Letting Go

My fifteen-year-old just returned from a class trip on the other side of the country. She arrived home late Saturday night, after her sisters had already gone to bed, and then she slept late the next day.

The younger girls tumbled over each other like puppies when their big sister finally got up. So much to tell her—how the neighbor’s pet rabbit escaped and the girls recaptured it, the path cleared through the brambles on the other side of the creek, a fort under construction by teamwork of the neighborhood kids, and a summer play to be put on by neighborhood actors.

A lot happens in a week when you’re a kid and the weather’s decent.

I listened to the sisterly excitement, but something kept me in the next room—eavesdropping, not joining in. This was their scene, not to be upstaged by my presence.

They are my girls and I am their mother, but more and more often I rejoice in the friendships and even the disagreements they have without me or Todd to moderate. They are learning to get along without a parental chaperone, a skill that will ensure this family’s bond once Todd and I are dead and gone.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I hope to be around for a long time for these girls, and I want in on most of the fun as long as I’m here. But at the same time, I’m not their relational glue. I don’t want to be the center of our family.

When Todd’s mom died, I read that at the time of an elderly parent’s death, the grown children will grieve not only for the loss of that parent, but for the loss of family. Once Grandma and Grandpa are gone, the aunts and uncles tend to grow more distant, the cousins lose their glue and the family joints grow loose.

Todd’s parents are both gone now, and perhaps there is more distance between him and his brothers than there was before. But not much. We were together at Christmas. We’ll be together again this summer. These grown Harris boys and their wives and children are consciously choosing to hold hands in a circle that no longer has a parent in the center.

If my girls form a sisterly family bond now that is, at times, apart from me, they will be better prepared for the day when Todd and I are in the ground and they’re left with only each other.

It’s been said that watching your children grow up is a constant process of letting go. I am letting go so that they never have to.

Page Proofs

My galleys arrived today. I love the Arabic calligraphy border on the title page!

Through the Veil

Here's a look at the cover for Through the Veil, which will be available for pre-ordering soon!

A New Thing

For the past six years my writing life has been project oriented. Creative, sure. But also neat and tidy. Each themed essay folded into a larger book project. I wrote my memories of life in Syria and Jordan, and when the essays were strung together, they became Through the Veil. I found the next project, writing somewhat therapeutically of the complex relationship between me and my mother-in-law, Jeanne, in our extended family household. I wrote our relationship as we lived it, and soon my writing became an exploration of Jeanne’s rapid health decline and my new role as her primary caregiver.

I wrote through Jeanne’s last month of life, sitting at her bedside, laptop open, typing as she dozed in a morphine haze. When Jeanne died in November, 2008, I had so much raw material drafted that I wrote and refined all through the spring, through a move to Oregon, and on into our new life here this past year. Sure, I blogged about life in Oregon, but my more concentrated, polished and thoughtful writing, has been the project-oriented work on caregiving and end-of-life issues.

For six years now I have written about women who will never read my writing, separated from me by years and by geography. Even while Jeanne was alive, I knew I would never show her my essays and that I wouldn’t publish a book about her until she was gone. I do strive to write truthfully, but there is a certain freedom in writing from memory.

Just a few weeks ago—during our Spring Break at the Oregon coast—I drafted a new essay. A long one. Not a single Syrian or Jordanian. No mother-in-law.

In this newest essay, I write of people in Newberg—a fellow adjunct at the university, the woman who pumps my gas, even my boss. I see these folks often—they’re part of my daily life. I’m not close to any of them. I haven’t asked their permission for this writing. And they have no idea that I’m spending my early morning hours with them, recording our conversations, painting portraits of them on my pages.

After writing from memory for over a year now, this feels very strange. Once again I am writing life as I live it. At some point before publication I will change names, ask permission of my acquaintances to use their veiled identities in my writing. But for now I say good morning to my literary characters when I pass them in the halls at work, I smile and look each one straight in the eye. I bought gas from my protagonist this morning; she has no idea at all that even as we chat, I am adding brush strokes, covering over mistakes, mixing just the right colors to paint her a hero.

As a child I imagined myself one of the Bobbsey twins. I read Flossie’s dialog aloud and tossed my imaginary curls. I wanted to be a writer, or maybe an actor. I loved entering into another world and dwelling there. I still do.

But I don’t write fiction. I don’t create an imaginary world. I am wrestling to take my own real world, past and present, and make it into literature.