Making It Up

Like, never say never, because that will keep you spinning in illogical circles for ever and ever. And ever.

Also, never say that you’ll only have one piece of pizza, because that’s just not true.

Never say gftzzdfqpppx, because you can’t.

And never say your mind is utterly, totally and absolutely made up. Because then when you change it, or even when you begin to be less utter, total and absolute, you will have to eat your words. Without ketchup.

For example. I, like many people who love words, have a few grammatical pet peeves. Like apostrophes. Its does not equal it’s does not equal its. But you know that already. I get my knickers in a twist about fewer vs. less. I truly, really need the world to preserve the difference between imply and infer. Alright is alwrong.

And.

I hate the serial comma. It’s redundant. Why do you need a comma, as well as an ‘and’? Easy. You don’t. They serve the same function, to separate parts of a list. I have faced down writers, bosses and editors (not fun, interesting, literary ones, but editors nonetheless) about the intrusive little curl, and have not, to this day, ever used a serial comma. I don’t ever want to use one.

Except that I have been forced to accept not everyone is subscribing to the Elements of Style According to Me, and apparently, many editors do in fact use the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma.* It is also dawning on me that perhaps I have a finite amount of righteous grammatical indignation and I ought to save it for shouting at signs suggesting that “15 items or less” is a valid check-out choice. Perhaps that little comma doesn’t matter quite so much after all. Perhaps I should get on board with every other Tom, Dick, and Harry (ooh I can hardly bear to look at it) and just use the darn thing.

I need to save my strength to get on with teaching the world the difference between uninterested and disinterested.

*Remember when Elizabeth Bennett remarked that her love for Mr. Darcy blossomed upon seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberly? I suspect my attitude towards the serial comma softened when I first heard it referred to as the Oxford comma. Suddenly, instead of sounding like something that should be locked up lest it comma more innocent victims, it sounded like something that might be wearing a cravat and offering to pour me champagne while handing me a dish of strawberries and cream. Much more civilized.

(cf: A Hole is to Dig, by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak)

When I started blogging in 2005, it already felt like the party had started without me, that everyone was blogging and really, did the world need one more? I started anyway, writing mostly about parenthood, feminism, politics and knitting, and it was wonderful. I made connections, had a corner of the virtual world I could call my own, thought things through, wrote things out.

Then I moved, and lost my groove. Trying to get it back, I  realized that I no longer wanted to blog about motherhood. Not that I was done being a mother, but the identity crisis that had fueled my writing and life for so many years was not quite so crisis-y. I was moving on. I was taking back a part of my life and energy for me, for writing. I would blog, I decided, about writing.

This time, however, the virtual world was even more crowded with blogs. It was riddled with blogs. It was lousy with them. Even more blogs. Good blogs. Focused blogs. Again, I felt like the party had started without me and this time, it was so loud that I wasn’t sure anyone would hear me knocking (even though I had brought a bottle of wine).

Audience is not the only reason to blog, but really, without audience, it’s journaling and I could do it in a .doc file on my computer and no one would be the wiser. That’s good practice, but it’s not so much fun.

So when I stumbled across the Second Writers’ Platform-Building Crusade on Rach Writes, I thought, well, yes indeedy. I will crusade! And like Stella, I’ll be grooving.

And I’ll be grooving along with all of you. So let’s turn the music up and leave the door unlocked. People can just walk into this party. The more, the merrier.

You probably didn’t even notice it (she said hopefully) or maybe you got what I meant rather than what I wrote, and this post is completely unnecessary. But I noticed and kept noticing and it’s been bugging me. In the last post, I wrote, “My mother was right. I should have been a teacher.” To me, this sounds too close to the horrible adage about those who can and those who can’t, close enough to warrant a disclaimer. So here it is:

My parents were both teachers. My mother was also a librarian, as was her father. They were also children of the Depression, hanging paper towels out to dry so they could be used a second (or a third or a fourth) time. They spent little, saved much and tried to teach us to be practical, useful and humble. So when I said (as I did, repeatedly) that I wanted to be a writer, their response was always: “That’s great! You should be an English teacher.”

