Write, Mama, Write. A little, a lot.

Join me in welcoming Lisa Romeo to Motherlogue. I’ve had the pleasure of reading Lisa’s writing, as well as participating in her online 4×4 writing workshops, her “I Should Be Writing” boot camp and private coaching. I can’t say enough good things about Lisa – as a boot camp instructor, she’s encouraging yet firm. As an editor/coach, she provides honest, helpful feedback that has helped push my writing to a deeper level. To top it all off, she’s got a great sense of humor. (Check out her upcoming offerings by clicking on the links…you’ll be glad you did!)

Having a post by Lisa here at Motherlogue? A huge honor. Welcome, Lisa.

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by Lisa Romeo

Saturday afternoon. I hear my sons squabbling downstairs. I rise from my desk, where I am writing, close my office door and sit back down, pick up my writing again.

Ten years ago, maybe even two years ago, I would have stopped, headed downstairs, refereed. Gotten thrown off my writing game, maybe not returned to the page for a few hours, a few days.

But the boys are 19 and 15 now and the older one was home from college for a short weekend. The squabbling was more balm than burr, at least to me, and I suspect, to both of them too. While I wanted to soak up precious hours with my college freshman, so did his brother and his father.

So I could write, without interruption. Just as I can (when the client and student work is done or minimal), on any given weekday, or on weekends when the younger boy and husband are occupied. Without worrying, as I did for many years, that any moment I might be pulled away — from the page, from the narrative unfolding in my head – by motherhood.

That’s what it was like in my house when the boys were small and I was trying to build a writing life. Without much childcare. With, at varying times, a high maintenance baby, postpartum depression, a toddler whose schedule was filled with healthcare appointments – and the usual and regular and seemingly unending clatter and joy and busyness of mothering.

At the time, I was writing a lot about mothering. You’d think being immersed in, surrounded by, besieged by motherhood would help the writing, and of course in many ways it did.

But as a practical matter, one can only produce words on a page relative to the time and mental clarity available. I did what thousands of mother-writers do: crammed writing in. Naps, Grandma visits, the occasional babysitter, preschool; and later, school, playdates (hosted by other moms, not me), Daddy and the Boys activities.

It all added up and I wrote. Some of what I wanted to write, anyway. Looking back at what I wrote when both children were much younger though, I detect a certain lack of depth. Something that should be swimming just below the surface of those pieces, was not. But I also see (and again, it may only be me) a kind of sizzling energy bouncing across the page, a drumbeat, immediacy. The boys were always around me, I was always in the middle of them, and it showed on the page. Which was completely right for what I was writing about –  raising sons, wrestling with modern parenting, building and bumbling a small family.

That was then.

This is now:  No one bothers me. All the years of reminders (Quiet, Mom’s busy. Mom’s writing, don’t bother her.) — worked. Plus of course, the boys simply grew.

My writing grew up too.  I’m not interested anymore in writing only about mothering, or the ways motherhood changes you when it still feels new (even if that’s 10 years in), and so I don’t.  Occasionally I do miss chronicling the mothering stuff, so I give in – last month that meant a piece about the not-so-smooth transition when that first child left for college and we became a one-teenager household.

So here’s what I’ve learned. The distractions, time constraints, and other mothering-related “obstacles” that seemed to prevent me from doing my best work in fact provided fulgent material.

But not always.

Some days, nursing a sick kid, refereeing sibling squabbles, making car pool trips, and stopping at three organic stores to get the right allergy-friendly ingredients was not material; it was just chores and busyness. And some days, conscripting Grandma, the teenager next door, my husband, or my mom friends was the only friggin’ way to get any damn bit of writing done.

So I did that.  If you need to, you should do that too.

Sure, one day it will be quieter, or it will still be noisy but you can just close the door and get back to that pesky sentence for another hour if you need to. Don’t misunderstand: I’m not suggesting some Hallmark sentiment about savoring the moment because one day the kids will be gone (though they will be).

There will be frustrating moments then too, when — despite the quiet space in your brain not occupied by calculating how many diapers are left in the house or if it’s time yet to pick the kid up from karate — the words won’t flow, when quiet is too damn quiet, when writing is still hard and you’ll be distracted from the page. We’ll always be mothers, we’ll always be writers. A little of this, a little of that.

