Tracy Lucas

How to make 100% sure you never get your big break as a writer

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:28:00 +0000

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Indie publishing queen Zoe Winters, who keeps accidentally inspiring me to write these mondo-long blog posts when I’m innocently trying to procrastinate by reading her blog in the first place, spoke today about the myth of The New York Gatekeepers of Publishing.

From Zoe's post:

There is a lot of hullabaloo about “good writing” vs. “bad writing”. And how do you know if you’re a “good writer” or not? The sad truth is that you can’t. I think one of the reasons the gatekeepers hold SUCH strong sway over unpublished authors is that they NEED to know if they’re good or not.

And the reason they need to know, probably more than other types of artists, is that EVERYBODY thinks they can write. Whether they can or not. Everybody believes they have a book in them. It’s not like other forms of art like painting and sculpting and film where people seem to have some basic grasp of whether or not they suck.

So many writers don’t have enough self-confidence. And those that do often end up being the ones everybody mocks for self-publishing crap. So people are afraid if they have self-confidence it must mean they suck and are just deluded. So much ego is wrapped up in the act of writing.

When a NY publisher says: “Yes! We will buy this work!” They are validating you. They’re an authority figure. To many writers these gatekeepers mean more to them than end readers.

She’s right. Validation is a slippery thing.

I’ve found more trouble dispelling that crazymaking need for outward validation than any other aspect of the illusionary writing life. Every time I thought my big break was imminent, something always came along to knock me back down to my comfortable place on the bottom rung.

Usually, it was me.

And before you say, "Well, I don't care what other people think, I'm writing for myself," let me tell you: writing to publish “for yourself” as an end goal is impossible emotional level to hit and score against. Here's why.

As a naive college kid, I remember thinking, "I'll be a professional writer when I send out my first query letter to a major publishing house."

Then I did just that, and it turned out to be not that big of a deal. My family was unimpressed that the Highlights editor hand-penned a couple of words on one corner of my green form letter. If I remember correctly, it was just my name, but I still did the happy dance. At first.

Of course, it wasn’t an acceptance or anything, so I decided that had been a dumb proclamation and aimed my sights higher. At, you know, publication, even.

A few years and several “real jobs” later, on a total fluke, I got a temporary gig as a journalist and it stuck. I was making $30 a week. The checks came in my name, like clockwork, for my words. In fact, I still remember the date and the weekday I first saw my name on the front page of a real, live newspaper.

But it wasn't making-a-living money, and I wasn't being creative; I was being a hack. I would know I was a real artist when I made some cash for something I felt like writing, not a city council recap. Something with authority, some prestige.

Then I thought, "Well, when I get my first acceptance for something creative, that'll be how I know I've arrived." I sent out a few subs and I got one, from a now-defunct online poetry zine. (Actually, I was in their last issue. Did I break it? Sorry, guys.)

But that was just a blog-style zine on some guy's free webpage. It wasn't a real, paper journal. (Don't hit me, Zoe, this is past tense. We all know better now than to doubt digital.) I decided would know I was an actual writer when I made it onto a physically printed page which I could show my family. That would prove it.

Then I did, but it was poetry. It wasn't a story. Try again. Then I got that, too. But it wasn't for money, so I still had qualms about telling everyone else I was a "professional writer".

I soon started working at a subsidy publishing house, editing books and learning how to do layout and define bindings to newbies and call Ingram and register copyrights. I made a couple of hundred a week for playing with books.

But they weren't my books, so they didn't count.

I became part owner of the publishing house when the former manager and majority owner had a huge shake-up, and I got to reorganize things to a degree. One of my partners and I decided to do an anthology, and we did. My name was right there on the cover. I wrote the introduction, selected the cover art, and wrote the press releases. I gave copies of the book to everyone for Christmas, and my extended family started thinking I was famous.

But I knew the truth; I had self-published it, and it didn't have to pass anyone's muster but my own. I knew it didn't count...

I could go on and on, but I've kinda already done that.

Just trust me when I say there has been plenty more, and it’s all the same pattern.

Between those college kid days and where I am now were a ton of other random publishing jobs, lots of writerly dues-paying, and nods of validation from many people I used to be completely terrified of and intimidated by. Now I publish fiction and non-fiction pieces in all sorts of places, report weekly for a regional newspaper, edit other people's books at a good wage, publish a literary magazine, own a book and graphic design company, and make enough between all these things to stay home and write exclusively.

My child goes to daycare so I can write, make conference calls, and manage publishing projects. I do this and nothing else for eight hours a day, every day of the week. My family is even buying that I'm a Real Writer, initials in caps. They buy me pen sets at Christmas.

I’m finally, provably established.

Yet every day as I’m running around doing these things, it's still in the back of my mind that I haven't sold anything to a NY publishing house and garnered a pretty little advance, written a full-length novel, or seen my name on a cover at Wal-Mart...

