Role Play: My Journey as a Writer

Of all the classes I took in college, my writing courses were some of my absolute favorites. I always felt like they stretched me and helped me grow not only as a writer, but as a person. In almost every writing class I took, at some point our professor would give us fifteen minutes of "freewrite" time and the same prompt: write about ten roles that define you.

At the beginning of my college career, I wrote down things like "friend, roommate, daughter, sister, reader, employee, writer, student." By the time I reached my last writing class, my main roles had shifted and now I added roles like "wife, return missionary, diabetic" to the top of the list. A year after I took my last writing class I added the role that defines my life now: "mom."

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I didn't let the role of mom rule my list. Last weekend I spent the entire weekend being "Scott's wife" and "Scott's best friend." It was glorious. We laughed together all day long, every day. I had great expectations about that trip bringing us closer--and as we left Denver, I thought that maybe I'd set my expectations too high. By the time we returned home, I realized that trip had accomplished more than what I wanted it to. Not only was I more motivated to be a better wife to my husband, I realized how much I loved (and missed) "the magic of ordinary days" as Kevin's mom. While we loved spending time together, it was clear that while the two of us could be a complete couple together, we could not be a complete family, not now anyway, without our daughter.

There are many roles in my life that have had to fall away lately so that I can be successful as "mom" and "wife" and sometimes "sister/daughter." I don't get to be as much of a friend as I wish I could be. I am no longer anyone's employee, and being a wife replaced the unique role of roommate a long time ago. As much as I loved my role as a student, I accepted that I needed to save graduate school for a time much later in my life, both for economic and personal reasons. This doesn't make me less of a learner--I still have that desire, and it still peeks through every time I look over a friend's resume, cover letter, or research paper. I make time for reading, but I don't have the energy to pick up books that are really going to make me think (not very often, anyway). But of all the roles I miss, "writer" is the one that has been the hardest to let go, and yet the most necessary to put on the shelf for a while.

Let me explain.

When I write, I can get wrapped up in a project and forget that I exist in a world that consists of more than just me, my experiences, my words, and my imagination. Can you imagine how a toddler could destroy a home if her mother/caretaker leaves reality for a couple of hours? Naptime just isn't long enough or safe enough some days.

Writing is a highly personal experience for me; I rarely share things until I feel they are "good enough" and even then, it is usually only my husband that gets to read them, because his opinion of me never changes. Occasionally, after something is really polished, I pass it along to my mom. That is why this blog has required me to be so brave; in a one-to-two hour naptime, I write down something, anything, and then when I hear her waking up, I have to push the "Publish" button and set my words free for the world to see, typos and all. Sometimes things come out sounding different than what I really mean. Sometimes my posts contradict themselves. Sometimes all I can see are the holes and the flaws in what I've written. Sometimes I don't have the right words to express what I am thinking, and sometimes I know the things I am really thinking would cause my readers to take offense, so I keep them to myself. I feel like that is limiting my writing, but I do it anyway, because I like to be a keeper of peace. My favorite writing professor told us that to write something that really matters to us, it will usually be a subject that will make us want to throw up just by thinking about it. I write about those kinds of things sometimes; rarely do they make it to my little blogging sphere.

The kind of writing I ultimately want to do involves hours of research and self-searching, sometimes traveling and sometimes adventuring. It involves planning, experiencing, outlining, drafting, revising, and courage.  I imagine it would take me years to get something ready for a publisher. I'm still not sure I have that in me.

