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FIRST PLACE - ENTRY FEE DIVISION - $200 PRIZE - 2009 FFW ANNUAL ESSAY
CONTEST
The Invisible Writing Mother
by Annette Lyon
My four children have never known a mother who didn’t write. I pounded out
a novel when my oldest napped in an infant swing. My second child arrived
while I wrote for a newspaper. Days before number four arrived, I finished
a six-week round of book signings with swollen ankles and a belly the size
of a watermelon.
My kids have seen me researching and typing furiously. They recognize edits
and galleys. They’ve seen me argue with line editors, wait for royalty checks,
whine about rejections, prepare to speak at conferences—chair a conference.
But for all its labor, the net tangible yield of my art is in contained in
a very modest space that’s easy to overlook: about the size of a book. More
precisely, seven books and a stack of magazine articles.
As a result, for my kids, my work remains largely an invisible—though not
unimportant—entity for them. (They know they have a liver, too, and that
it’s important, but they don’t really understand livers.)
Their mom writes. They see it. They don’t get it.
Despite efforts to keep my writing (plus my speaking, freelance writing,
editing work, critique group, and travel) at minimum-impact for my family,
I worry that it’s become an invisible behemoth casting a long, suffocating
shadow. Balancing the equation is hard.
But what would kill me is my children growing up without really knowing me.
Every mother, whether they’re writers or soccer-coaching, cookie-baking,
carpool-driving moms, will do whatever it takes to care for their children.
We’d draw our own blood for them if necessary. We super-mom protectors come
with the downside of huge, self-induced pressure to never let our children
down.
But that’s an impossible goal. I know that I have let them down at times.
Yet I know that right as I try to keep everything in balance, that to be
the best mom for them, I can’t stop writing. I did that once—and our lives
fell apart. I’m a better mom when I write.
What “mom writes” means is shimmering into focus for my fourteen-year-old
son. He gets that Mom doesn’t just “type a lot,” like he said when he was
four. Recently, he had to choose a historical novel to read for his English
class. On the way home from school he offhandedly said, “I guess I should
read one of your books.”
I gulped. Four of my novels are historical, but a fourteen-year-old boy
isn’t precisely my target audience. I tried to decide which book he’d be
least likely to hate. At home, with sweaty hands, I handed one over.
What if this was a bad idea? Maybe he wouldn’t be honest with me. What if
I didn’t want him to be honest? Over the next several days as he read it,
I cautiously watched for reactions. I never said a word. Neither did he.
Then, about halfway through the book, it happened: engrossed in the pages,
he laughed out loud.
Forget professional reviews; this was praise. For days, he wanted to talk
about the story, how I’d written it, where I’d gotten my ideas. He got it:
Mom writes stories. Real, live books. Mom creates characters, plots, and
descriptions. This was knowing me in a new way—my son, my baby who’d slept
in the swing with the soft clicking of the keyboard in his ears.
He saw my writing.
After one such talk, I watched him go—and I held back tears, feeling as
if the Wizard’s curtain had been drawn back. My son could see what had
been invisible before, and best of all, he loved what he saw. He was proud
of his mother. He saw my writing, but most of all, he saw me, a new version
of me, for the first time—the part that had been behind the curtain his
whole life.
I have something new to look forward to now: the day when each of my three
daughters will see the mother behind the curtain and discover who she is—
the person they’ve always known, plus a bit more of me they never knew was
there.
We all want to feel truly known by another person; invisibility of any kind
prevents that. I anticipate with deep joy the day when each of my children—
long before they are parents themselves—will understand their mother for who
she truly is. All of her.
But today, my son sees me. Really sees me. And for now, that’s enough.
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