teens

I left early yesterday morning, giving my daughter in her bed a cat and a kiss, and heading to a rural corner of Vermont where traffic wasn’t a problem — as if traffic generally ever is in Vermont.

I was checking out a high school ag program to write about. The students were funny, a little rough around the edges, the boys joshing each other. They cheerfully answered my questions — it took nothing more than for me to ask, Tell me what you’re doing, and the kids started their stories, knowledgeable and ready to share their know-how, as farm kids often are.

The landscape in that part of Vermont spreads flatly around enormous Lake Champlain, as if there’s so much more terrain than in my mountainous part of Vermont. Driving home, I thought about those kids, one girl who was determined to be an artificial inseminator technician, another who was headed to cosmetology school, all so young, just beginning their lives. One boy struggled with a steer, tugging with all his weight on its rope. A girl came over and took the rope from his hands, said Hey, now, and the steer followed her.

I left with a dozen pepper plants from their greenhouse. I’ve buried their roots already in the last bit of open space in my garden, with a silent prayer, Thrive.

losing you
was the becoming
of myself.

rupi kaur, milk and honey

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.

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Farm Kids

Parenting a Teen and Writing a Novel