Lisa Romeo is a writer and freelance editor. She also teaches writing online, and in New Jersey at Rutgers University and The Writers Circle. Her blog offers tips, resources, interviews, and more for writers. She lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and either one or both sons.

November 30 Means: That’s A NaNoWriMo Wrap

The month of writing a novel is nearly over; actually, it’s already over in some parts of the world. But here in the Pacific Northwest, writers still have just over 13 hours to finish their novel. In the class I’m co-teaching, we have two students who haven’t finished. The other 14 have uploaded and verified their word counts and have received the NaNo “winner” badge.

One of those 14 winners is my older son. I couldn’t be more proud. He finished writing his novel on Wednesday evening while we were at the library. His word count goal was 3,000 and he made it to 3,215. It’s not all about the words, his story is good, too. But the word count became a focus for him in this process.

“I want to change my word count,” he told me last week when we were in class. My co-teacher and I were modifying word counts for some kids who were really struggling. (For anyone worried about legalities, this is approved by the folks at the Young Writer’s Program branch of NaNoWriMo.)

My son was at around 2,200 words. And, unfortunately for him, his teacher in this case is also his mother.

“I know you can make this goal,” I told him. “You’ll feel great when you meet the goal you set out to meet.”

“But I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

“You can.”

I left it at that. For the next week, I proceeded to listen to my inner voice: should I have let him change his goal? Was I the worst mother in the world to keep him at 3,000 words? Was this going to make him hate writing? Hate me?

When he signed up for NaNoWriMo, I considered making his goal much lower, but he wanted to have the “normal” goal for third graders. And now I was the one encouraging him to stick with it? Had I lost my mind? Had I become one of the Kyoiku (education) Mamas (a mother who relentlessly forces her child to study) that I watched in Japan when I was teaching there? Until Wednesday night, that voice haunted me.

But when I saw his joy-filled face as he counted his final word on Wednesday night, I was glad he kept his goal. The experience of setting a challenge for himself and exceeding it? Priceless.

A New Perspective on NaNoWriMo

As I mentioned in this guest post at Lisa Romeo Writes, I’m teaching a NaNoWriMo workshop at my older son’s elementary school this year. After a month or more of preparations, the students are finally in the process of writing their novels (3,000 – 6,000 words, depending on grade level). They are over-the-top excited.

And, I’m over-the-top worried. What if the kids get discouraged? What if they don’t write? What if they can’t meet their word-count goals? What if, what if, what if.

While I’m worried about the class as a whole, I’m especially worried about my own son. Since First Grade, I’ve watched him struggle with reading, writing and spelling. In Second Grade, with a doctor’s help, we identified that while he has 20/20 vision, he has other vision issues that were making it really difficult for him to see letters on the page, track lines of text and identify differences in letter formation.

Thanks to vision therapy and occupational therapy for his handwriting, he’s making huge progress. Huge, huge progress. With these barriers closer to being resolved, he is working so hard to bring what he writes and reads up to his academic level. In fact last month he beamed when the eye doctor told him he had a Fourth Grade brain. (He’s in Third Grade.) She explained that no wonder it’s been tough for him — it’s a lot of work trying to express everything he knows in his Fourth Grade Brain when he’s only working with a First Grader’s vision.

So last week he sat down to start his novel. He put 45 words on the page. A Second Grade girl in the workshop had 700 words. Another boy had 450 words. My son looked at me, concerned.

“What if I can’t do this, Mom?”

“You can do it,” I told him. “Put that inner editor back in the box! We all write at our own pace. It’s the story you put on the page that matters. Not the number of words. Not the speed with which you write. We all have our own process.” (Reminder to self: listen to your own advice.)

Yesterday while he was home sick, he decided to spend some time writing.

“Will you sit with me while I write?” he asked.

We were both nervous. Where would this project go? We sat side-by-side at our oak dining table. He opened his notebook with the NaNoWriMo sticker on the front and picked up his pencil. One sentence, several “how-do-you-spell” questions and seven words later, he stopped writing.

With only 52 words on the page, I was also starting to wonder how he would get to 3,000 by November 30.

“What else should I say?” he asked.

