This is a blog post I wrote to share on author Nova Ren Suma's blog on November 12, 2012.
It
was the summer of 2009. My little family and I were staying at a KOA camp just
outside of Astoria, Oregon. I watched my kids play in the pool—an indoor pool,
because of Oregon weather. The whole room was wet with steam, and kids’ screams
reverberated off the walls.
There
were lots of families, but one mother caught my eye. Her children were a little
younger than mine, also a big brother with a younger sister. I liked the way
she spoke to her kids, the way she looked into their eyes, the way she smiled.
Making
friends as an adult woman involves a wooing process. You make eye contact, you
smile, you try not to get too much into her personal space, you compliment her
children the way a young suitor might compliment a lady’s hair, or her dress.
I
saw this woman and I wanted to be her friend. I had friends back home, but the thing
was, I didn’t plan to go home.
Back
up four months. I stood in my kitchen, stirring something in a pot, waiting for
my husband to get home and listening to my kids screech on the trampoline in
the back yard. It was a beautiful yard. Even though it was in Santa Ana,
California, we had chickens in it. For a while there had been a pig named Igor.
Everything
I had was poured into that home, that yard, and those two children. Their
childhood was magical. I had made it so, along with my husband’s pretty
significant salary and a job that may have been slowly draining his vitality.
It
might not have been that very evening, but it was an evening like that one when
Keith came home, sort of a wild look in his eyes.
“How
was your day, Honeyman?” I asked.
“Well,”
he said, “I got laid off.”
He
could have gotten another job. We could have kept the beautiful house. The
yard. The chickens.
Back
up another month or two. There was my husband, alone in the garage, smoking
another cigar. At first it had just been once in a while; now he was up to two
a day, maybe more. I hated the way he smelled. He worked long days. It seemed
to me that he spend his evenings hiding from us—from me—in the garage, in the
smoky cloud of his cigars.
He
was not a happy man.
“I
don’t care what it takes,” I told him. “Buy a boat. Have an affair. Do
anything. Just get happy.”
So
when Keith announced that he had been laid off, we did the math. It was simple
math. We could pay our mortgage for two months. I remembered what I had said—Get happy.
I had meant what I
said. And I continued to mean it—with most of my heart—as I watched my husband
come back to life in the three months that followed, as we finally finished the
kitchen remodel and put the house on the market, as we sold it for a price that
would allow us to pay the bank what we owed but would eat up all the money we’d
put into it, as we sold or gave away nearly everything we owned, as Keith built
a bonfire in the backyard, whistling, happy, and burned our scrap wood and
broken chairs and sandbox frame.
And
then we were away, away, and my children and I were by turns ecstatic and
scared and free and lost. Keith was pretty steadily ecstatic.
I
think that when I saw the woman at the pool, I heard in the way she spoke to
her children an echo of how I hoped I spoke with mine, even as I’d uprooted and
displaced them.
I
introduced myself. “I’m Elana.”
“Cheryl,”
she answered. We shook hands, maybe. I don’t really remember.
She
asked me what I did. I answered, without hesitation, “I’m a writer. I write
Young Adult novels.”
Now,
the truth was, I had never written a Young Adult novel. I’d never written a novel, not really. But the words came
out, and they didn’t sound like a lie.
“I’m
a writer, too,” she said. It turned out, she’d sold a novel, published essays,
was working on a memoir. She was, I thought, a real writer. Her name was Cheryl Strayed.
What
had brought me to that moment, that introduction of myself as a writer?
I
had written for most of my life, off and on, though all I’d published was a
couple of short stories in obscure little journals. I’d studied writing in
school, I’d survived graduate workshops. But I’d never introduced myself as a writer. It would have felt presumptuous.
I
always intended to one day write a book, but in the years since conceiving my
firstborn, it was like I had amnesia. All my creative energy was poured into gestating,
into nursing, into nesting. I didn’t seem to have time for writing, or a need to.
But
now that the house was gone—and with it the pots and pans in every size, the
never ending cycle of washdryfoldputaway, the rearranging of toys, the painting
of walls, the machinations of housekeeping—now that I lived with my children
and my husband and my dog and a ferret in an ugly brown RV… maybe it felt like
I didn’t have the right to claim motherhood and housewifery as my job, anymore.
I
didn’t leave the KOA and magically write a novel. We parked the RV not too much
later in Corvallis, Oregon, and I got a job teaching at the university—first
ESL, and later composition. We rented a house on Roseberry Lane. Keith got to
be a stay at home dad. I slogged through stacks of papers.
Fast-forward.
I
got sick. We moved home to California, living first with family and later in a
rented house that may or may not have been possessed. I got better. Keith got
another job, and I was home with my kids again. I set up house. We were back
where we’d started, in a way.
But
it was out there—those words. I’m a
writer. And though motherhood was still beautiful, though it still filled
me up in a way nothing else could, I wanted to make the words true. So I wrote.
Maybe
it was because the bad thing had already happened—we’d already lost the safety
net of a good job with health benefits, the furniture and the pictures on the
walls. Even the walls. Maybe it was because I’d met a woman who was both a mama
and a writer, who was beautiful and strong and seemed so sure of who she was.
Maybe it was just time.
I
don’t know exactly the ratio of what caused it to happen, what brought me to
say those words. But that day in Oregon, with the clouded-over sky and a whole
world of possibilities to choose from, when I opened my mouth to define myself,
I named myself a writer.
