Becca Rowan is a writer and the author of Life in General, a collection of essays about mid-life as experienced by an American woman in the 21st century. Becca loves creating connections by sharing stories on her popular blog.
As I wrote today's date in my morning pages notebook, it occurred to me that today is my grandmother's 100th birthday. She passed away in 1992, so she's not here to celebrate, but it set me thinking about the way life moves along "in it's petty pace from day to day" until, before you know it, a century has come and gone. I can look back now on the trajectory of her life, an ordinary girl from a small Kentucky town, second in a line of six daughters, and see the ways her character impacted my mother's life, and mine, my son's, and even his children and their children beyond. In reality, the legacy of an "ordinary" person is anything but ordinary. I always credit my grandmother for my love of books and reading, because it was her voice that first brought me all the stories I loved to hear~Peter Rabbit, The Bobbsey Twins, Heidi, The Little House Books. She was always willing to read to me, and even though I never saw her reading anything for herself, she would drop whatever she was doing if I came to her with a book in hand. And it was she who provided the genetic "imprint" for my piano playing. After my own piano was delivered, I would sometimes catch her when she thought no one was listening, gloriously banging out the old hymn tunes she had once played in the little frame Baptist church next to their old farmhouse in Millwood. I would listen in fascination, seeing and hearing a completely different aspect of her, but an aspect I now recognize in myself.
There would have been very little about life in the first half of the 20th century to prepare her for life in the 21st. Always overly cautious and fearful of change, she would no doubt have been horrified by modern life, particularly the way people (meaning me!) spend so much time away from home. For her, if you were fortunate enough to have a nice home, you should be satisfied to stay in it. I didn't quite understand this, until I learned that the only one of my grandmother's sisters to leave home had contracted tuberculosis, which she passed on to two other sisters, and to their father, all of whom died within one year. And yes, as much as I love to travel, I often have to tamp down those little demons of fear, nagging me that I would be better off at home.
Yet, so much of the rest of her philosophy of life is also mine~that loving your family and taking care of them is the most important work you can do, that caring about your neighbors and helping them is what it means to be a Christian (whether you go to church or not!), that you should never be satisfied with anything less than your best work, whatever it is you're doing. These are values that came through her to my mother, and to me, and that I hope I've passed on to my son. Basically, she was just an ordinary girl from a small town in Kentucky, but she left me some pretty extraordinary gifts, for which I'm grateful.
Now that I've spent half a century on earth myself, I'm more than amazed at the swift passage of time. Thinking about my grandmother today reminds me to make the most of the next half of my century, and to continue her legacy to me in a way that will honor her memory into the future.
I'm never quite sure what to say when people ask me what I "do." What they really mean, of course, is what do I do for a living, what I get paid for doing. Depending on who's asking, I'll answer that I'm an administrative assistant (or an administrative professional, as I've been hearing lately). Sometimes, I'll say that I'm an admin assistant and also a musician. I have never said "I am a writer." Why is that? In the past year, I've probably spent just as much time writing as I have working in my office job, or playing piano for my school groups. I've written dozens of haiku and poems, I've completed three short stories and one novel, not to mention close to 250 blog posts on various subjects. I've filled 8 spiral notebooks with handwritten morning page meditations, yet none of my family or friends (except those of you who are reading this) have any idea that I've been doing all this scribbling in my "spare time."
I'm just starting to get my head around the idea that I might be a writer - see, I still can't quite say it for certain! But Brenda Ueland says it, Julia Cameron says it, Natalie Goldberg says it~if you wrote something today, you are a writer. Unfortunately, I've been well conditioned by this product driven world we live in - a world that tells us that unless you've created something that's in demand, something that people are willing to pay for, then you haven't really produced anything worthwhile. It doesn't matter that I spend lots of my free hours sitting in front of this screen, searching for just the right words to convey my ideas about something, or that I study the craft of writing by reading other writers on the subject, or that I feel a sublime sense of well being when I manage to get a sentence or a simile just right. The satisfaction I get from writing~ from using language to convey thoughts, ideas, emotions~is extremely valuable to me. Isn't that reward enough to convince me that I am a writer? In the past, it's been easier for me to define myself as a musician, because people listen to my music. The reward of playing for an audience is immediate and intoxicating. You see their reaction in the smiles on their faces, you feel their involvement in the energy that pervades the room, you hear their enjoyement in the excited applause. I admit that I love that instant reaction, that feeling of providing the audience with something that entertains and enlightens them. The writer's "product"~the essay, the story, the poem~is "consumed" somewhere else. The feedback is rarely immediate, and sometimes doesn't come at all.