Except that I didn’t want to be an English teacher. I wanted to be a writer. But writing was a Big Dream, a risk. It was hardly a profession at all, but a poorly paid and uncertain leap into the dark. Teaching was sensible, reliable and if not well paid, at least predictably paid. Be a teacher, they said. What I heard was: You’re not a good enough writer to risk trying.

I listened. I became a teacher. I taught poetry and grammar and Shakespeare. I gave spelling tests. I discussed Great Books. I stood in classrooms full of middle-schoolers and high-schoolers and college kids. I’m okay at it, not great. Disorganized. Given to stream-of-consciousness rather than structure. And the whole time, I knew I was settling, that teaching was my safety-profession, and it shouldn’t be. Teaching should be what someone wants to do, feels called to do, not what someone thinks she must do because she’s not good or talented enough to pursue her Big Dream.

I stopped teaching long before I started writing. I was bright enough to know that whatever I did with my life, I shouldn’t settle, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually jump into the dark and try writing. It’s a hard message to shake off, especially when it comes from your parents: “You’re not good enough.”

Teaching is an art. Teachers are amazing. My husband is one now; he loves it and he’s good at it. Watching him makes me get how less-than-stellar I was. My dad is a passionate teacher. He will talk your ear off about any one of a number of his favorite topics, looking for that gleam of engagement in your eyes, hoping to make you think about the world just a tiny bit differently. When the Jehovah’s witnesses come knocking, he invites them in and starts instructing them on The Power of Myth.

Me? I’m a writer. No help for it really. Not so much a leap into the dark as an awakening, an embracing of who I am and what I want in this life.

A day or two ago, I was on the phone with a friend of mine I don’t see very often these days, mostly because he was living in Australia and is now in Geneva. What have you been up to, he wanted to know. I hate that question. I tried to deflect attention by telling him about what Ed was going, how the children were. Now, he said, tell me what you’re doing.

I’m working on the latest round of edits on my latest manuscript. Might even finish them today. Then I will screw my courage to the sticking place and send it out.

I said it apologetically, possibly even a little defensively. I wanted to be able to tell him about great achievements. This friend has been in my writing corner since we met, since we used to go and drink bizarre cappuccino in Cairo while scribbling in our notebooks and discussing our love for fountain pens. Most often, though, we would discuss the difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it, the deceptively fragile, difficult to shatter pane of glass between desire and action. I am proud to have cracked that glass, but I never feel like I’m dancing around on the shards of its destruction. I always feel like the glass is on the point of repairing itself, like it’s Resurrection Glass and I will have to shatter it a thousand times.

He didn’t say good luck or tell me he’d look for my book in the stores. What he did say was that he was in awe of me. That he was proud of me.

WHY? I asked, and not gently either. I might have yelled, actually.

Because you’re doing it. You’re persevering. You’re still trying. That’s success, right there.

Oh, I said, very small and quiet. Oh. There was a long pause. Thank you, I said finally.

It was a hard thing to say, not to argue that I wasn’t successful by a long shot, that I was not yet agented or published, that I was not yet being asked to give inspirational lectures at writers’ conferences, that I was just sitting in my startlingly cold house, tap tap tapping at the keyboard and trying to hum loudly enough to drown out the naysayers in my head. Yet, as I choked out thank you, I felt that glass divider crumble a bit more. There might have even been a crunch or two as I ground a piece into dust with my heel.

You’ve heard this before. I’m saying it again because goodness knows, I need to hear it every twenty minutes or so. Success is not all external. Success is winning the fight in our own selves against I can’t, I’m not good enough, no one likes this, I’m wasting time, my mother was right — I should have been a teacher. Success is sitting down when it would be so much easier not to. Success is fighting through to the end of a manuscript and then going back to the beginning and fighting through it a second and third time to make it better. Success is being humble enough to be willing to fix things and proud enough to risk writing them down in the first place.