And yes, I know how silly that is. I get that now. All along the way, my goals only seemed ideal until I reached them. Then they lost their weight and became meaningless; because surely any goal that I could reach couldn’t have been that hard to begin with. Once a particular thing’s not impossible anymore, it becomes boringly attainable and I have to refocus elsewhere.

Silly or not, though, I think it's human nature to keep pushing the golden ring further away out of your grasp. Since I’ve noticed my mental self-sabotage, I’ve watched others do it over and over and over again. My husband acts, and time and again I've seen him reach his goals only to instantly change them, brutally discounting everything he’s done so far. It’s that next step that will be the big break... even though last year, the “big break” was the thing that now he’s done.

Remember junior high? How if you were only in high school, people would have to listen to you and treat you like an adult? Remember high school? How if you only had a car, then you could go anywhere and conquer the world? It’s like that. Well, here you are. You have a car, you are an adult. Is it everything you thought it would be? Is life suddenly easier, perfect, tangle-free?

It only seems like an exclusive world when you're outside looking in. It’s all about the imaginary prohibition. The people looking back at you through the glass are probably regretting their own yet-unreached pinnacles over the agent lunches you're jealous of. The people sitting in publishing offices sipping lattes are likely daydreaming about other offices, other projects, other lives.

As one of my favorite Jackson Browne lyrics puts it:

No matter where I am
I can’t help thinking
I’m just a day away
From where I want to be

One of the things I’ve never thought to tell newer writers (which I suppose I should) is to set small goals—in writing—and keep the list somewhere so you can check yourself against it every few months. Maybe add more goals later on, sure; but make a rewarding pattern of Xs as you go.

Those checkmarks are worth everything, even when your ego outgrows that goal and looks for a new one.

And like Zoe said, so much of being in this business oftentimes comes back to ego. For better or worse, being a writer is part of being a writer, go figure, and it's all part of the territory. It's the weirdest kind of journey, and I don't know of a single established writer who would stand on the mountaintop and proclaim that he is finished, everything meaningful in him has been written, and there are no new mountains to climb.

That's a great thing. Ambition is what makes us better, makes us wiser, and gives us something to hope for. Yeah, it can be a curse, but it’s definitely a blessing, too.

Don’t ever stop reaching for new places, new heights.

Just remember not to miss the milestones along the way.

They count. They really do.

100 years are simply not enough

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:43:00 +0000

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I read a blog the other day (3 Shared Paths, one of my favorites), and the latest post discussed the recent solar eclipse and how long it would be until the next one: 19 years.

Rebecca mused on how long 19 years feels—not is, chronologically but really feels—and how much a life can change in that time span.

My favorite gem:

What will be the themes in your life 19 years from now? Take some time to really think about it because you’re building that time in your life right now.

That hit a nerve. Definitely.

19 years ago, I was a different person. Hell, that was three whole people ago. In 1991, I was idealistic, lazy, depressed, and hopeful. Yes, all at the same time. I had my whole future ahead of me and I knew it, so I didn’t waste much time with the present.

Unfortunately, that particular present was the last place I had the chance to see my great-grandmother alive. Or visit my childhood home which was later bulldozed for the maintenance area of a public golf course. And it wasn’t long afterward that I had a crisis of faith, my first broken heart (which is really the only one that matters, isn’t it?), and a breakdown in the identity of my youth.

So much has changed since then, and I must have been the one that changed it—for better and for worse.

I’ve rebuilt, and I’m better for it. You always are.

It takes a lot of breaking to make a solid person.

That doesn’t mean it was simple. When you’re a kid convinced of invincibility, as all kids are, the first problem is always the hardest. You disbelieve that bad things really are going to happen, or that your turn for old age is just around the corner.

Rebecca’s blog post reminded me of a tiny poem I wrote when I was in my 20s:

~30~

When I am thirty
I shall believe
That I will die

For as a child,
Both thoughts
Were equally impossible.

I find it in a folder again every few years.

Umm, yeah. It happened, just as I suspected it would. I was right.

The poem's a bit overdramatic, as many of my twenty-something and teenage poems were, but the concept still fits.

Now I know, without a doubt, that I am going to die. I will have a last breath, leave my body, and go wherever it is we go. My body is going to only fall apart more, not develop or strengthen, from here on out.

I will no longer have a voice or an experience. I will vanish, too.

I’ve been brooding on mortality lately. (I’m a morbid little punk.) When you think about it too much, it just all seems like such a waste. 70-100 years is so terribly short a time to accomplish everything you can, from start to finish—and getting that long to do it is under the best possible circumstances in the first place, blindly taking for granted that you don’t die in a car wreck or succumb to some disease or another long before 70.

Life is too short.

The John Ondrasik song “100 Years” sums it up best, I think.

That song. Yes. That’s where I am today. Exactly there.

I’ll be brighter later. These days there are serious family health things going on, financial worries, parenting battles, and major work stresses. (Those are constant, though; freelance work is never a consistently smooth ride.)

I’m not complaining. Please don’t think I am. I love my family and the fact that I get to stress about deadlines in the first place.

