Ramble on
It’s started – 10 weeks of writing prompts, writing every day for 10 –12 minutes. No edits or changes, just send the piece to that week’s partner and give them feedback on their piece. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, I know I can write, given unlimited amounts of time to tinker and touch-up. I’m accustomed to taking my time, going back and changing things, moving words around.
What am I afraid of? Making a mistake? Sounding like an idiot? Actually, though my nerves tingle and twang as I look at each day’s prompt, there is something about it that is freeing. Just go with the words. Letting things go has always been difficult for me.
I attribute this in part to years of dinner table discussions with Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. Anything you said could reveal your intellectual and moral vacuity; flabby thinking was the sign of a rotten psyche. He was good at it, could sniff out half-baked statements, then deflate them with a quick rational jab. How could I challenge what was true when truth was a moral issue and the challenge itself a sign of my moral bereftness? My mother trapped herself for 18 years in these conversations. Over time her tiny reserve of self-confidence depleted.
As I sat in the Writing Salon this Sunday, for one of two class meetings (the rest is online), I watched the instructor. Thin, petite, probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark shortish hair, she could be my mother (I’m finding a lot of women in their fifties who look like they could be my mother; it won’t be that long before I could be her, too).
My mother is full of creative energy. She writes incredible poetry, designs jewelry made from glass and metal she finds on the streets of Baltimore, and has made some beautiful pieces of pottery. Her garden is amazing. She reads and ponders, is an excellent conversationalist, funny and erudite. She has spent most of her career being a copywriter, first for advertising companies and later for two universities. But she has never had the fundamental level of confidence to take on things in her life completely.
Mom, August
2008.
“You’re secretary material,” my
grandmother used to tell her with more than a hint of
contempt, trying to subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to
college. Perhaps no one was surprised when she got
pregnant and dropped out to become … a secretary,
though she later went back and got a degree in
English and Anthropology. Her family refused to see
her intelligence, her need to be intellectually
engaged.
So here I end up, writing about writing, and it
morphs into writing abut my mother. This post took 12
minutes to create, though I can’t bear to let it go
through raw: there will be some edits. Over the
coming weeks I’ll put class work out here, polished
or not, though I’m probably not going to post the bad
stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be freeing, too.
In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her
talents. She reads my stories, tells me I have a way
with words. “It must be those Irish genes,” she says,
alluding to my father’s side. The last time she said
that, I came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss?
genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since she
is adopted.)
We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should be
making watches or kielbasa or something? – but she
knew what I meant. She’s got talent.