Today, I am successful. I am doing what I once thought I would never find the courage to do. I am trying. I am writing.

What about you?

3. Have a baby two babies.

You know how before you have kids, before you even get married, you do that thing where you vaguely think about what might vaguely happen if you produce vague offspring in some comfortably vague future? Ed and I talked about having two children as the eco-responsible thing to do. Someday. We thought we might name them This and That. Someday. We thought these thoughts in the warm, safe glow of being twenty and then twenty-five and even twenty-nine and having no intention of sprogging up within the immediate future. And we talked about having two children so much that it seemed impossible we would have just one. Thus, when writing this list, I clearly wrote down a version of “Reproduce” and had to correct it lest the future get the wrong idea that I would have one and be done.

Then I had one. And I was done. More than done. I was baked, fried, roasted, grilled and burnt. I had been skinned, held over the fire and chewed until I was nothing but bones and gristle. It had been the single hardest thing I had ever done, and I nearly hadn’t made it. I did not understand how the human race had survived if this was what having babies was like. I loved my baby, sure, but it was with the sort of deep, dark determined love that is dragged from the primordial swamp of the soul and psyche and was in no way pink, fluffy, warm or cozy. I gritted my teeth and I loved that baby with every ounce of strength I had because that baby needed so much more love than I thought it was possible to wring from a human heart. Slowly, I adjusted, I coped, I changed. The baby grew a bit, calmed a bit, cried a bit less and I thought it might be safe to breathe.

Then, about 20 months after the first arrived, Ed suggested it was time to think about Number Two.

Don’t make me, I whispered. Don’t make me go back there.

But when we decided to have one, he pointed out, we decided to have two. He could have held up my list as proof. We had decided to have two. One baby was always going to arrive as the first of two.

Fine, get it over with then, I said, before I get any more sane and refuse to go back to Babyland, a jungle so dark and hideous that the very thought of returning made me shiver and sweat. It would be awful. I would go back to surviving on two hours of sleep in every twenty-four. I would go back to the helpless horror of knowing that I could not comfort my baby any better than anyone else in the world, but that it was, as the mother, my job to hold the crying baby and do my best to make things better. I would go back to sitting immobilized on the couch while a baby demanded that I grow a third and fourth breast because he was not done feeding, dammit. I would go back to clinging to the rudder, and hoping that the storm would clear.

I was completely wrong. I have never been so glad to be so wrong about anything in my whole life.

Having the second baby made having the first one make sense. She was round, warm and reasonably cheerful. She slept occasionally. She made little cooing noises. I understood why people liked babies (even if I still semi-secretly thought they were sort of larval). I saw glimpses of the pink, fluffy and warm that had been rumored to hover around these tiny humans. I picked up my crying infant and calmed it, just by being its mother, just by smelling right or having the right voice. The intense miasma that had surrounded me and the first child opened and we both could breathe more easily.

It is somewhat astonishing to me that the woman writing the list knew that she must have two babies. Not even that she’d quite like to have two babies, or that she planned to have two babies but that she MUST. That was right. Had I stopped at one, as I would have given an ounce of leeway, the world would be a less wonderful, more inexplicable place.

Of course, this all makes ten times more sense when I look back and know that the first child was autistic and the second child was not. Babies with autism, even the very high-functioning brand my son has, are not rewarding in the way that a neurotypical child is. They don’t coo and babble; they don’t particularly like faces; they hate even minor shifts of routine; they are rotten self-soothers; they find the world oppressive and overwhelming; they take a long time to bond; they learn to be loyal before they learn to love. It’s not a recipe to make a first-time parent feel confident or even competent, and I’m convinced the baby is not thrilled about its lot in life either. It’s just something to survive, for all of you, not something to revel in. Yet this baby taught me more about love than anything else — or anyone else — had ever done, or will ever do. I am grateful not just for having the second child, but for having both babies.

