Blog Post #2
The other night I did a reading of Motherhood Exaggerated at the New York Academy of Medicine. It was sponsored by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation which is the preeminent force behind the move to instill humanism into health care. Anyone interested in the combination of the highest quality medical care with the highest level of doctor empathy and compassion (and we all should be) should check out the foundation’s work by going to www.humanism-in-medicine.org.
I was introduced by Sandra Gold, Founder and CEO. She didn’t want to deliver the standard recitation of where I went to school and my professional accomplishments. Instead, she asked me to tell her how I would describe the progression of my life—what I have strived for and how I have defined myself.
What I realized in talking with Sandra is that very little of what I have become good at was learned in school. Indeed, the one discipline I was specifically trained for—teaching music—is the one I spent the least time doing. I learned the educational theories of John Dewey, I crafted coherent lesson plans, I studied child development, but in the actual classroom I had no idea what to do. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have become a successful teacher over time, but if I had, it would have been because I taught and trained myself.
The first meaningful job I held was as a development professional at the 92nd Street Y. This job was counterintuitive to everything I knew about myself. Unlike music, which I loved and played, fundraising required that I do all the things I hated—being assertive, talking on the phone, “working the room,” meeting strangers. But I started at the bottom, took Anne Lamott’s advice and tackled one bird at a time, and morphed into the head of my department. I reveled in the evolutionary process more than in the career. I was fortunate that, when the learning curve began to flatten, I was presented with a new challenge: motherhood.
Like the profession I would soon leave, there were many reasons why I felt ill equipped to be a mother. I had decided I wasn’t good with children, without ever defining what that meant. When I took babysitting jobs as a teenager, my favorites were the ones with small babies who would already be asleep when I arrived. But I still spent the next hours until the parents came home in fear of the baby waking up. A crying baby was a mystery I was sure I could never solve. My problem with older children was that they had to be played with, and I was too quiet and bookish to be playful. Still, I loved family too much to imagine an adult life without children. So a decade into my marriage, my husband I began trying to conceive. It took four years. Three years into the effort, not only was I still fearful and not very playful, I was certain I was barren and that no child would ever find me attractive.
I was also a daughter who had lost her own mother. I was left only with a frozen image of the kind of parent she was, not what she would have wanted to be if she had a second chance based upon what she learned the first time around. I tried thawing out that image, but when my younger daughter Nadia was diagnosed with cancer, I would need more than remnants of one person’s way of mothering to help her. I was unaware of how I was changing while I was caring for Nadia as well as for my other two children. It was while I was writing Motherhood Exaggerated that I looked back and saw how I sifted and sorted, rejected and replaced so that I emerged altered and happier with the kind of mother I had taught myself how to be.
Which takes me to my current incarnation as a writer. When I was in fifth grade, because I had perfected my penmanship, I was moved into a creative writing class with all the other accomplished script-masters. The message that neatness and perfection were somehow a part of the creative process was embedded in me. Throughout my school years and in my work I crafted papers, reports, and proposals that were logical, symmetrical, and punctuated just the way Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Rhinehardt taught me in high school. Maybe there was a little something different about my grant proposals because people actually said they were interesting. You should be a writer, they said.
I think the real reason I started what I can only call “non-school” writing was because I loved the sensation of drawing a pencil across a new page of lined paper. It was hard to get over the “neatness counts” mentality and I was very proud of myself when, in my initial efforts. I created tidy packages made of words with combed hair and shined shoes. But if I loved the site of my kids when they were covered in glitter and glue, their hair filled with sand from the beach, their faces covered with chocolate frosting, then couldn’t the same be true for words. I had to loosen up, to take my words for a walk in the mud, through city streets, into the ocean—to get them covered in salt spray, blood, and sweat. I’ve had writing partners, taken a few workshops, benefited from mentors, but the process has revolve around what I have discovered and initiated in my writing, not what I have been taught to do.
Motherhood Exaggerated marks how far I come in that process but, I hope, it is not my final destination.
I was introduced by Sandra Gold, Founder and CEO. She didn’t want to deliver the standard recitation of where I went to school and my professional accomplishments. Instead, she asked me to tell her how I would describe the progression of my life—what I have strived for and how I have defined myself.
What I realized in talking with Sandra is that very little of what I have become good at was learned in school. Indeed, the one discipline I was specifically trained for—teaching music—is the one I spent the least time doing. I learned the educational theories of John Dewey, I crafted coherent lesson plans, I studied child development, but in the actual classroom I had no idea what to do. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have become a successful teacher over time, but if I had, it would have been because I taught and trained myself.
The first meaningful job I held was as a development professional at the 92nd Street Y. This job was counterintuitive to everything I knew about myself. Unlike music, which I loved and played, fundraising required that I do all the things I hated—being assertive, talking on the phone, “working the room,” meeting strangers. But I started at the bottom, took Anne Lamott’s advice and tackled one bird at a time, and morphed into the head of my department. I reveled in the evolutionary process more than in the career. I was fortunate that, when the learning curve began to flatten, I was presented with a new challenge: motherhood.
Like the profession I would soon leave, there were many reasons why I felt ill equipped to be a mother. I had decided I wasn’t good with children, without ever defining what that meant. When I took babysitting jobs as a teenager, my favorites were the ones with small babies who would already be asleep when I arrived. But I still spent the next hours until the parents came home in fear of the baby waking up. A crying baby was a mystery I was sure I could never solve. My problem with older children was that they had to be played with, and I was too quiet and bookish to be playful. Still, I loved family too much to imagine an adult life without children. So a decade into my marriage, my husband I began trying to conceive. It took four years. Three years into the effort, not only was I still fearful and not very playful, I was certain I was barren and that no child would ever find me attractive.
I was also a daughter who had lost her own mother. I was left only with a frozen image of the kind of parent she was, not what she would have wanted to be if she had a second chance based upon what she learned the first time around. I tried thawing out that image, but when my younger daughter Nadia was diagnosed with cancer, I would need more than remnants of one person’s way of mothering to help her. I was unaware of how I was changing while I was caring for Nadia as well as for my other two children. It was while I was writing Motherhood Exaggerated that I looked back and saw how I sifted and sorted, rejected and replaced so that I emerged altered and happier with the kind of mother I had taught myself how to be.
Which takes me to my current incarnation as a writer. When I was in fifth grade, because I had perfected my penmanship, I was moved into a creative writing class with all the other accomplished script-masters. The message that neatness and perfection were somehow a part of the creative process was embedded in me. Throughout my school years and in my work I crafted papers, reports, and proposals that were logical, symmetrical, and punctuated just the way Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Rhinehardt taught me in high school. Maybe there was a little something different about my grant proposals because people actually said they were interesting. You should be a writer, they said.
I think the real reason I started what I can only call “non-school” writing was because I loved the sensation of drawing a pencil across a new page of lined paper. It was hard to get over the “neatness counts” mentality and I was very proud of myself when, in my initial efforts. I created tidy packages made of words with combed hair and shined shoes. But if I loved the site of my kids when they were covered in glitter and glue, their hair filled with sand from the beach, their faces covered with chocolate frosting, then couldn’t the same be true for words. I had to loosen up, to take my words for a walk in the mud, through city streets, into the ocean—to get them covered in salt spray, blood, and sweat. I’ve had writing partners, taken a few workshops, benefited from mentors, but the process has revolve around what I have discovered and initiated in my writing, not what I have been taught to do.
Motherhood Exaggerated marks how far I come in that process but, I hope, it is not my final destination.
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