parenting

We are Our Own Stories

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Part of this day I spent rewriting an essay on myth, beginning:

The first day of eleventh grade, my daughter returned in the afternoon, dropped her backpack on the floor and sprawled at the kitchen table, her upper lip curled in that dissatisfied way I recognize as disgust for the adult world. We’re doing myth this year in English class. Myth, she repeated, who needs that old junk?

Rewriting this essay made me realize, again, how fundamental is logos – story – to us. My ten-year-old daughter is busily creating the story of her child life these days:  lacing up new high tops, the adventure books she reads and swaps with her friends, an attack of flying insects the other afternoon, soccer practice and watermelon for snack and what, exactly, her big sister is doing. Her life is imbued with meaning, her Story of Being Ten writ real and lovely. The old junk is us; but it took me years to realize that the word made flesh wasn’t just a poetic line, that we are, in fact, our own stories.

Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

–– Mary OliverIMG_8999

Companionship, Mothering

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

When I went through my time of parenting two-year-olds, I thought that was difficult. Exhilarating, exhausting, maddening at times: but yes, difficult. Oh, how young I was.

To parent a teenager is in some ways like walking through a ring of fire. Going forward, I will doubtless be scorched, and my emergence is not guaranteed. Last night, my daughter asked me with genuine anguish, But why do people suffer? When I was sixteen, I asked this question, and I’ve continued to ask this question, in a multiplicity of ways, through decades. I can spew off varieties of answers, but ultimately, to my daughter, with her honest face, I come up short.

Late in the night, with my children sleeping, a solitary light burning, the windows open to the crickets with their sound of tiny shaking bells, I read a passage from a chaplain who had been at the scene of a horrific plane crash. When I finished the book, in those quiet, dark hours, I thought of my child. Just as she fought in her birth to be free of my body, I see this girl thrusting her way from the tatters of her childhood, striding so urgently toward what she believes is the golden realm of womanhood. Here I am again, ready to catch my daughter, wanting only to be here.

“… I don’t know why that young child was killed. This is a true mystery. And so I enter into it with you. I cry with you if you allow me into that space. I’ll walk with you. And this is something that a lot of chaplains I know that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan–talking with their soldiers–they’ll say, Look, I’m gonna journey with you on this. I’m not here to explain it. I’m gonna journey with you. There’s a sense of humility there that I think connects with people, because I think in their heart of hearts we know, Oh, I don’t have an answer. So let’s walk into that mystery together.”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Gabriela/Photo by Molly S.

Parenting a Teen and Writing a Novel

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My long-time friend and I went canoeing and swimming with our kids today. The ten-year-old girls immediately ran for the beach, swam the entire time, and never put one toe in the canoe. The two teenagers, a him and her, swung the heavy canoe off the car and confidently carried it to the lake. How the heck did this happen? These two kids I once held on my lap while they shared goldfish crackers? After a dutiful swim, they preferred to sit on the beach–forget romping in the water–and talk.

There’s a fiction phrase–a willing suspension of disbelief–which, the further along in parenting, the more that seems a truism for life. I expect to be in the teen years for a good long while yet, and I could say it’s interesting, but, in fact, it’s darn mesmerizing… among a few other adjectives, too. But when these teens were ten-years-old themselves, I could never have believed they would become so full as people, so funny, so wry, and with legs sprawled everywhere. Here I am, I thought, in that perpetual rough draft of my life, garnering more material.

What you are aiming for (in writing a novel) is willing suspension of disbelief, and the first person who must suspend disbelief is yourself. Some beginning novelists have more disbelief than others, but even if your burden of disbelief is heavy, the only way to suspend it is to keep adding sentences to the ones you have already written.

–– Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
…. Or, I take this to mean, in other words, keep on trekking:  parenting and writing.

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