3. Have a baby two babies.

Check.

This is the third of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

(TTTDBD stands for Twenty Things To Do Before Death, as if you hadn’t guessed.)

2. Live in Italy

Growing up in New York City, when people asked me what I was, I told them I was half-Italian and half-Irish. No one assumed that my mother spoke with a brogue or that my father rode a moped shouting “Ciao!” It was just a way of identifying your heritage in a huge melting pot place.

Once I got to England and then onto wherever else, I had to start saying I was American and I felt like I’d lost a little bit of my identity. What does that mean, American? At the time it was completely meaningless to me (and still is, some days). What it did mean was that I got into a lot of arguments about how we could elect so-and-so president and what did I think I was doing invading Granada?

But I starting thinking more about what it meant to be Irish and Italian. Was it about potatoes, Guinness, storytelling and stone walls? Pasta, Vespas, arguing and the Pope? I wanted to know more, see it all up close, smell it, live it, be it.

Why Italy though, and not Ireland?

Well, Italy is a lot warmer. Espresso, vino, pasta and cannolli. You do get to say “Ciao, bella” an awful lot. Then there’s my name: Francesca Maria Amendolia does not exactly blend in the Emerald Isle. So that’s where I would go. I’d gaze at art, grow tomatoes, write thoughtful letters with a fountain pen and figure out what the Italian was for stamps.

Actually, I already know that because it’s such a great, ridiculous word: francobollo. I’d learn the Italian for lobster.

And let’s be frank. Who wouldn’t want to live in Italy?

Does knowing where we come from tell us where we’re going? The more I work through this list, the more I think it was about identity. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who do other people believe me to be? Can I be someone who eats a lot of lasagne in Italy with a big jug of Chianti? Please? Can I have that life?

Like the girl in The Fantasticks said: Please God, please! Don’t let me be normal!

So maybe 2 could now read something like this:

2. Live a not-entirely-normal life.

This is the second of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

(So to begin, I glanced at the list again and the actual title is “Francesca’s 20 Things to do before Death,” which has the odd effect of making Death sound a bit like a holiday — like Christmas, or Columbus Day. I reckon I phrased it like that because I couldn’t decide, having started in the third person, whether to write “before she dies,” which seemed jarringly disassociated as if I were somehow two people – list-writer and list-writee, or “before I die,” which would mean a change of grammatical perspective, which yuck.)

1. Speak French fluently.

Mais bien sur! Naturellement! Encore du vin, Madame, et je suis desolée que votre grandmere est flambée.

I speak French less well than Eddie Izzard, which is saying something, although if you ever have the chance to watch him do his stand-up in France – en français - you should. It’s super.

I have a smattering of the language, enough to get me a glass of wine and maybe a bit of cheese. It is possible, had I been willing to try, that I knew a lot more than that, but I would have stuttered and halted and made glaring mistakes. I didn’t want that. What I wanted was to speak French casually, easily, as if it were nothing particularly remarkable. I could see myself, slinky dress, cigarette in holder, cocktail in hand, perhaps discussing Sartre . So really, it was not about the language, but about who I would be, were I able to switch into that language at will.

Part of who we are is set. Having children cured me of that whole ridiculous tabula rasa thing. They popped out into the world already themselves. So did we all. But another part of who we are is down to our choices: not Who am I? but rather Who do I want to be? It’s one reason why being a teenager is so exciting and terrifying and exhausting. Am I a jock? Am I emo? Am I punk? Am I a nerd? Am I a rebel? Trying things on, one after another, seeing how they fit, feeling our way towards being the person we want to be.

There’s a bit in The Saturdays, the first book about the Melendys, when Mona has decided to have her braids cut off. As she heads to the hairdresser, she imagines that the people she passes have noticed her, and that now they are wondering about the beautiful girl and her mysterious smile. Then she catches sight of herself in a shop window, and instead of a glamorous young woman, she sees a girl with a wide, young face and a sappy smile that is about as far from mysterious as it is possible to be.