It’ll all be okay in the end. I have faith that it always is, even when that has to mean that life is tangled with thorns and razors in the midground from here to there.

This year has been reflective for me, and quiet. Seriousness has a place, and that’s all right sometimes. If you never pull back and look, really look, then you don’t know where you are in the path on the first place.

You can’t recognize the good times until you’ve murdered your ego through the bad times.

(That sounds more Buddhist than I actually am. Huh.)

But life is intentional, difficult or not, and this is mine. When it gets better, I’ll rejoice and bounce around a little in my shiny happy new circumstances. Until then, I’ll appreciate what I have, work to make things better, and enjoy the time I have with my family whatever our current flavor may be.

You have to be careful spending the time you have. You don’t get more.

I try to remember that, but I’m human. I get pissed off about toilet paper rolls hung the wrong way and bills mailed late (ha! paid bills?) and having to clean the house from scratch nightly. Everybody nitpicks, I suppose.

But overall? I love my husband. I adore my kids, and feel privileged to be able to watch them grow up and change before my eyes. I get to do what I enjoy for a living, albeit a meager one at the moment. Maybe these are the golden days. Maybe we’ll win the lottery and remember these years as the ones when times were tough and we were young and in love and we had to live in a tiny space nestled into bed with the baby.

Life isn’t always rosy, but it could stop at any minute. And then it’s done; whatever happened is over and that’s the legacy you’ve left. There is no correcting it; there are no do-overs.

Life is the bills, the groceries, and the years winding by in a less-than-perfect state. It’s the memories made over crappy, burnt breakfasts and dead dogs and Christmas presents that aren’t quite as expensive as the gifts you’d like to be able to give.

Life isn’t in the clouds. It’s here, in the dirt and the mud.

And it’s beautiful.

Fine, okay, alright. The much-feared, obligatory "7 THINGS" post.

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:54:00 +0000

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Far be it from me to be accused of taking things "too seriously", as claimed by this guy, who is actually a dear personal friend from Austin, Texas.

Apparently, my blog topics are bringing him down.

So, in the interest of pacifying Frank, and since he was kind enough to call me a "worthy blogger" for all the world to see, here are seven things that few people know about me. (But I'm not pasting the graphic or tagging anyone else, so you can forget it.) :)

1. Jackson Browne's "Sky Blue and Black" is one of my all-time favorite songs. I'm overcome with emotion almost everytime I hear it... and I've heard it a LOT. (I think I even own eight or nine different versions, actually, and I've had them for over ten years.) This is a song that I should be desensitized to enough to let it roll off my back; but it never, ever does.

2. I play guitar. Not magnificently, but enough to sing along with pretty well and surprise most people who know me on a face-to-face basis. I've been thinking about making some YouTube videos just for kicks, but never have gotten around to it yet. Maybe soon.

3. If I weren't a writer, I'd probably be an interior designer. I draw houses constantly, have architecture software to make 3D images of them, and snip photos out of magazines to save forever. I also play The Sims just to decorate. And then I kill them all.

4. I can't stand the smell of Cheeze-Its. This especially sucks because my kid loves goldfish crackers, and they're close enough to count, as far as my nasal membranes are concerned. I think the hatred stems from the time I ate an entire family-sized box of Cheeze-Its on a roadtrip to Pennsylvania as a kid, and then ate them all in reverse. All over the car. The sight alone of the box on the grocery store shelf is enough to make me nauseated. Maybe that's why I hate orange.

5. I have never read MacBeth, Midsummer's Night, nor King Lear. I should do that. It actually really bothers me.

6. I watch every minute of the Winter Olympics obsessively, and always have, but I won't watch the Summer Olympics at all. I have no idea why.

7. I have had the same email address for sixteen years. The only people who ever write me there are spammers and old boyfriends, so I rarely check it... but I pay $10 a year to renew it just because I can't stand the thought of breaking my record.

So, there you have it.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled, over-serious programming. Pffftt.

.

Smash Cake obsession, and a bit of gratuitous non-self-promotion

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:16:00 +0000

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Been crazy-busy working on not one, but two new websites; one for my editing and design company, Four Square Creative, and one for the literary magazine I'm starting as an imprint thereof, Smash Cake Magazine.

(The sites aren't fully cooked yet, so I'm not sharing links today. But believe me, my dears, you'll be the first to know.)

I've got lots of plans and big dreams, but as usual, not-so-limitless financial resources. I'm fine with that; having no money just means making more time.

Instead of hiring a web developer (the cheapest quote I received was for $2500 for a five-page site), I decided to grit my teeth and learn enough CSS and PHP to do it on my lonesome. Was it comfortable? Not by a million miles. But was it educational? You bet your little lacy doily.

This is the part where I pimp WordPress, and swear to anyone reading this that their CP is the way to go. Granted, it took me the better part of a week and several twelve-hour, squinting-at-the-screen-with-my-eyes-crossed, massive headache-inducing sessions... but in the long run, their support codex is unbelievably intuitive, idiot-proof, and helpful. I survived. Nothing blew up... well, more than once, anyway. I got it.

