Seasons

I feel a new one coming on

For all of my adult life, and especially my life as a parent, writing has come in waves, or perhaps seasons. Weeks and even months (sometimes many) will go by with me feeling like I have nothing to say, no story bubbling out of me, no internal mystery to unravel. Sometimes those quiet seasons come on because of stress and too much busy. Sometimes they come because I need a period of percolation and absorption as things I’ve learned or events that have happened to or around me demand the full capacity of my brain to comprehend.

These off-seasons can be discouraging for a person who has loved writing and dreamed of being a “real” author since she was tiny. It can be hard to watch peers progress and publish and to know I have beautiful stories to tell, too. Sometimes I struggle with the monotony of my life right now; laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning. My life prior to the past decade of stay-at-home-mom-ing was packed with adventure and creativity. This phase, those chores, can feel rather lackluster.

Recently, in the middle of lamenting this, I realized a few things. The most significant and the one I’ll share here is the idea that I am, in fact, in the most creative and adventurous stage of my entire life. Sure, I could be putting words to paper, or traveling the world, and those are good things that I love and that have shaped me. But instead, I am crafting a childhood for five small (in stature only) humans. The significance and gravity of this role has sometimes escaped me, but it’s come crashing down on me in the best way.

Little ol’ me, Author of Childhood. I am fueling their minds and bodies with the books we read, the meals we make, the songs we sing, and then we clean up and scrub dishes so we can do it all again tomorrow. I’m clothing them with the lovingly patched and adventure-stained piles of laundry in which I am constantly drowning, so that we can go out and seek more adventure, find more beauty, climb more mountains and dip our toes in more streams.

My husband and I are responsible for creating a childhood full of wonder, love, and learning that will launch them into adulthood and sustain them throughout their lives, and that is not a small job. You can’t do that with evenings, weekends, and holidays off. This is a highly demanding position and not one I would give up for anything, and one I will strive to appreciate more, because never again will I have this incredible privilege to craft a childhood for the people I love most.

Now, I think I have some pretty great story ideas—stories I very much hope I will have the time and brainpower to pen and share one day. But this parental project takes a hefty precedence over any other creative endeavor I have stewing around in my head, and I cannot bear the thought of the inevitable end of my children’s childhoods. I’m also overwhelmed with anticipation at the idea of them launching into their own lives and being the “home” to which they can return and bring their own children.

I have come to love poetry more than ever before over the past year. There are many poems that I lean on almost like scripture, that capture the essence of being human, and show me how to grow into the person I long to be. This poem is called “On Children” by Kahlil Gibran¹.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I want to be a writer. I love to write. Writing is part of who I am, part of what I was created to do on this earth. But more than that, I want to be that stable bow, because no story is more beautiful or more powerful than a motherhood well spent.

All that to say, I feel a new season coming on. I don’t know what that means exactly, except that my stories seem to be coming out of hibernation. My characters are getting restless. Scenes are toying with the edge of my conscious mind. Words are stirring in the muddy recesses of my brain like a bullfrog at the cusp of spring. My youngest is potty trained, three of my five are reading, and more and more often, I find them self-sufficient for longer and longer periods of time, which means that we may finally be ready to reintroduce writing into our schedule. And even if my children are the only ones who ever read and love my stories, that is enough motivation for me to write them. That is Author enough for me.

1. I shared another of his poems, Defeat, in this post.