Doing the Work

I am trying to take good advice when it comes along. At least what I think is good advice and strong medicine and friendly encouragement.

I'm speaking of Moose's comment on my last post--encouraging me to take on the challenge of posting every day. Because then, she reassures me, it "becomes less about what you write and instead becomes just about doing the work.'The work will teach you how to do it' if you let it."

I've also been reading Traveling with Pomegranates, a book by a mother and daughter, Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, in which Ann is wrestling with her sense of "calling" to be a writer, something she has doubted and wondered about, especially because her mother is a writer and she has been wary of "doing what her mother does."

This is actually the second book about (and in this case, by) a mother and daughter that I've read in just over a week. While I was at my mother's last week, I had brought with me The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which I'd never read before, though it has been in print for several years.

Having that book with me may have saved me, in fact. It gave me something quiet and unobtrusive to do while my mother did her word search puzzles and dozed off. And I could escape into that rich, warm, moist world of Louisiana (and Seattle, and even a wee glimpse of Portland, Maine) and those lovingly drawn characters.

I could feel myself wishing that I were as alive and quirky as those Ya-Yas on into my own elder years. And I could taste the buried but still lingering hope that I might yet have a chance of feeling more lovingly connected to my mother some day before she dies (or has lost all her mental faculties).

But that's not where I am right now. When I'm with her I am in a swamp of thoughts and feelings, and only at rare, fleeting moments do I sense a sweet gentle wind of compassion, a sense of space, of understanding on my part. Of being able to say to myself, "She's an old woman now. She won't be here forever."

For the rest, there's civil war within myself--feeling trapped, resentful (some of that toward my siblings as well as toward my mother), bored, disappointed, and then hating myself for those very feelings. Back and forth between feeling and punishing myself for feeling. It's exhausting.

And underneath it all, there's still the little girl I was (and still am?) wishing for a connection, a sense of being seen and known and unquestionably loved by the person who mattered most, still hoping yet afraid to hope, wanting to be seen yet afraid to show myself fully.