Except, of course, in this world of blogging. What a gift to those of us who need to feel as if their words are being read, being consumed by someone, somewhere, who might find them meaningful. The internet has provided writers like us with a place to share our stories, our perspective, our experiences, and ~even more exciting~ to engage in a dialogue with other writers. At least in this space, I find myself much more comfortable saying that I am a writer.
Perhaps, some day, I'll be able to say it to the rest of the world as well.
So, how about you? Do you call yourself a writer? Shouldn't you?
About eight years ago, my son began the lengthy and complicated legal process involved in allowing his fiance to immigrate to America from her native Thailand. He hired an attorney who specialized in immigration law, particularly in obtaining the K-1 visa that she would require to enter the country. I was totally amazed at the number of hoops they had to jump through, the paperwork, the waiting periods, the status levels. Even though they were legally married within the prerequisite 90 days of her entry into the United States, over the last several years they have been required to make numerous visits to the immigration office in Miami, offering photographs and affidavits that proved they remained married and had a "true loving relationship." There was a period of about two years after their marriage when she was not allowed to leave the country~a period during which she missed significant events in her family back in Thailand, events like her sister's wedding and her grandmother's funeral. But all of that ended today. This afternoon, my son and daughter in law made one final trip to Miami where she became an American citizen.
As a third generation American, I guess I've always taken my citizenship a little bit for granted. I do my share of whining about the way things are here (especially lately!), but I'm happy to enjoy the benfits of living in a country where so many good things are readily avaiblable. The tragedy of 9/11 struck me to my core, and I was as fiercly defensive of my country at that time as a mother is of her child. Over the years, I've played around with the idea of moving to another country (like England), but even if I did, I doubt whether I would relinquish my American citizenship. So I'm touched that my daughter in law wanted to do this, that she chose to pledge her allegiance to this country.
American entices people from all over the world with it's largesse, it's abundance, it's variety and choice. Sort of like belonging to the popular crowd in school, it's something people desire to be a part of. And I believe in the ideal of the melting pot, that American should be a place where people from other countries can seek new opportunities, religious freedom, or refuge from oppression. If we look back far enough in our geneolgy, everyone in this nation has an ancestor that chose this country as his new home, that came here looking for something new, different, better. My Armenian grandfather owed his life to the United States~ he was so proud of his citizenship that he considered July 4 his birthday, and we always celebrated it as such.
But today, I'm most proud of my daughter-in-law, for all the work and effort she's made to get to this point (and for scoring 100% on the new, more difficult citizenship test!!) She is a lovely, intelligent, caring, and hard working young woman, who is a great asset to our family, and will be a great asset to our nation.
Congratulations, Nantana!
Last night, breaking one of my own unwritten rules, I read through old morning pages notebooks. I shy away from reading these things I've written, these morning thoughts that I allow to stream onto the page directly from my still sleepy subconscious. I'm afraid of how inane these words will seem, that they represent nothing more than the dissatisfied ramblings of a middle aged woman, one who is always too polite to speak her frustrations aloud and so lets them spill onto pieces on paper. It was not without trepidation that I unearthed the pile of notebooks and started paging through them. But I'm trying to make some decisions about my life and its direction, and I was hoping that somwhere in these volumes of words I've written over the past seven months, that some sort of synthesis would occur, some words or phrases that would leap off the page, cause me to do a double take, and say, "Yes, that's it! There's the answer, right there in black and white!"
There is a strange alchemy that occurs in the writing process, a defining of the dross of our thoughts into the gold of insight and inspiration. "The power of the word is real, whether or not you are conscious of it. Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize," writes Sonia Choquette, a spirtual teacher. Natalie Goldberg calls it "composting," the method of allowing our experiences to sift through our consciousness and onto the page, until our thoughts become like rich, fertile soil.
Sure enough, there was gold to be mined in those morning pages notebooks of mine. There were some words that kept appearing over and over, words that immediately sparked the "Aha!" in my mind, telling me exactly where I needed to focus energy for change in my life. Spending a few moments writing each day, I've used the written word to connect to my subsconscious thoughts almost the way a therapeutic hypnotist will allow us access to our deepest feelings.
Writing is powerful. It connects us to ourselves in unexpected and surprising ways.
So, how about you? Has your writing provided you with any "Aha!" moments lately?