Part of the gift of growing up — and growing old — is that those two images, the one you carry in your head and the one you see in the shop window, begin to resemble each other. The dissonance is not so great. We grow into ourselves, merging who we are with who we want to be, letting go of somethings, embracing others.

I still don’t speak French very well, but I reckon I’d be more willing, should the opportunity arise, to try, which in turn would make it more likely that I would learn to speak it better. So perhaps the new number 1 on my list would be this:

1. Remain willing to make mistakes, and never mind if you feel silly.

This is the first of a series of posts provoked by finding a fifteen year old list of 20 things to do before death. You can read about it here.

I love a new blank notebook, especially those marble Mead ones that we had in kindergarten. They make me feel like the world is a friendly, exciting place full of possibility, and maybe cookies. Or at least pretzels. There are a bunch of them scattered throughout the house, from all different eras of my life, some filled, some not. Yesterday I found one from when I lived in Cairo (so circa the second half of the nineties) and in it was a list:

Francesca's List of Twenty Things to Do Before I Die

I am somewhat amused (or even bemused), from my vantage point of more than a decade later, by its randomness and scope — “Speak French fluently” vs. “Take a pottery course.” Really? I mean, I’m glad some of my life goals simply a matter of signing up at the local art center as opposed to having to be reborn as a 5 foot 8 ectomorph with really bendy feet (because then I could have been a ballet dancer). Although now that I think about it, perhaps that was on purpose, to create a list that mixed concrete, achievable goals with more ambitious ones.

The more I reread this list, the more I feel a sense of kinship with the much younger me who wrote it. Clearly, I was not in my first bloom of optimism. Dancer (for example) is not on the list. Neither is member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bond girl or international woman of mystery. I had clearly given up on marrying a royal or a Kennedy, and had no intention of running for president. Of anything.

Yet  there was a sense I would still do things both small and big. I like that I didn’t put an expiry date on the list. Not “20 Things to Do Before I’m 30″ or even 40 (thank goodness, because that would have depressed me mightily). Just “Before I Die” which is, pretty much, when I’m going to stop achieving things except possibly polluting a small bit of ocean with ash.

I’ve never been all that Type A about things. Really, I’ve just gone places and done stuff. Yet, lurking in the back of my psyche, trying not to be noticed, is a desire to truly DO things. Achieve things. Cross things off a list. In most bits of my life, I feel like Sisyphus, rolling a rock uphill only to have it roll back down. Yet, as Camus pointed out, we must assume that Sisyphus was happy and I get that. I am happy. The struggle is the point.

Still, I recently realized that I am ambitious and it was no good letting that ambition sit gnawing at me, like a rat in a silo. Surface looks okay, but don’t dig down. So I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these goals in turn. So that’s what I’m going to do.

We have a lot of books. In fact, instead of a dining room, we have what we are pretentiously and cheerfully calling the library. It makes me very happy (now that it’s almost tidy) to be in there. I feel extra wise and studious, like I might produce Great Work.

Despite the vast number of books we own, I don’t think I’m a hoarder. I don’t have piles of clothes I never wear or shelves of old school notebooks or broken appliances stacked up in the basement. I try to live by William Morris’ advice: Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Yet there seems to be a lot of stuff around. Not just stuff. Stuff with a capital S. Books (obviously), hats, pillows and shoes. Wooden spoons, laundry, pictures waiting to be hung up. Broken jewelry, yarn, deformed candles, seasonal pencils, bits of the New York Times, half-used pads of drawing paper and old library cards. Library books. Not-quite-dried-up markers. Snow boots that don’t fit anyone.

