Writing Through Cancer

To those of you who received two previous posts from “writingthroughcancer.com” this morning, I do apologize.  I’m on the road this month, and this morning, in an attempt to clean up the spam and trash on my site, I inadvertently deleted over a month of prompts between March and this past Sunday.  Whoops!

Thanks for your patience…  My next post will arrive on Sunday, as usual.

Sharon

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My daughter Claire sent me a link to a You Tube video this morning, a fake interview for “the toughest job in the world.”  The interviewer named the position as “Director of Operations,” and little by little revealed the requirements, each more onerous than the one before it.  Interviewees reacted with disbelief, surprise and “no way,” until the spoof concluded with the revelation that the position was actually “mother.”  The surprise and disbelief melted away into teary-eyed words of gratitude from the interviewees for their mothers!

As fun as the video clip is to watch, it drives home the enormous responsibility that comes with motherhood, all the daily tasks that are done in support of a child’s well-being and development.  I remember some of the yeoman’s work that was undertaken each day, the sleepless nights, the inability to do much more than collapse on the sofa once my daughters were put to bed, aware that there were still dishes to wash, laundry to be done, and somehow managing, despite the fatigue, to rise from the couch and finish the tasks.

Those memories have been re-ignited not just by watching the video clip, but by having spent the past ten days in the company of my daughter, Elinor, and her two and a half year old daughter.  The day begins early and from the moment Flora awakens, it’s nonstop activity until after she’s put to bed each night.  With two pre-school children, her sister Claire runs an even more frenetic schedule.  They know, full well now, what motherhood entails.  Now we all exchange “happy mother’s Day” greetings—they, in recognition of my contribution to their lives, and me, in appreciation of the mothers they have become.

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday, and while you may be remembering or celebrating your mother offers many writing possibilities.

This week, step back from Hallmark’s flowery sentiments and remember your mother (or anyone who was like a mother to you) and the role she has played in your life.   What qualities or anecdotes best describe your mother?  How can you bring your mother’s character to life on the page?  What are some of your most important memories of your mother?

Of course, motherhood—the way we see and feel about our mothers—is complex.  Remember the poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens? In each stanza, the reader is offered something like a snapshot, all different but always, the word, “blackbird,” appearing in each.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime…

One writing suggestion is to try imitating Stevens’ structure and write thirteen ways of looking at a mother (or motherhood) and see what happens.

Of course, mothers also give us advice, lots of it; some that we appreciate; some we don’t want to hear.  In a delightful essay entitled, “Advice from My Grandmother,” Alice Hoffman creates an unmistakable portrait of her grandmother, Lillie Lutkin, by offering the reader all the advice given to her by her:

Cook badly.  Even if you’re already a bad cook, make it worse.  Trust me, it’s easy.  Throw in anything you want.  Too much salt, too much pepper.  Feed him and see what he says.  A complaint means he’s thinking about himself, and always will.  A compliment means he’ll never make a living.  But a man who says, “Let’s go to a restaurant,” now he’s a real man.  Order expensive and see what he’s got to say then.

(In Family:  American Writers Remember Their Own, 1996).

We learn from our mothers lessons of love and life, many of them not appreciated until we’re much older.  What a mother teaches us can become material for a character portrait as Julia Kasdorf creates in the poem, “What I Learned from my Mother.”

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(From: Sleeping Preacher, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)

Today and this week, write about mothers, yours, your mother’s or anyone who has played the role of mother in your life.  Write from whatever idea or memory comes to mind.  Remember your mother in as many different ways as you can.

And to those of you who are mothers like I am, I wish you a very happy Mother’s Day.

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What you do with time

is what a grandmother clock

does with it: strike twelve

and take its time doing it.

You’re the clock: time passes,

you remain. And wait.

(From:  “Mother,” by Kurt Brown)

I’ve spent a lot of time waiting over the past few days.  It began at six a.m. on Thursday morning, as I arrived at the San Diego airport to check in for my flight to Toronto.  I waited in line for a boarding pass and to check my bag.  I waited in line at the TSA security checkpoint.  I waited in line to board the flight, and we all waited, an hour and forty minutes past our departure time, the result of the high winds that were pummeling Southern California.  Hours later, arriving in Toronto, I waited in the long line of disembarking passengers to pass through customs.  And by the time I finally claimed my bags and climbed into my son-in-law’s car an hour later than expected, we ran into the dinnertime traffic, extending our normal 25 minutes door to door to about an hour. My day, it seemed, had been defined by little more than waiting.

In truth, it’s not something I do well.  Whether it’s a line at airport security, a doctor’s appointment, a tardy dinner guest, or finding myself still waiting, as I did in her adolescent years, for my daughter, whose perpetually last-minute style is even more pronounced as she juggles her preparation with that of her two-year old daughter’s.  Despite helping out as much as I can, I seem to end up—you guessed it—sitting near the door and waiting to go somewhere we’ve planned.

In Worcester, Massachusetts,

I went with Aunt Consuelo

to keep her dentist’s appointment

and sat and waited for her

in the dentist’s waiting room.

(From “In the Waiting Room,” by Elizabeth Bishop)

Have you sometimes found yourself waiting for someone or something to happen?  No doubt you have, because we’ve done some form of waiting for most of our lives.   We’ve waited for a special event, for people, for letters to arrive, or our planes to depart.  We’ve checked our watches when a guest hasn’t arrived at the appointed hour for a lunch or dinner and wondered if we got the date wrong.  We wait in lines for tickets, for security checks, for advertised specials, or the hot new film that everyone is talking about.  We’ve waited and paced the floor when a teenage child doesn’t arrive home at curfew.  We’ve impatiently thumbed through outdated magazines in the doctor’s office  as the hands on the clock move well past our scheduled appointment time.  And it’s likely that you have waited, as so many of us have, trying not to worry, to hear the results of the battery of medical tests administered to you or a loved one.  In short, we’ve all done a lot of waiting.

We’ve all waited with hope; and we’ve waited with dread.  But sometimes, it’s the waiting that overtakes us, and we’re unable to concentrate on anything but the waiting for someone on something to happen.

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting

And the letter you wait for won’t come,

And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray

And the letter I wait for won’t come.

(From “Caboose Thoughts,” by Carl Sandburg)

We know better, of course.  It does no good to pace the hallway or sit at the table, foot tapping restlessly, willing something or someone to speed up.  Time—and events—move as they will.  If we allow impatience to be the master, then how much of life have we failed to notice?

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

(From “The Four Quartets,” by T.S. Eliot)

The faith and the love and the hope are … in the waiting.  These words make me reconsider why life makes us wait.  I am still learning, even after all these years, to accept what I cannot control, to let things unfold as they will, even if it’s as simple as waiting for my daughter finally come into the room and say, “I’m ready to go now.” and almost always, we manage to arrive wherever it is we’ve planned to go without too much delay.

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

(From:  “You Reading This, Be Ready,” by William Stafford)

What do you wait for?   Do you remember a particular time when your life seemed to be consumed by waiting?  Were you waiting with hope, dread or impatience?  Why?  When has waiting kept you from noticing, from appreciating those small moments of beauty that Stafford describes?  Write about waiting.

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