There are a couple of things about our own personal stories I’ve learned in these decades on the planet. First, there’s not really one story for any story and stories change over time, or at least, their meanings change for us.
Adoption, as I’ve written about before, seems about the textbook perfect case in point for complex stories. If you read psychological literature about adoption, key players are referred to as the triad: first parents, adoptive parents and adoptee. Like any family, parents’ experiences and kids’ experiences are very often different. From what I’ve read, this may be considered even truer with adoption.
However it goes for others, I know that in my life, it’s a big story. To the extent that an adoptive parent takes on the role of narrator—as a first storyteller to his or her child—I feel a pretty pressing need to hold the story with both tenderness and something like clarity and confidence.
I also notice that when I start to write about our experience, I very often have too much to say for an essay. It’s like I’m jamming way too much into a distinct container—the overstuffed suitcase or closet or container drawer—and I’m always desperately trying to get enough in without spilling out around the edges (because no one likes clothes peeking out of the suitcase). One editor suggested recently that I really have to write the whole story—and pick a larger container.
My eldest son, whose idea of a good time involves little sleep and lots of creativity, has signed up—third year’s a charm, he hopes, Hamlet tech week, Chinese and school be damned—for NanoWriMo. That’s the write a novel in November (50,000 words) challenge.
Once he signed up, he mounted a relentless campaign of the sort that only someone who lives with you can truly master—and which being fifteen aids tremendously—to get me to sign on, too, not for a novel but for the purposes of writing the memoir that’s kind of begging to get out.
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One of my hesitations about this project has been wondering when the “right time” is, not in terms of being busy—I get it, I’ll never write it if having actual free time is the litmus test—but has been about being ready. For no definitive reason except that the story I hope to write isn’t the whole story—since that doesn’t exist—and won’t go on necessarily forever into the future—at least the one I’m writing as opposed to the one I’m living—I just feel like, okay, now. It doesn’t feel all that different than some midday walks home from preschool when I want Saskia to move toward home near her all-important naptime and she’s out of the stroller and lollygagging so I suggest—pretty much out of nowhere—that we race. She’s always up for it, and what’s more, she doesn’t worry about whether we’re perfectly even.
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How attempting to write a 50,000-word piece in a month whilst continuing the rest of life—including this blog—actually goes, I have no idea. Frantic springs to mind.
In terms of the blog, my best guess is this: you may read some snippets of the larger piece. You will read some short posts, decidedly not essays. A list or two may creep in. You may read the word tired much more than once.
Mid-month, I’ll interrupt the personal blogging to report Grow Food Northampton’s progress raising monies for the farmland trust. It’s really amazing: by the time this piece is posted on November 1st, we’ll have surpassed $300,000. If you haven’t clicked when I’ve written about this community-saving-farmland effort, please do. That’s another reason I’m not sleeping as much as I might like to, fundraising for something so exciting.
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What else is there to say, really? Ready. Set. Go.