I looked at his tiny (but growing!) hand gripping the yellow #2 pencil, his bottom lip tucked under his top row of teeth. He waited for my response. Motivation and ability to write aren’t the issue here. He wants to write. He’s got a great story in his head. He’s shared parts of it with me. But how does he get that story out onto the page?

“Let’s make this like your handwriting exercises,” I said. “You write a sentence, then you dictate the next sentence to me. Then you write, then you dictate to me. We’ll continue back and forth, back and forth, sentence by sentence.”

“Okay,” he said, his teeth losing the grip on his bottom lip.

He began his next sentence and handed me the pencil when he reached the end of it. The pencil stopped but the ideas kept coming. I wrote what he said and handed him the pencil when the sentence came to an end. When his storyline stumped him, either on the page or while dictating to me, I probed with questions. How did the taxi driver kidnap the boy? Where did he take him? What did it look like?

Twenty minutes later his word count was at 245 words. And he was done for the day. He raced to update his word count in the virtual classroom for our Young Writers Program at NaNoWriMo.

“You’ve completed 6% of your goal,” I looked over his shoulder at the screen.

“Actually, 6.8 %,” he corrected me, beaming.

I’m not so worried anymore.

It’s Nearly Time for NaNoWriMo

I’ve been busy teaching students at my son’s elementary school about NaNoWriMo. Beginning in November, they’ll join me in attempting to write a novel. More about my experience in the classroom is here in a guest post I wrote for the Lisa Romeo Write’s blog.

Using what you’ve got

One thing I didn’t mention in this post about the many benefits of our eat-at-home month: I became much more adept at using what we have in our fridge.

Typically I am the type of cook that looks at a recipe, looks in the pantry, makes a list of what we need, buys it and then cooks. But when I was doing that for 30 days it was a little more difficult to always be ready. Not to mention, it’s kind of exhausting to do all that prep work before one even turns on the stove. In order to make our goal of eating at home for a month, I had to get creative. For the most part, my experiments in the kitchen worked out.

This past Saturday night I had another opportunity to experiment. I was frying sausage for spaghetti sauce, the water was boiling for noodles and it was time to get a jar of Newman’s Tomato & Basil sauce from the laundry room (aka pantry in our house). As soon as I opened the door to the laundry room I knew I was in trouble: we were out of that sauce. Not a jar in sight.

Rather than scrap the meal, I paused and realized I probably had something in the cupboard I could use to make sauce. Indeed I did: diced tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce. I’ve never made spaghetti sauce using several variations of canned tomatoes, much less from scratch, but I put the contents of the three cans into my blender, turned it on (with a towel on top of the blender’s lid, just in case) and voila! We had a sauce. Feeling a little bit like Emeril, BAM! I added some water, some Worcestershire sauce, oregano, basil and sauteed onions.

On Sunday I read a chapter in Laura Munson’s thoughtful, full-of-heart memoir, THIS IS NOT THE STORY YOU THINK IT IS. In this chapter she describes a labor of love in which she and her kids use 11 pounds of organic tomatoes to create spaghetti sauce for the fall and winter ahead. Her cooking is like therapy, and maybe mine was a little like that, too — in that I went into unknown territory without being sure of the results. I met that challenge with confidence but also with a bit of gentleness if it didn’t work out. “What’s the worst that can happen?” I thought when I started opening the cans of tomatoes. That’s new behavior for this mama.

In the end, my spaghetti sauce received two thumbs up from my husband and me. I sat at our round, oak dining table, surrounded by my sons and husband and relished our meal with a heart full of pride that I had created my own sauce.

The Great Eat At Home for a Month Experiment

As I mentioned in my last post, for the month of September we decided, as a family, to challenge ourselves to eat every meal at home. I’m happy to report: we did it! My sons are even happier to report that we now have an XBOX Kinnect. Part of our goal included the reward — we would use the money we saved by not eating out to purchase an XBOX.

So, what did I learn from this experiment?