Also helpful was the myriad of support pages at Laughing Squid, my hosting company, who I'm equally rabid about. For eleven bucks a month, I've got a sweet package and constant support. This is a kooky little company run by just a handful of artsy folks, and they've managed to stay that way. It's amazing; I wish I knew these people personally... they're just so interesting! And I'm pretty sure their freakishly detailed support pages would help anyone trying to get started, even if the person were using a totally different host. They're that good. The longest their support desk has EVER taken to respond to a ticket of mine was still within the same hour I submitted it. (This includes a ticket that I sent in just one hour before the close of business on a Friday afternoon. These people are the bomb.)

Anyhow, now that I've learned a little bit of what's necessary to dance into real, live web-hood, I'm [thisclose] to releasing details about Smash Cake Magazine, and I'm terribly, desperately excited. It feels as if everything else I've done, edited, and published up until now has been all backstory for this, my baby.

Hopefully, we can make her fly.

Flashing my boobs

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:12:00 +0000

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Literarily speaking, that is. (And no, literarily's not a real word. It should be.)

Literary Mama has seen fit to publish my poem "Brevity", available by clicking here.

It's a little weird for me, honestly. I adore this particular publication, and have submitted time and again there, only to have two accepted pieces. (Both of those are here, for anyone who's interested.)

And I've always sworn by writing what you feel, not what's comfortable, so there was no oddity at all in my submitting a piece that deals with secret breastfeeding habits that I picked up casually, remember fondly, and don't tell anyone about because it's probably kind of gross.

Submitting things like that has never been an issue for me at all. Reading poems aloud about private sexual experiences or my personal failures and embarrassments has happened more than once, in groups from five to twenty. I've gotten shocked looks, offended a few folks, and been congratulated for my honesty--sometimes even all at the same event.

I'm not shy with my words.

So why does seeing this particular poem, which isn't racy, controversial, or even remotely written in blue language, suddenly making me feel so squirmy?

Is it because my step-kid is now old enough to be able to follow a link on my blog and see it? Is it because it's gross, and not blatantly rock-and-roll sexy?

I don't know.

But there's a poem about my nipples at Literary Mama, I'm twitching as I write this, and I wouldn't change it for the world.

NaNo Nashville gear now live!

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:20:00 +0000

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Here's the project I've been working on this week... well, the one that's fully finished, at any rate.

The flash panel below is NOT an outside ad nor a referral link, it's merch for NaNo Nashville, my personal Zazzle store.

NaNo Nashville is a subgroup of writers here in Music City who are getting together to support each other in their attempts to produce a 50,000-word manuscript in only one month. These items are not official NaNoWriMo gear, but rather are based on a logo I designed and implemented on these items to help raise funds for the events hosted here toward Tennesseean efforts.

One third of all of the proceeds will be donated back to the official NaNoWriMo site, located here, to thank them and keep them going, and another third goes to the official NaNoWriMo Municipal Liason for Nashville, Mandi, who has been awake every night since August planning, scheduling, and begging for donations from every business in the area (mine included, LOL -- we paid for and sent a ton of bookmarks and some door prizes for the kickoff party.)

Anyhow...

Hope there's something cool for everyone... and if you have a suggestion or quibble, please feel free to yell it at me. I'm all ears!

.

The idiocy of modern fairy tales

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:02:00 +0000

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Yeah, we live in a world turned topsy-turvy with political correctness. Yeah, it makes most of us sick. (Alternatively, it makes the rest of us insane with vanilla-flavored fury at anyone who doesn't play the game.)

Not a big secret there.

But one thing I'd missed somehow was that folks these days, especially in the early education realm, are bowdlerizing Mother Goose and other common rhymes for the emotional well-being of our little tots.

Of course, Grimm's tales and those from the Hans Christian Anderson archives are never what Disney would have you believe; children get maimed, killed, eated, abandoned, or upset and left in a sad ending, even.

I knew we weren't all familiar with the details, being the self-aware, therapy-loving, post-Boomer generation we are.

But Humpty Dumpty? Apparently, according to the BBC, he can't break now. He ends up happy and superglued.

The old lady in the shoe? She has reformed her child-rearing policies and now gives kisses instead of whippings. Still not good enough? Worried because she "doesn't know what to do"? Calm thyself; that's fixed, too. Here's a multi-stanza version, including the words "kindhearted mom", and other baffling things.

Even the Minotaur is now cute and cuddly, and those crazy boys from Troy got a (yay!) surprise from their good friends who sent them a horse. No mention whatsoever of the killing and sacking, death and destruction.

Read this article by someone with the distinctly opposite view of mine, iffn' you wanna, and tell me what you think.

Personally, I can't believe my ears.

Or eyes.

Hell, whichever is politically appropriate.

.

