A Story About Not Writing

Missed deadlines, changing seasons, and dancing.

When it comes time to plan our upcoming Coffee+Crumbs essay collection, we writers have a few deadlines we need to adhere to. There’s the essay deadline - the biggest and most important of them all - then, we have a title deadline, and finally, we have to give an idea for the type of photograph we want at the top of the essay.

Our essays for the fall collection were due September 1. In July, I sent over the title, “Proud Marys.” A few days later, I sent over a photo idea: “Something with a high school football game. At night.” My essay was going to be about a couple of high school quarterbacks - one, who committed to Notre Dame when he was a junior in high school, and another who has yet to commit to any college.

The boy who plans to play for Notre Dame has a grandpa who was the Head Coach of the Michigan Wolverines. His father also played for the university. And about seven or eight years ago, one of the boy’s brothers died from a rare form of cancer.

Every year since, my neighborhood pool puts on a Chad Tough Swim, raising money for families and children who must battle these horrible illnesses. What happens is all those who say they’ll swim, choose an amount of laps they think they can swim in an hour, and then ask for donations accordingly. Harper, who hadn’t yet started swimming competitively, who, when we first moved to Ann Arbor, told us we could go ahead and sign her up for swim lessons, but she would not be taking her hand off the side of the pool, said she would swim, but she isn’t going to name how many laps she’d do. She would swim until she couldn’t swim anymore, and then she’d be done. 

That morning, Harper swam for the entire hour, beating two high school boys in laps. She swam until the referee told her the event was over. 

“I think she’s found her sport,” a mom who was standing next to me said.

The other quarterback is the son of one of my best friends. She and her husband have spent thousands of dollars and most of their summers helping him chase the dream he has to play football in college. “You are either chased or you’re the chaser,” she told me once. “We’re the chasers.” 

So I wanted to write about football and swimming and life and death and chasing dreams but also - probably the most - about the moms who sit in the stands and on the sidelines and watch the story their children choose to - and must - live. Somehow, I was going to tie in my friend, myself, the mom whose son committed to Notre Dame, and Mary, Jesus’ mother, all together. That last sentence is laughable - I was actually thinking of comparing the lives of children who play sports to that of the one who is known for literally giving his life for all of humanity. It’s a tall and pompous order but for about a year now I’ve been thinking about Mary and the story her son had to live and how immeasurably joyful and painful that story was to watch.

But I missed the deadline. In my time writing for C+C, I have never missed a deadline that I said I would meet. It wasn’t from lack of trying. I worked on it for months. But I also mapped out and launched “Heart to Page,” an idea I’ve had for several years but never had the courage to try. I was offered a position as an Adjunct English Professor at Concordia University, and I took it. All the while my daughters started school, both of them are in high school, and the enormity of all of these events contributed to my lack of focus and direction, and I couldn’t order my emotions and thoughts into any kind of story. 

“What does this essay need? What does it want to be?” These are questions Lauren Winner, one of my graduate school mentors, would ask us. And she’d want an answer, too. If she were to ask me these questions about my wannabe essay, I’d say, “I don’t know.” 

Upon further reflection though, I think I’d tell her it needs some space; that the story is still happening. I’d tell Lauren that I’m seeing so many common threads about dreams of high school students and college students and people my age too (myself included), but I can’t quilt them together into something beautiful that keeps us warm while we’re living the mystery of chasing and being chased by dreams. 

Lauren once read my cohort Cynthia Rylant’s short story, Mr. Putter and Tabby Write The Book, a story about a man who is snowbound and so consequently decides to write a book. It would be a mystery.

Mr. Putter has all the fixin’s a writer should need - tea and paper and a crackling fire. He has snacks and a cozy chair. Zero distractions except one every writer must face: no matter how idyllic her writing scenario is, writing is hard.

Mr. Putter makes all sorts of delicious meals. He takes naps and hot baths. He cuddles with his cat, Tabby. He doesn’t write his mystery book. However, he does write. He begins with a good things list: cinnamon toast, tea, a cozy chair. He fills his large stack of paper with words that are good and when the snow has melted, he reads what he wrote to his friend, who tells him he is a wonderful writer.

He’s sad, though. Mr. Putter tells his friend what he wanted to write was a mystery, but he took naps and made snacks instead. His friend tells him not to worry: “the world is full of mystery writers. But writers of good things are few and far between.”

Cynthia Rylant gives us a story about the writing life, which at times (more times than not) can be tedious, mundane, and full of frustration and doubt. But I think she’s also exploring the questions Lauren asked of us: What does our writing need? What does it want to be? Rylant takes Mr. Putter through the mystery of those questions whose answers change every time we write and shows him the  many good things that surround him while he’s working out that dream. Our writing is not and will never be one thing. This is true of us, too. As long as we are alive, we are growing and changing. One minute we are clinging to the side of the pool, legs swaying in the water, insisting that this is enough, that this is great fun and the water is sparkling from the sun and from the other swimmers, and the next minute we push off into that unsteady, sparkling light and embark on figuring out another side of ourselves. 

//

The night the fall collection was published, there was a high school football game. The quarterback who will play for Notre Dame next year played against my friend’s son. All the students who went to the game - no matter whose side they were on - wore orange in honor of the boy’s brother and the foundation that was set up for those who must live out similar stories. 

I didn’t go to the game. I was at an end of summer pool party, though all of us were aware of what was going on. We are a tight-knit group of friends, and the things that happen to our kids are a part of our stories, too. This is what I (in part) hoped to express in my “Proud Mary” essay, and I thought about that as I danced with my friends. Like Mr. Putter, I was disappointed that I couldn’t write what I thought I wanted to write. But then Hadley, my oldest daughter, showed up and started dancing with me and my friends. Hadley and I, we are different. My introversion often clashes with her extroversion. I’m more of a glass is half empty type of gal, where Hadley’s glass is constantly filled to the brim, and there’s always plenty to share. We aren’t the type of mother-daughter duo that fights, but there is tension as we navigate who and how we are. On this night though, we danced together giving each other space but also showing the other a thing or two. We danced, and Hadley reminded me of a dream - or maybe it was a wish or a hope - that I had when I realized I was pregnant. It sounds strange I suppose, but I hoped for days like this - where my children and I would dance together, forgetting for a moment that one of us is a mom and the other is a kid. Forgetting for a moment about all the definitions we cling to and all the definitions that cling to us. 

On the night of the missed deadline and the football game, Hadley and I danced together, celebrating summer - a season that reveals itself so very slowly in Michigan. January and February, March and April, and even May are not forgotten in the rays from the sun, the dew on the grass that hangs on until mid-morning, the night time fires we gather around - all of it pays tribute to the seasons summer has been through to get to itself. Soon, summer will give its last gasp and no remnant of the sweltering days will be felt in the icicles and pine, the snowplows and barren trees. And that will be good too. The many identities a season takes cannot be rushed, nor will there ever be consistency. To try to explain what summer is and how it becomes is as difficult as explaining who an individual is.

 As soon as you understand, she changes.