2008 SECOND PLACE: Entry fee Category

 

Being Bombeck

By Amy Mullis

 

Trying to be Bombeck, I lost my voice.  Not the throaty alto that backs me up when I attack "Amazing Grace" with gusto, if not precision, on Sunday mornings, but the one that always took me from pen to paper, keyboard to screen, without so much as a wheeze.  But, "be Bombeck," they all said, and shouldn't they know?  So I set off on a quest to be somebody else and found the reward to be a hearty case of laryngitis of the page. 

 

Oh, I could speak with Erma's voice.  Or Dave Barry's.  Or P.S. Wall's.  Or even Robert Benchley's.  Just not mine.  So I whipped a U-turn on the road to nowhere and grabbed the exit for the road I should have taken. 

 

Write what you know.  It's advice that I resist, make faces at, pointedly ignore.

 

But I write humor.  I write essays.  Sometimes I'll throw in a thesis on Faulkner in a condescending nod to my college days.  So after the sort of deep thought that causes migraines in laboratory animals, I started fresh from my experience. 

 

 Who knew I would end up as every woman. 

 

 Write what I know?

 

I know the dog needs to go out, the hamburger needs thawing, and the younger son needs a package of puff balls and a sheet of poster board for tomorrow's project. I know that there's a deadline coming up at work, the car payment is due by the 13^th, and the dog wants back in.

 

If I write what I know, it will be the story of every mother who ever had to figure out how to make a cow costume out of a yard of polka dotted cotton blend the night before the elementary school production of Charlotte's Web. Who had to hide her smile behind a lecture when the toddler drew a happy face on his sleeping baby brother. Who had to figure out how to be at Awards Day at two different schools at the same time. Or had to deliver a child to baseball practice before quitting time at work. Who has cancelled a birthday party at the last minute due to projectile vomiting on the part of the birthday child.

 

I know Christmas morning will whip by in a flurry of wrapping paper thicker than a Minnesota snowfall in the living room, that Easter tastes like chocolate and smells like vinegar, and that my little one's first day of big school looks blurry and tastes like the salt I have to wipe from my eyes to see.

 

I know that when I'm sick and the kitty curls up beside me like a living security blanket, I feel better. And that he'll want payback when I'm well enough to work the can opener. I know that when I let the dog out, the squirrels don't need to worry because he thinks they got into the tree by magic and that if he stares up and barks for long enough, they'll come down to play.

 

I know that when my sister calls, if I'll leave the housework and go shopping, I'll laugh until I don't care if I ever separate the whites from the colors again. And that when I get home, the clothes will get sorted and the socks will get cuffed, but it won't be a life-changing event if they don't.

 

I know that no matter how long Mom's been gone or what part of heaven she's gardening in today, she still loves me best. And that I want to live my life so that one day my children will look up at the stars scattered across the sky like an overturned jar of glitter in the heavens and know that I love them best, too.

 

I weep to think about the Neverlands that would have gone undiscovered if all traveling minds marked their boundaries with the words, "write what you know," but it turns out that's the advice I should have taken.

 

 I'll write what I know.  And in the process, I'll laugh with a brotherhood of friends, cry with a multitude of mothers, and speak with the voice of truth.

 

Bio:
Amy Mullis is a humorist and essayist (and longtime fan of Funds for Writers) who lives in upstate South Carolina with her muses: Bill, her sweet but bewildered husband and mild-mannered computer tech who is on the lam from people who ask him questions about their memory, Son One, her Muse of Sarcastic Answers and Undeserved Persecution, and Son Two, her Muse of Perplexing Questions and Inappropriate Dinner Conversation. Her work has appeared in various Chicken Soup and Cup of Comfort anthologies as well as The Christian Science Monitor and Sasee magazine, and she currently writes a humor column for www.thewahmmagazine.com . See more of her work on her blog, www.mindovermullis.blogspot.com .