Two poems up at The Legendary

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:31:00 +0000

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Thanks to the editors of The Legendary, who saw fit to publish two of my poems, "Loving Darkness" and "Finger Trails" in the September issue.

These are among the older poems that I haven't trotted out in a while, and it's nice to see them find a home.

The Issue #9 poetry section is available for your viewing pleasure here until October 20th or so, and my permanent contributor's page is here.

Is reading really wrong for little kids?

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:28:00 +0000

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One controversial website I frequent fairly often (wait, doesn't that already mean "frequent"?) is a blog called FreeRangeKids.

The basic idea here, posed by mother-turned-activist Lenore Skenazy, is that our kids already know what they're doing. And if they don't, it's up to them to figure things out.

Want your child to learn how to cook for himself? Then ya gotta let him burn his hands on the frying pan a time or two. Should your kid be creative enough to play on her own and make up games with sticks? Then you have to cancel some of the fifty-seven extracurricular lessons you've scheduled for her and give her time to just wander in the yard without a plan.

I agree with this, in theory. Sometimes only in theory.

About half of the time, I think the advice is dead on the nose.
Exactly half the rest of the time, the site just pisses me off.

That's probably why I go; adrenaline is a great thing to get you going in the morning when you don't really want to go do the laundry yet.

Regardless of why I do this to myself, most of the blogs I've read have sent me into a tizzy in one direction or the other, either for wanting to stick up for the blog-fodder folks who are accused of being overprotective, or in joining the blog crowd in wanting to lynch them.

Today's post, written by someone other than Lenore, fits into the writing scheme of things, and angers me on a certain level.

The full post is here, but here's the gist:

Wait a minute: Are those flashcards in that mom’s hands? At a baseball game? Yes. Yes, they are. She’s holding them up to test her preschooler on her letters and numbers – on a Friday night at Little League.

Meanwhile, your kids are playing under the bleachers. Something about a princess and a fire truck and magical cookies…you have no idea what they’re saying. All you know for sure is that your kids are having fun, while the little girl with the flashcards is working on mom-imposed homework and a nervous breakdown before she’s 12.

Here's my take, and what I wrote in the comment trail:

I'm sure somebody will be quick to call me a liar, but...

I was reading at a third-grade level when I was three. I skipped kindergarten, and I LOVED school. Never fell behind, never hated it, never stopped wanting to find out more things and dig into more subjects. (Except math, LOL, but that's another whole post...)

My mom used two methods to teach reading to my sister and me. She'd read to us constantly, and use her finger to follow the words along as she went. It wasn't long before we were reading them to her, and then writing our own stories (the earliest one I've found a copy of was a snowman saga I wrote when I was four.)

The other method was, you guessed it, flashcards.

She made her own on little index cards (this was the 70s, so it wasn't exactly a hot topic yet), and used words for things that we knew; Mommy, Daddy, toes, cat, door, hot, Barbie doll, shoes, etc.

She never "pushed us to achieve" or forced us to sit down and do them; it was just a game that we both liked and it made my sister and I feel like grownups. All kids like that feeling; hell, that's why most of us first try drinking coffee.

She just did it as a game, and we demanded to play it all the time. Pretty soon, I was reading my favorite store signs, snack food logos, and toy commercials. She'd stick those little suckers right into the flashcard mix, and I got to yell "PEPSI!" and "KMART!" and throw my hands up and run around the room laughing hysterically.

T'wasn't torture, I'm afraid.

Granted; that depends on the kid. For my sister and I, reading was a cool game, and it stuck. I'm a professional writer and book editor, she's a 24-year-old with a Master's Degree who works as a children's librarian in a major city.

I don't remember learning to read at all; it's just always been my favorite hobby and something that came naturally.

I get that we're all against the soccer-mom hovering types who are forcing this stuff down their kids' throats and obsessing over Yale scores at 14 months... no argument there whatsoever.

But could we also entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, that kid at the Little League game was one of my breed, and that's the ONLY way the parents could keep the child busy enough to sit through the game without driving everyone else in the bleachers NUTS?

Part of the key to the Free-Range problem in the first place is that good moms and dads are paranoid about the faceless mass of OTHER parents who are lurking in the shadows, waiting to judge every parental decision they make.

Our doing it in reverse doesn't make us any better.

So, maybe I'm a little too defensive above, but I'm curious...

I have writer and reader friends through here from time to time.

What do you guys think?

How did you learn to love words--was it because or in spite of your parents, or maybe even totally unrelated?

The Father's Take on Parental Fear

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:16:00 +0000

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Well, okay, not my own child's father, specifically speaking, who I'm sure would have a plethora to say on the subject (and my increasing motherly paranoia) if ever he had the time to blog.

Nope; I'm referring to fellow writer David Erlewine, who I first admired only as one of his random blog followers and recently have had the pleasure to chat regularly with online.

Apparently, he not only writes some of the darkest fiction on the subject of family life, he's also an all around pretty decent guy--with two perfectly healthy kids, a beautiful and supportive wife, and a list of publication credits longer than... well, longer than I can think of a cliche for.