Some of the Stuff is useful. Some is not. But I remember all too well when all my possessions (minus most books) could be packed into a single trunk. Not a car trunk. A steamer trunk. I remember getting married and giggling about all the things we didn’t have: plates, cutlery, potato mashers, couches, television. We had next to nothing.*

Now I have Stuff. It crept up on me like algae and I’m not really sure how I feel about it. Some Stuff is luxurious. Ooh, we have bath-salts and a turntable and if we want wine, we don’t have to turn out our pockets and count up the change — we can go get a bottle from the rack. It still makes me feel grown-up and wealthy to do that.

Other Stuff, though, is like mucus. Sure, it has a function but too much of it and you can’t breathe through your nose and you snore loud enough to wake the kids. It happens while you’re looking the other way. The accumulation of years, like silt, just piles up.

Lots of things happen while we’re looking the other way. Daniel, for instance, has announced his incipient adolescence, heralded by toe hair, apparently. He’s worried (excited too, but mostly worried) about puberty and he seems to think it might all happen this week. No no, I tell him, not sure whether I’m being reassuring or not, not sure whether he needs reassuring at all, or if I do.

No no. Growing up has very few kabooms. It creeps up on you, almost without you noticing, tiny bit by tiny bit… and like the Stuff, some days will be treasures and some will be mouse-chewed mittens.

*Although definitely not in a quasi-Dickensian “we were so poor that we looked up to people in gutters” kind of way. We just didn’t own anything yet. It made moving a piece of cake.

My son has Asperger’s Syndrome (although very soon, that’s not going to be an official diagnosis anymore — it’s going to be called High Functioning Autism – whatever). He’s in fifth grade now and he’s being bullied. Not badly – not physically – and not in a systematic fashion. He just doesn’t get It. You know. It. That ineffable, inexplicable element of cool that comes so easily to some children and not to others. He doesn’t realize he’s being teased until it’s too late and he’s blown his top. He brings his beloved Ugly Dolls to school and minds when the kids call them ‘stuffed animals’ or make fun of him for having his toys with him. He thinks swearing is a stupid and is quite happy to tattle when things strike him as unfair, which they do fairly constantly. He bursts into tears, screams, leaves the classroom… basically, he’s himself, full on, at all times. Other children are learning to hide who they are, mask themselves beneath a veneer of acceptability. That sounds like a criticism, and I suppose it is, to an extent. But I don’t blame the children. They’re learning to survive in society. My son has different survival instincts, ones that have nothing to do with blending.

He’s in a mainstream school which nevertheless definitely welcomes odd-balls. It’s like Square Peg Central and it’s the reason we’re there, rather than at our local elementary. Still, that lord-of-the-flies thing is still going strong, and he comes home most days with stories of small moments of unhappiness. Asked to draw something in art that ‘tells a story with strong emotions,’ the class clown drew Daniel screaming. He notices the laughter, knows it is unkind, but doesn’t know how to navigate it.

There are a lot of messages of hope and solidarity being sent out to gay teens and pre-teens right now, and rightly so. But the message that it gets better is true for anyone who is being made the Piggy. It gets better. I tell this to my child, and to the child in myself still crying because no one would invite her to play and no one wanted to sit next to her on the bus. It gets better. It gets so so much better.

I have sometimes wondered why I write for children, when I happily shook the dust of those years off my feet and never looked back. But for me, writing for children is not about immersing myself in that mindset. It’s about celebrating what made those years bearable for me, the lifelines that helped me to survive grade school and junior high. For me, now as then, stories make order from an inexplicable universe. I knew that I could have found the door to Narnia, would have climbed the Faraway Tree, would have gone to Oz, would have followed the rules in the Chocolate Factory, would have been pure enough of heart to find the Grail… I knew that I was more than my classmates told me I was. Books kept my soul intact when it might have crumbled.

So now I write the stories I want to read now, the stories I wanted to read then, the stories I reached for, the stories that gave me solace, held me up, took me away, made it all better.

It gets better. It does get better. And in the meantime, there are a hundred hundred stories that will hold your hand, squeeze it secretly and whisper, “You and me, we know. We know things those bullies will never know.”