality time is ornamented by the Playstation, or talking board games, or Youtube videos of funny cats.

My step-daughter is on Facebook. I chat with her there more through the week than I do when she’s in my house every other weekend. Is that better to have the online time, then, or worse? Does it leave us without anything new to say?

“Hey, I went to [this place] and did [this thing] yesterday.”

“I know, I saw your wall post.”

“Oh.”

There’s nothing left to talk about. I’ve spilled it all. She knows everything I ate, she’s seen all the new family pictures, and she has already visited all the websites it occurred to me she’d like. It’s all done instantly, and our one-on-one time is left a little lacking. There isn’t much more to share when it’s all been visible so fast.

It’s play-by-play life. Not living.

I think maybe Alain de Botton recently said it best. From his City Journal article:

We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

and

To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

And if we feel that way, a generation who does remember what it was really like without the Internet–or, gasp, even cable TV!–and instant access to everything everyone has ever known, what kind of minds will our kids have?

I’d like to think that writing will save us. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. It’s naively idealistic, yeah, but that’s what I’m in it for. I read the ideas of those I agree with, those whom I hate, those I don’t understand, and those I wish I were more like. I read everything I can get my hands on. You probably do, too.

I write what I believe. I hope someday someone cares. Not in that woe-is-me, shitty emo way… I mean in the way we pore over Samuel Clemens or Saint Augustine, and marvel at what they were probably like to have coffee with. I want somebody to know what I thought. I want what I’ve had to learn the hard way not to be in vain, or be lost as soon as I am. I think each and every one of us deserves that; my gadgety grandfather, who never wrote down schematics for his many inventions; the gas station guy who composes songs in between cigarette sales; the frazzled mom collapsed in the bathtub during her one free hour to herself; the man chosen as the new leader of the free world. We’re all equally worthy of being remembered.

But in our new society, remembering only happens for a split second. I think it’s because we feel like we have to remember everything, at all times, with no exception. Sure, we’re all more interconnected. But how long do the hard-won emotions last?

Like a great example from the article quoted above, we leave the movie theater vowing to let the new, warm values learned change our lives and become lifelong watchwords–but then we’ve forgotten about them by the next night, a hundred loud commercials and meaningful blog posts later. All thought is now temporary and had behind closed doors as individuals instead of within a flesh-and-blood community.

We hear more. Of course we do, there’s no way to argue that. But I can’t remember whether we listen. What happened last Wednesday?  I have no idea. I’d have to check my Twitter feed to see what I posted. It’s all in and out, and nothing seems to stick.

Even cultural milestones and major events are becoming as temporary as newscasts. What happens if and when our digital-only archive crashes? How would we know where we’ve been, what we’ve learned? Would we all be lost again?

Maybe the Internet will never die. Maybe technology is safe from that giant blue screen in the sky. But who are we becoming? After only fifteen years of web life, is this really who we are? What happens after fifty, or two hundred?

If we don’t care about each other anymore, really care, what have we got? If you choose to believe current trends, our kids will care even less…

Is anyone else scared shitless of where we’re heading?