This is why you should care. In all fairness and full disclosure, my recent blog detailing how my son's new existence makes me terrified of the world at large came from a purely female viewpoint.

I have no experience being a father.

I can't speak for any emotions that go along with that role, nor even understand it in the slightest, I'm sure. Having been a stepparent for the majority of my adult life, I'd like to think I can relate on some level, though; I used to cringe every time someone proselytized, "You'll never understand until you birth a child yourself," or, "It's different when you made them on your own," or acted like breastfeeding was some superhuman talent that the rest of us should grovel in awe of.

I wanted to punch people quite often... How dare someone assume how much I loved my kids, biological or otherwise, and pretend for half a second that her love is better, stronger, and truer just because she once shared some body parts and a few fluids with an embryo?

It appears that I'm still a little pissed on that point.

But I get it now; I do. I used to think these people were belittling me, and elevating themselves into the role of the righteous parent, all-knowing and fully attached. They made me feel inferior, and fake. I became a plastic parent in each of those conversations, and backed away, unnerved. They convinced me not to stick up for myself as a parent; I had only the title, not the right.

I have to imagine that this is similar to the rap that some fathers get. My husband, Jerry, would love nothing more than to be a stay-at-home dad. In fact, that was the plan when our children were merely hypothetical beings. He'd stay home and clean and cook (um, no-brainer for me, yes please!), and I would by then be a big-shot publisher, work a forty-hour week doing what I love, and bring home the bacon.

Well, that mostly happened. I became the co-owner of a local publishing company the very same month that I learned I was pregnant. Things rather fell apart when I was on bedrest for ninety percent of my pregnancy (my office name became "The Incubator", which seems to have stuck, unfortunately), but the women I worked with were phenomenal and understanding, and everything kept right on moving according to plan.

Eventually, I sold my shares back to the other two owners and struck out on my own, forming a design and editing company with the money and working from home so I could be closer to my son while he's still little enough to benefit from it.

But in all this?

We learned that I simply can't make the kind of money in publishing, even as a fiercely dedicated entrepreneur, that Jerry can make in his line of work. I can supplement us, and quite a bit, actually; but I can't grab enough bacon from my books to feed us at the end of the day without some serious help.

So, in the end, I'm a stay-at-home mom who works next to the playpen, stays up late long after everyone else is in bed to network online and produce more copy, and never actually gets any sleep of her own. Oh, and every month or so I do the dishes.

Jerry, who'd love to trade, can't.

And yes, I adore my kid dearly, and would feel ripped in half if I returned to the corporate world now. I can't imagine dropping him off at a daycare, or even missing six hours of his life during the day, which his father would spend with him instead.

But what of Jerry's feelings?

Don't dads get to love their children obsessively, too?

We mothers tend to act sometimes like we have the monopoly on parental instinct, loving insight, and all things kid-related.

Every once in a while, an eloquent father shows up and slaps us all around to remind us that is simply not the case.

David Erlewine is one of those fathers, and wrote a guest blog over at PANK magazine on just that subject; how his kids scare the bejeezus out of him, and why he writes it out of his system.

On that, I can relate.

Here's his stance, in his own words..

Go read it, then let me know what you think.

As good a time as any

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Lucas) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 06:17:00 +0000

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Today is my son's first birthday.

I never thought I'd say that.

Firstly, because I always swore never to bear offspring, and secondly, because surely it hasn't been an entire year since I revoked that oath.

It doesn't seem possible.

At 7:05 p.m., he will have been outside of me for one calendar year; I over here and he over there. At that evening hour, scheduled for tonight, he will cease being my baby, my infant, and officially become my toddler, my young child.

I want to write an epic letter, mother to son, waxing philosophic on how the past year's changed me and how the future will change him. I want to promise him things, stop and remember moments, and breathe in the last of this day.

But I can't.

I can't face myself.

It's stupid; it's just a birthday, simply a calendar notch, only an anniversary. It was bound to happen. We've known it was coming.

Yet here I am, 1:22 in the morning, typing random crap into this blog editor and crying my silly not-as-little-as-it-used-to-be ass off.

I think I know why.

Nobody told me--or if they did, I didn't hear them--about the bizarre instinctual forces at play in a mother after birth. I mean, I admired the hell out of anyone who'd done it, and I would never have laughed off the task. (That's why I wanted no part of it, remember?)

There's an animal fierceness that takes over once the parasite is removed from the host. I expected to be relieved when birth was over; I expected to be celebratory and thankful.

Instead, I became terrified.

I was transfixed by the tiny grubworm of a human before me, the one who needed everything, at all times, in all measure. I loved him more than I was prepared for. The world began scaring the shit out of me.

Jerry had said that before, when we once pretended to talk about having more kids. Neither of us was serious at the time, and we were shy ninety percent of the resources we'd need, anyway. It was a daydream and nothing more. But one of the things he had said was that he feared bringing another person into this world, and adding to the two he'd already made. He said that he didn't think he could handle being afraid for a third. Not again.

