Do You Have Children?

Men never ask me this question but mothers always do. If I hesitate and answer that I have two children, she may imagine they’re dead. So I hasten to add that we are only estranged. Have been estranged for years. This leads down a path I do not want to tread, at least not with someone I’ve just met.

You, however, I know you. I can tell you a little more of the story. But I must begin with the Great Disclaimer: I was a Monster. Yes, it’s no wonder they got rid of me. Although I didn’t beat them, didn’t chain them up—quite the contrary, I let them go where they wanted. They visited their father, my mother and their friends whenever they liked. I packed them up and spent the holidays alone.


Or with a boyfriend. Single for eighteen years I confess I did have lovers and yes, sometimes they stayed overnight but not in the same room, not until the boy was home from boarding school at fifteen. Even then I was discreet about the bedtime romps.

I was lonely. I like company. I like men and yes, sex. Of course I want to say, my only sin. Now that I’m digging into it, I see there is an underlying, original sin.

I never wanted to be a mother. I never babysat, never played with dolls or imagined what kind of a mother I would be. Never had a crush on a girl, either, although that may be irrelevant. Babies were just outside the picture. The first baby was an accident.

I married Mr. Executive to escape my mother, a woman obsessed with my virginity. She’d have locked me up in a chastity belt if there were such things. The pill came along ten years too late for me.

Frying pan into fire. Without birth control, illegal in Connecticut in 1960 even for married folk, I was two weeks along when I married and a mother a month after my twentieth birthday. The second child was meant to save my marriage.

As my husband prepared to move out I screwed up my courage and asked if he would take the children. I was just twenty-six, still young enough to finish college and start a career.

“You’re a good father,” I said. He had a great job and the kids adored him. “You take them. I’ll have visiting privileges.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I have a job. I can’t be a full-time parent.”

"You can hire a nanny and a housekeeper. Stay in this house, keep the kids in school. I’ll be around."

“And,” I confessed, “I don’t think I’m a very good mother.”

Doing it After All

You'll never be a writer.

That’s exactly what my mother told me.

Writers have to be crazy people. Writers drink too much, screw around, can’t stay married. Writers never make any money.
And they make people angry.
Great writers have special talents.
Great writers are born, not made.
Great writers are like gods, they speak for everyone.
Ordinary people can’t be great writers. Who wants to read ordinary writing? Who do you think you are? What do you have to say?

Nothing. For years, nothing at all. Just grumbling and grousing in my journal.

Then I felt something so strongly I had to write it and I did, in a hurry before the voice of my mother killed it. I didn’t tell a soul what I had dared to do. I just stuck the pages into an envelope, mailed it off and forgot about it.

One day I got a check for twelve lovely dollars from the publication, a horsey newsletter. They printed my writing—now it was a real article—under my by-line. I was so happy I cried.

Mother was completely wrong. I am not crazy, I don’t drink too much and I am happily married. Well, for the second time. It’s true I don’t make enough money to support myself and my writing has angered a few fatheads.

But I don’t have to speak for everyone, just for myself. It turns out there are lots of people like myself who enjoy reading what they are already thinking or about to think or would have thought if I hadn’t written it first.

I don’t have to write the Odyssey or Gone with the Wind so I write about ordinary life. If you are a woman, a parent, any person who has known love and despair, anger and fear, we have a lot in common. That’s enough.

That was Stage One, sheer delight. Ha ha on Mom. Then the spark I had struck dimmed.

Only the gods can write. Who wants to hear all your troubles? Everyone suffers, what’s the big deal about you?

That shut me down for years while I waited for My Big Life Story to unfold. Long wait. Life Story unfolded but was not big enough for a book. I would never dare write a book. Only gods could do that.

Years passed, one ordinary day at a time, added up to a lifetime of ordinary.

More events pissed me off, I wrote more articles. People who read my articles seemed to think I could write a whole book. A joke, right? One man suggested I write about a 19th century bag lady whose portrait hung in the Pennsylvania Historical Society, long ignored.

What preposterous idea! Then I wrote her story as a radio drama, The Story of Crazy Nora, and by golly National Public Radio bought it and aired it.

Still not a book. Years passed, more articles. One day I said out loud in front of a lot of people, “I’d like to write a book.”

By golly, in one year I had written my first book and that won a prize.

But I still did not believe I was a writer. If I became a writer I would become a crazy, penniless drunk, lose my marriage and piss people off.

Now I am old enough to say, Who cares? I have found a husband who not only puts up with my craziness but pays the bills. I don’t drink any more—or any less—than before. I seem to always piss people off anyway, so, so what?

Many people say they want to be writers. What’s the difference between wanting to do it and doing it?

Giving yourself permission. Accepting that you may become your mother’s worst nightmare, a crazy, drunken slut. Oh, and poor, too. That you will undoubtedly reveal to your readers that you never did have a Big Life. That you weep when your dog dies and burn the onions in the frying pan. That you fuck up, that you are a jerk.

But in between, that you are a living, breathing pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem, just like any other person and that is exactly your value to mankind. Our ordinary words bind us, teach us, support and encourage us to love one another and ourselves. Writing our ordinary lives takes us out of ourselves and back home to our own hearts.

Once you begin, you will find your way.