When Kids and Writing Both Grow Up

Here is part of my guest post this week over at Motherlogue.

       Saturday afternoon. I hear my sons squabbling downstairs. I rise from my desk, where I am writing, close my office door and sit back down, pick up my writing again.

      Ten years ago, maybe even two years ago, I would have stopped, headed downstairs, refereed. Gotten thrown off my writing game, maybe not returned to the page for a few hours, a few days. 

      But the boys are 19 and 15 now and the older one was home from college for a short weekend. The squabbling was more balm than burr, at least to me, and I suspect, to both of them too. While I wanted to soak up precious hours with my college freshman, so did his brother and his father.... 

     That was then.

     This is now:  No one bothers me. All the years of reminders (Quiet, Mom’s busy. Mom’s writing, don’t bother her.) — worked. Plus of course, the boys simply grew.
My writing grew up too...

      So here’s what I’ve learned... 

 The rest looks at how my writing grew up alongside my sons, who are now 19 and 15, what's changed about writing and mothering, and how I feel about it all. You can read the whole post here.

Today I'm thinking about why I write. Father did know best.

My father was a major reason I fell in love with words. Each night, he read two newspapers. From the time I was first able to read, he pointed out interesting articles. He wrote short stories, allegorical fables, and letters to the editor which he never mailed. He kept them all in a drawer. He wrote some really terrible poetry, and some pretty darn good poems, and sent them to everyone he loved. He loved books, and he knew the difference between writers and authors. He was philosophical and corny, naturally intelligent but formally uneducated. And, he innately knew, when it came to a piece of writing, that shorter was better than long.


He died three years ago today.

My father detested cold weather and moved to Las Vegas as soon as I graduated from college. But four years or so before that, he accompanied me on a tour of Syracuse University, on a winter day when the temperature barely reached 15 degrees. When we exited the journalism school complex, a blast of frigid wind slammed into us, and he handed me $20 for cab fare and went back to the hotel (where I'm sure he read all the local newspapers.) A few months later, he wrote the first of many tuition checks.

Three years ago tonight, on an airplane heading west through darkness to a too-bright Las Vegas morning, I wrote a eulogy. It took me two hours. It was too long. And, it's never finished.

My Super (Bowl) Essay

While I was being very serious about writing at the AWP conference in NYC today, this essay of mine went up online, which in the whole scheme of things was much more important…at least if you are a Jersey girl and New York Giants fan. Of all the hundreds of thousands -- millions? -- of words that will be written about the Super Bowl this weekend, they may not be the most significant. But they made me kind of popular with the boys in my house!

Maybe it runs in the family....

Q: What could warm a writer-mom’s heart more than her 14-year-old son coming home from school one day last week and asking, “Hey Mom, ever hear of a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald?”



A: When that same son comes home from school yesterday and says, “We’re going to start reading the book Night by Elie Wiesel. Think it’s going to be any good, Mom?”




What I just finished reading: My Misspent Youth: Essays, by Meghan Daum