His first two weren't mine. They are now, but they didn't start that way.

I didn't birth them; the hormones were not my own.

I laughed at him then, and told him he was paranoid. I asked him who would keep the world safe if we didn't make more decent people. I silently figured he was too sentimental, and it was a single daddy thing, made whole by his not being in the girls' day-to-day lives anymore.

Now, I get it. Now those thoughts have come back to kick my ass.

Every time he bumps his head, Natasha Richardson flashes through mine. Every time he screams, I weigh the decibel against pain value and worry quotient.

When he sleeps, I watch him breathe. I check, I count.

Carseat straps are yanked upon with every muscle fiber I possess, regardless of the length of trip or the span of time (five minutes) since we've been to the store. Eggs, honey, and peanuts strike cold blood into my veins, imagining the hives, the rashes, the pupils, the still chest. Popcorn and raisins have switched from their former place in my diet as healthful options to the upstairs cupboard that's not anywhere near the kitchen; exiled as choking hazards, punished for their possible, if unlikely, threat to my young one.

I don't even have words for what the evening news does to me. Babies killed, babies thrown, babies found. One was eaten recently by his mother, at three weeks old.

For a very little while, I took a job with a Gannett company near where I live. (Money was tight, and freelancing doesn't afford a writer any decent health insurance.) It was about an hour long commute--to a much more metropolitan city than mine.

One of my side jobs in the newsroom was to compile and handle the city's obituaries. When someone died, they called me, and the next day everyone else would know. I thought myself a minister, speaking to the funeral directors and the families with grace and hushed tones. There were so many...

On the day that triggered my last, a funeral home employee called me to submit an obituary for an infant. I don't recall now whether it was a stillborn death or a newborn, but in my head, they're the same anyway. Loss is loss, and this was a baby like the one I'd left with the babysitter the same morning. Whether in the womb or without, this person's baby had been alive, just like mine, at the beginning of the day. Now it wasn't; its entire life was now permanently over.

I fought my emotions as I typed in the info, and gave the funeral home caller the total. If I remember correctly, it was thirty-five dollars. (The paper charged a prescribed amount for each section used within the obit format; accomplishments, survivors, grandchildren, club affiliations. It's a rather short list for someone who wasn't given the option of developing a personality at all.)

We closed the sale, and I typed and punctuated the copy, then went back to the story I'd been writing. Most of the words were blurry. Some of them made sense.

About a half an hour later, the funeral home called me back. "We need you to strike that two-day we called in," they said. "The family doesn't have the money."

As the new girl and relative piss-ant, there was nothing I could do. Even if I could get the permission to waive the fee, the funeral home still planned to charge the family the same amount.

There was nothing I could do.

I took my lunch break, at the odd hour of 11:18, and cried in the common room for every second of the sixty minutes. Here was a family who'd been pregnant yesterday or last week, waiting with an empty and freshly repainted nursery, looking at it month after month and daydreaming about the person whose room it would be, the person they'd come to know later. Later, you'll be walking, and we'll make the crib a racecar bed. Later, we'll teach you how to ride a bike. Later, we'll cry at your wedding.

Except there was no later.
There was no anything.
There was nothing.

And these selfsame people, in all their anguish, had been told by a cold man in a black suit that their son or daughter didn't deserve an obituary, because that son or daughter had parents that couldn't cough up the cash.

The thirty-five dollars.
I put more than that in my gas tank every couple of days.

I wonder, in that moment, which was worse? The feeling of having missed the chance to know a still and blue child, or the failure and self-defeat of not even being able to have provided the single and only time she'd have an unexpected need, as children do. I wonder if that mother thought about how she would have had to scrape up money for school supplies and torn clothing to be replaced, and felt that she was too weak, too poor, too lacking to have made a good mother; I wonder if she internalized it all, and titled it shame that she'd carry forever.

I'm sure she did.

I don't know her pain, and I would never profess to.

But I know the internalizing trick, as all mothers do.

When my mother speaks with a catch in her voice and says, "Are you sure that's a good idea?", in it goes. When my mother-in-law rolls her eyes at the insane idea that I won't give my ten-month-old whole milk, that gets cataloged, too. When Jerry reacts too quickly to a tumble, I tell myself that I'm lacking in empathy; too slowly, and I feel ridiculous and overprotective.

Motherhood has made me insane. And, having chosen to be a writer, I was pretty damn near it already.

I don't contain issues. I spill them, and let them go.
That's what I do.

I live, breathe, and in successful pursuits, spend catharsis.
My life is built around it.

Suddenly, here's this infinitesimal man, living in my house, for whom I cannot capture my feelings. I can't wrap them, I can't phrase them. I sure as hell can't release them.