I studied two genres of writing in college: creative nonfiction (think memoir) and fiction. I always thought fiction would be my niche, but I only actually got to take one fiction class. I did awesome in it. The first story I wrote was somewhat of a bust (it was a novel trying to be a short story and so it just didn't work), but it still won first place in the campus-wide writing contest sponsored by USU's newspaper. It wasn't ready for publication, but I turned it in anyway. Now I wish I hadn't. It needed more work, and had I spent time with it, I could have turned it into something much better. My second story, on the other hand, was a quiet piece about an elderly construction worker widower mourning the loss of his wife and his daughter who had inherited his "fix it" tendencies and spent too much of her time trying to "fix" her father. I wrote it for my grandparents. At the time, my Grandma Burningham had been a widow for over five years and every time I saw her she told me she wanted to die. She taught me the kind of pain that can happen when you are separated from your soul mate. My grandpa on the other side had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and those grandparents knew separation was coming. I saw my parents trying to take care of their parents through the fresh eyes of someone who had only been married for less than a year. And from that, and three hours in the computer lab in the basement of the English building, came a nearly-perfect short story that earned me an unquestionable A from one of my hardest professors, no final project required, it was that good. That story, on the other hand, won only second place in the official campus-sponsored writing contest. I knew why. Ryan Keeper's story had sex and immorality and swearing and all that "real world drama" that seems to so impress writing professors who spend most of their time teaching LDS kids from Utah who don't touch alcohol or drugs and have little-to-no experience with the emotional consequences of one-night stands. I knew the judges appreciated my story, but I also knew that if I really wanted to get noticed, quickly, on a more-than-just-a-university-undergrad writing sphere, I would need to write about the things Ryan wrote about, and writing about those things just didn't interest me.

In the semester after taking my fiction class, I ended up in an advanced creative non-fiction writing class again. I'd taken the same class from the same professor three years before, but I felt that a mission and terminal diagnosis (I will have diabetes until I die) and marriage later, I would have a completely different experience in the exact same class. When I took the class the first time, my mother read my end-of-semester-product essay and told me that even though my writing took me to great and new places, it always ended up leading me back home. I never forgot that comment, because that was when I realized that when I wanted to write about things that really mattered, I had to write about things that were real to me, whether they were personal essays or fiction.

So when I took the class a second time and we were required to write a braided essay (meaning weaving two or three different subjects/strands together into one cohesive whole), I decided to write about three things that were very important to me. First, for my travel strand, I decided to focus on my great-great-grandfather Dennis and his life, which was adventurous and tragic all at the same time. My husband and mother accompanied me on a trip to Montana in the middle of a February snowstorm just to do research. The three of us will never regret that trip, ever. The second strand had to be a personal strand, sharing some of our story. I decided to write about my diabetes diagnosis, which included my life as a missionary and falling in love. The third strand was related, researched, and was the thing that made me want to throw up. I wrote about the risks of diabetic pregnancy and my desires and fears of becoming a mother. I worked on that essay for hours. It ended up being over 50 pages and still wasn't finished when I was done, but I was in a much better place personally. As I go back and read it now, I see the foreshadowing: the scenes with my Aunt Betty, talking about her father Dennis as the Montana snow fell outside her apartment window; she passed away a few months later. The mentions of my grandfather's cancer diagnosis and fight and his teasing; I wanted to have a baby before he passed away, but we didn't make it that far. I got pregnant a few short weeks after he was buried. I did all that research about diabetic pregnancies; I knew everything that could go wrong. I think it helped prepare me for the thing that did unexpectedly go wrong, leading to Kevin's premature birth and the month we spent in the hospital with her.

And now, two years later, I want to write about my life as it is now: the experiences of becoming a mother and the struggles of our marriage, the things I've given up and the things I've gained. The blessings of waking up to my daughter kicking her feet against the crib slats, of gagging as I clean out the stale milk from old sippy cups, of tickle fights and laughter and watching her copy my every move. I want to write about following my husband to the Salt Lake Valley and learning to lean on my in-laws where I used to lean on my parents for the day-to-day things we need help with. I want to write about watching my dad become a grandpa, finding his true calling in life and the way she strokes his mustache and cuddles up with him and how he calls just to say he misses her and can we please come back soon. I want to write about how different my marriage is now from where we started three years ago, about the things that we are working toward: a house, grad school for him, more children, a career job, feeling settled. I want to write about how thinking about having a second child terrifies me and fills me with desire at the same time.

I want to write about the things that matter, the things that take me home.

My aunts gave me a sign for our wedding that I keep above the door, next to my Texan welcome sign, our key/mail holder, and our family calendar, where I can see it all day, every day. It says, "Home is where your story begins."

It reminds me that even though I have put my writing career on the backburner so that I can cut up pears and make peanut butter sandwiches and do laundry and  wash dishes and change diapers and play with blocks and read the same board book fifteen times in a week, I am spending each day doing research, gaining experience. I am doing more than it appears I am doing, I am filling more than one role.

I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a sister, a daughter, a friend. I am a return missionary. I am a diabetic. I am a homemaker.  I am a reader.

And, on Thursdays, I am a writer.

Thanks for reading.