• I can resist the “it’s-just-too-much-to-think-about-what-to-cook” urge if I’m in the habit of doing it. I became much better at finding things to throw together in our fridge. Thankfully “just doing it” is now the new normal when the dreaded “What shall we have for dinner” question comes up.
• Knowing exactly what is in my younger son’s food is an important part of enjoying a meal for me. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve known this in my head. In fact, it’s pretty obvious. But there was a shift for me last month — I felt how much better it is for me if my husband or I (rather than a chef in a kitchen somewhere) are the people preparing my son’s food. Sitting at our table, I felt calmer and more relaxed, even though most of the time I’d been the person busy getting that food on the table.
• We were spending too much moolah on eating out, and it wasn’t even “fancy food”. Cost-benefit ratio? In our case, eating out was a huge fail.
• Time and hassle? I think eating at home actually saves us time and hassle. We don’t have to pick a restaurant, drive there, wait for a seat, make choices from the menu, etc. (Nor do we have to hassle with keeping our kids entertained during that time.) Again, eating was a more relaxing experience when we were at home.
• Our sons’ taste buds improved. While our eating out destinations never included McD’s, the tendency for the boys was to choose something fried from the menu. And they would balk at the healthier options we presented them when we did eat at home. Compared to many kids, they are really healthy eaters — they eat a lot of veggies, fruit, whole grains — but still we couldn’t be convince them that a potato is actually from the same food as a french fry. After our month of eating at home, I’ve noticed that they are more willing to take the obligatory “few bites” of the foods we prepare and often they are pleasantly surprised. For example, there were no screams when I dished up the Pork and Lentil Cassoulet we made last night. That’s a huge win.

On October 1 we went out to dinner to celebrate our month away from restaurants. We’d had a lot of discussion about where to go and finally picked our favorite Mexican Restaurant. It was good food and a fine experience, but having been away for a month, I realized that I would have preferred eating at home. Our schedule was crammed that night, so it took juggling to get us to the restaurant on time, once we arrived the boys were fidgeting, we allowed them to have lemonade (sugar high = bad) and the food was fine but not great. The perspective we gained from a month away was huge.

Based on the success of our eat-at-home-for-a-month experiment, we’re still tracking our habits this month and are aiming for no more than two meals out this month. And, we’re considering new challenges for a future month…maybe dropping sugar or eating paleo. Stay tuned.

25 Days and Not Really Counting

It’s been 25 days since our family has eaten out at a restaurant. We decided to take a challenge: no restaurant meals for the month of September. That’s a significant goal for us. On average, we were eating out (or ordering pizza) two, maybe three times each week.

This bright idea came after a trip downtown to eat lunch with my husband during summer vacation. We ate somewhere we’d eaten before, which usually makes me relax a little about our younger son’s nut allergy. Internally I think, “He was fine the last time we we ate here. He should be fine this time.” By fine, I mean their kitchen prepares food that is safe for him to eat – no nuts in his meal, nut products in the oil or foods that have touched nuts on shared plates, etc.

But as he sat in the booth across from me, I noticed my younger son stopped eating after a while. He looked as if he was going to curl up in the booth.

“You feel okay?” I asked.

“No. My stomach hurts.”

“How’s your mouth?” I asked, looking at my husband.

“Not so good,” our son replied. He’s four years old, so his ability to assess a reaction on his own is still minimal.

I pulled out his EpiPen, handed it to my husband and we all stopped eating. For those who don’t have a child with allergies, this might seem over-the-top. He complains of a stomach ache and a feeling in his mouth and I immediately think he’s having an allergic reaction?

If it were my older son, I wouldn’t be as concerned by the comments that his stomach aches or that his mouth feels funny. My older son doesn’t have a life-threatening allergy to nuts. But my younger son does and when we he makes a comment like that after he eats food that *could* have contained nuts (even though I’d confirmed it didn’t with the wait staff) we need to be alert.

He went to the bathroom with my husband and older son. And, he promptly vomited. Thankfully he began to feel better. Was this rejection from his stomach a “mild” reaction to nuts we couldn’t see? Was it just a tummy ache? Was it because he’d had some sweet lemonade? We had no way of knowing. We paid for our bill ($50), left our plates full of food and went to a nearby grocery store to buy him a banana and some cheese.

After this experience, I wanted to take a break from the underlying stress at restaurants, the constant worry if the food is truly nut-free. And, part of me wanted to see if we could save the $440 or so we spend at restaurants each month.

Here we are at day 25 of restaurant-free eating and it’s been amazing. I’m proud that we’ve made it and I’m proud of the benefits I’ve seen as a result.

I’ll share more about why later in the week.