For my younger and non-kiddoed friends, I compared it to the love you feel for a band. Maybe this wouldn't work for those who didn't love music as a teenager, but for most of the friends I keep, this computes. That love...
Not now, as an adult, but at a melancholy fourteen, when it's four in the morning and you're lying on the floor with your head against the speakers, vibrating every note through you, pulsating with the color of the tones, reeling back and forth in the brutal and vital need of the singer. I'm talking the singer or band who understands you more than anyone, more than any relative you've ever had, more than your best friend or your latest crush; more than any God your parents have. Force, and passion.

It's that, only live, and everyday.

It never dampens. It never levels off.

I love him so much it hurts.

I think of Fairuza Balk, in Almost Famous, not eating fried chicken.

I'm not a baby person, I don't "ooh" and "ahh" over tiny blue clothing, and I don't pretend that anyone else on the planet should think my kid is any cuter than theirs.

He is, of course, but that's not the point. :)

I'm not your typical mother. I never meant to be either of those things; typical nor a parent.

Since his birth, the majority of what I've written is what Jerry calls "dead baby stories". He thinks it's morbid, and he's probably right. That doesn't change the fact that I don't have a choice.

In every scene of daily life, in every corner of every intersection, at any meal when solid food is involved, during all walks and each bath, I fear intensely for my child's life.

I see the ways it could play out; and I'm not so sheltered to know that for many mothers, this has been reality. If only they'd closed the gate, if only they'd checked the blind cords or walked in on a SIDS event in progress, if only they'd not watched a FreeCreditReport.com commercial for those thirty seconds instead of glancing at their children as they choked to death.

I think this way. Constantly.
It's rather exhausting.

And, after much reading and internalizing of even this fault (stack the levels), I have decided that I'm not alone. In fact, far from it.

As terrifying as it is, this is perfectly normal.

My problem is that I'm a writer, so I admit these feelings freely and do not edit their pallor. It's the only difference; the singular reason the world isn't even more full of morbid tales than it already is.

All mothers would write this.
This pain is impossible. These feelings are hard.

Every mother that has ever lived has been desperately afraid for her child. (Personally, I have no idea how anyone could have two.) The mothers of the pre-dawn haze, the mothers during the Renaissance, the mothers in Persia, in Salem, in Chernobyl, in 1970s Chicago. They all have felt this way.

My logical self knows that it's hormonal. It's a byproduct of the chemicals that are coursing through the blood, the ones that keep the baby alive those ten (yes, not NINE) long months and through the subsequent birth, and that add to the survival instinct in the bleeding days afterwards.

After birth, I was a cat, and a wolf.

That knowledge, however, doesn't supersede the rawness and its taking over.

As these days have wound down, slowly and spinning all at once, into a year, I am baffled.

I cannot fathom how I've managed a year with this precious wound.
I cannot understand that the SIDS danger is past, that my baby can finally have a pillow of his own, that his infant carrier is now not the safest place to be, and that my food is his food.

I do not have a baby anymore. I only have a son.

And part of me loves that--like I said, all the twelve-month-and-under dangers have passed, and we're safe.

We made it.

But more of me is afraid. Afraid for the future, afraid of the new choices and decisions I must learn about obsessively online before making, and afraid of the new heights he's bound to want to climb to.

I'm scared shitless.

What breaks my heart the most is knowing that this, right now NOW, is the smallest my little lover will ever be. There is no going back. There is no stopping.

And already, and for about a month now, I can feel the mother-blood remnants dissipating through my skin. I have found that I can let him try to get onto the couch himself. He can hold a whole cookie and be trusted to take little bites. He didn't drown in his sippy cup.

I'm becoming his parent, as I knew I'd have to when we conceived him. But the guttural, physical motherliness is fast becoming memory.

I don't want that.

I want to wake in the middle of the night, just because his rhythm changes to a tenth of a beat off. I want to be the one who has to feed him, because I am capable and because I am his food. I want to be the only one he loves, the only thing he knows.

I want to keep him. And keep him safe.

Mostly, I want him to stay. I need him to; I cannot love this much and be faced with an empty hole, which is what all mothers' sons' cribs become.

Today marks the first step. This day is the first chronological milestone toward that adult person he will become, that unassisted flight. I suppose it should be a goal, but if I'm being honest, it's not yet. It will be.

For now, his milestone is my millstone. His feathers are my granite.

There will be more days, God willing, and more years before my son becomes not my own, and chooses instead to identify as her husband, their father, our granddad.

(This thought alone is enough to make me feel guilty for having ever married Jerry. How dare I take him away?)

But we've done it.

We've made it a year, we've learned each other, and we're strong and safe.

I almost typed "for the moment".

I don't know what the future will hold. I can't promise what life will be, or will not.

But suddenly, my boy, we have a past.

A past that has seen you grow and change, fall and rise, melt and tense. A past which has been my greatest blessing, my darkest fear, and brought me my closest ally.

We have a past together, and it's marked.

Congratulations, my son. You did it. You made it. You amaze me, scare me, and force me to love way more than I'm comfortable with. You fought your way into and through this crazy world, and you made me a mother.

.