A writer friend of mine had a baby this year, and she is struggling to balance writing, parenting and marriage. I struggle with the same thing, as so many of us do, but when I read my friend's letter, I realized how completely out of the woods I am. My kids, after all, get up and get dressed by themselves and make themselves breakfast and go to school until about 4:00 every day. One of them even drives, for heaven's sake. My parenting is crammed into the margins of the day, now -- a drama over a middle school mean girl that bubbles up at 11:00 p.m., a crisis over a college essay that coincides exactly with a deadline of my own on a Friday afternoon, a snarky attitude at 7 a.m. that has to be nipped in the bud before it is allowed to bloom. It's all relatively manageable stuff. I have giant swaths of every day in which I get to write. I am home free.
At first I thought I couldn't be much help to my friend. What good would it do, after all, to say, "Oh yeah -- ha! ha! -- I remember those shaky years." Then I realized that it would, in fact, do a world of good just to know that someone had been there before and survived it. That's one of the main reasons I love books: books allow us to experience something we haven't experienced before, and to realize that we're not alone, and to believe that we, too, will make it through. That's the power of storytelling.
So I told my friend my tale. I recounted how I used to cry all the time, and how I thought I was losing my mind, and how I was so desperate to write something -- anything! -- that I wrote a really bad book. I told her how many things I do badly (cooking, housecleaning, gardening, socializing, hair care -- the list is endless) so that I can be a good wife, mother and writer. I told her how much Barney my kids used to watch so that I could do a little work of my own, and how I wrote the last lines of one of my books while sitting on the floor outside the bathroom where my kids were playing prune-like in the bathrub. I told her to keep breathing because it would get better -- not soon, but one day.
And she wrote back and said, "You saved my life today. I read your email three times." Our stories matter. That's why we have to keep doing what we're doing.
2 comments:
I love reading this post. How thoughtful of you, to give your friend the consideration and time to write to her and offer support and provide a little guidance. That is what friendship is all about.
Knowing that others have been through what you've been through and survived is helpful so often in life. So many times we tell people that we know what they're going through when we really don't. But sometimes we really do know and that's when we have to make sure we give them that support.
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