Give yourself away

When I was in high school I had a favorite teacher. She would have us freewrite. It was liberating for me. I didn’t understand why some of my classmates would groan. We were given a topic and ten minutes. Our pens were instructed to flow freely and effortlessly and consistently for 10 minutes. And I say “our pens” because they really take on a life of their own when you let your mind just go. I don’t think I ever realized it until now but it was like a meditation. A release of the thoughts. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much. I just wanted to release my thoughts. And it was different than journaling in the comforts of my own dorm room, because I was given a topic. I couldn’t focus on the thoughts and emotions that were working through my teenage mind. If I was asked to write about family, I wrote about family, I didn’t write about the moment I was in. And yet the moment I was in was absorbed into the topic in a very comforting way. My moods were acknowledged without being exploited, or over-emphasized. I didn’t toy with words in the English classroom as much as I did on my own either. My words made more sense because I crafted them less carefully. I think that is the way with me. And it is nearly offensive that this type of stream-of-consciousness is said to produce often unusable material. Bah!

I should bring out some of my old words. I remember myself as a mess through those years. But then I think that my writing was probably at its best when I was younger. More raw. Less focused. In a good way. Now it seems that I suffer from everything motherly. It is how I identify myself. I am too focused. It is tiresome. Often boring. Every event and emotion is colored by the fact that I have children. That I have three. They demand time and energy, taking it away from other parts of who I am. I am distracted by thinking about this perspective only because I have 15 things that need my attention at any given moment. People, places, functions. And all of this interferes with my writing: extracting details without tainting them, producing something fully thought out and coherent, even reflecting on motherhood is difficult to do because it requires an objectiveness that is rare when you are breaking up fights all day long and planning out nap times and fretting about why your banana bread came out raw in the center.

Really. Everything is colored by the fact that I am a mother. It’s draining. It’s beautiful and it’s draining all at the same time. I long for a self outside of this self. A time and place away from it all. That log cabin with the tin roof, I long for that. I long for rainy days deep in the forest. I long for a 22-year-old self that lives in a shabby Brooklyn loft. I long for the PhD I thought would have. I long for dinner dates with girlfriends. I long for knee-high boots and a sassy haircut. I long for coffee with intellectuals. Sex with unknowns.

None of this will be. And yet some of it has already happened. And some of it could happen. And yet, none of it will be. What has happened to me has been changed by motherhood. What has yet to happen has already been colored by motherhood. I love my children. In all their grace and terror. But I’m not prepared to feel like this. To feel I’ve lost a self that I never took the time to find.

I am not a novelty. For what I feel or what I say. This is part of the problem, too. I know that there is nothing new here. It is the feeling of the every woman, in some small way. There are things that we didn’t have a chance to become. There are moments that we wished we’d had. There are times we wish we could extract the mother from the woman and drive away. But time away is just time away. And then we come back. And we are lucky for that. Because what if we didn’t. And what if we didn’t have this to come back to.

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I have cleaned up some grammar and shifted a few words and commenced reading through the final edit of this post at least five times over the last twenty minutes. My children are in the living room, still in their pajamas on a Sunday morning at 11 am. They are getting restless. The fights have begun. I am in the kitchen trying hard to pull this time out of the day and call it my own. But it is impossible. So I will end with this:

I round the corner once again as screams and cries fill the house. Ethan has taken something from Max. I hear ripping paper. I give directions and solve problems. For some reason I then decide to put all of my books back on the bookshelf. The books that have been piled on the edge of the shelves for months. Olive Kittredge, Eastern Wisdom, The Tao of Pooh. Anne Sexton, Ian McEwan, Karen Armstrong. Books that Ethan goes back to time and time again. My homemade wrecking ball – he pulls them off the shelves and flips through their pages. I tuck them back in. Even though I am trying to do this post, I do that. And I’m glad I did. Because a book falls open. Inside the back cover is my handwriting. And a quote:

“…it is not by protecting and defending yourself that you survive, but by giving yourself away.”

Inside the front cover: Sarah, 2001

I’m glad that Sarah of 2001 recognized the meaning in this statement. But I’m pretty sure that Sarah of 2009 is much, much closer to actually being able to execute it. And even then, I have so much to learn. I have so much to do. And I have even more resolve to find in the doing.

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Thanks for reading my freewrite. Sometimes I don’t have brain enough to do much more.

Tagged as: freewrite