Day 94 Free-Time Parenting?
In the paper this morning, I read about a 47-year old actress who’s cutting back on work because she needs “… a little more free time to be a mom” to the baby girl she and her husband have recently adopted to go with their four-year old son.
Now, she may be the Super-Mom of the Universe, I wouldn’t know. Maybe she just chose her words poorly. Maybe she’s read all the attachment parenting books, maybe she puts in more time than any other mom at her son’s preschool, who knows, maybe she’s wearing one of those tube-and-bag dealies so she can breastfeed her adopted daughter.
Having a second child at that age is a questionable decision, in my opinion, but hey, maybe her 47 years wear better than mine. (Pretty safe bet, she’s an actress after all.)
Here’s what I do know: it takes more than “a little more free time” to raise children. Parenting isn’t a hobby. It’s not a spare-time deal, a “fun” thing to do once you’ve checked off all your other life goals.
Nor is it necessary. You don’t have to do it. In fact, if you’re waffling on the idea of reproducing, take the hint and Just Say No. It’s okay. The world will manage without your genes being carried forward. And you’ll get to keep traveling, guilt-free and unencumbered.
But most of us still discover parenting by surprise, catapulted into the fast lane of the Grown-Up Highway before we thought much about it. (Surprise, not mistake. No baby is a mistake.) And we’ve found that parenting is the best, most rewarding and most important job of our lives. And bar none, the most difficult. There’s no room for selfishness once a baby enters the picture. Or there shouldn’t be, at least.
As Peter De Vries said, “Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
The key is parents who step up and embrace the new maturity a child demands of them, every day, all day long. Not just the free time.
Day 91 Q: Who’s the Hero of Your Story?
A: Obviously, each of us is the Hero of our own story. When I say Hero, I mean Heroine, Protagonist, Main Character, Star of the Show, Point-of-View Character, Dude, The Big Guy, Harry Potter. The one who owns the story.
You, in your show. Me, in mine.
But some of us forget that sometimes. We get stuck in Best Supporting roles. (Not really, of course, because the camera of our lives is still focused squarely on us. It just seems that way in our own dumb little minds.) What happens, I think, is that it’s easy to slip into a passive role, to let events happen, rather than take action to direct those events.
Good stories have main characters we root for, because they are active, decisive. They act on their own behalf. (That’s why they call them “actors.”)
We can’t help but be the Hero of our own story. Whoever owns the show is the main character. Period. Real life heroes are also active; they live on their own behalf. (Yet we don’t call them “livers.” Hm.)
As you may have guessed, I’ve just returned from another day with Michael Hauge, talking about story structure, the inner and outer journeys traveled by characters over the course of a movie or novel. After the talk concluded, he challenged us as writers – and as evolving human beings – to ask ourselves the same question we must pose to our characters.
What is the next specific, significant step I can take
on my journey to my goal?
Then, fill in the blank:
“I’ll do whatever it takes to (insert the step identified above)
but just don’t ask me to ________.
This blank is the thing that stands in our way, it’s the thing keeping us from finding our True Selves, going from Identity to Essence, from immature to differentiated, child to adult, asleep to awake, pathetic orphan to best-ever wizard, etc. There are all sorts of psychological explanations for this process, but I think we all understand the concept. There’s the ordinary people we are in our ordinary lives; and then there’s that potential to be extraordinary that lies within each of us.
Hero material. We’ve all got it.
We just have to get out of our own way.
Day 89 & 90 Still on Track! And Inner Conflict…
Yes, that means I did a double day on Friday. It was a calculated risk; at the 9:15 am class, I noticed it didn’t feel as hot as it sometimes does.
“The heater’s not working right,” explained Dan. “It’ll be fixed on Monday.”
Hm, I thought. This is about the best chance I’ve got to do another class in a day without killing myself. So I went back for 3:30 pm.
“Weren’t you here earlier?” asked Angela.
“Yup,” I said. “So if I can’t do much, that’s why.”
But I ended up having a second strong class in the same day. It felt awesome. It completed my 90-day challenge without using my loophole-day on the front end… and… it means I can continue my challenge. New goal: 100 classes in 100 days.
Ten more days… piffle.
*
And today, I spent the day with a group of writers learning about novel structure with Michael Hauge. I learned two things in particular that struck me, as they have to do with Real Life, as much as they do writing. He said that a character arc is the journey a character goes through from living in what he calls his Identity, to moving into his Essence.
I love this concept. Our identities make us feel safe and protected, even if they aren’t healthy. Our identities are who we really believe we are – even though it isn’t, not really – and this ignorance is key, which is disturbing to me because I like to think I’m a pretty self-aware person. But I guess that’s why they call them “blind spots.” If ya could see them, they’d just be called “spots.”
Example: in The Titanic, Rose starts out completely in her Identity as a kept woman, the unhappy fiancee constrained by a man who objectifies her and a mother who sees her as a meal ticket. She clings to this identity, this persona, this mask, so tightly that she’d rather pitch herself into the deep blue, than change. She sees no way out, although obviously, she could just tell her mother and Cal to shove off. But that wouldn’t be something her persona would do, so she can’t. But Jack sees something more in her, and helps her see it herself. He sees her Essence, and helps her gain the courage to embrace this part of herself.
Example: in Jerry Maguire, when Renee Zellweger’s character says about Jerry “I love him for the man he wants to be, for the man he almost is.” (Loosely paraphrased, don’t sue me if it’s a bit off.) She sees beneath the mask he’s constructed, to the Essence of him.
We love to watch characters go through this development from shallow to deeper, from someone who’s immature, afraid, insecure, wounded, and who wears a mask to protect the tremendous vulnerability he can’t even admit is there, and become something more, something better.
That constant tug-of-war between living in one’s identity and living in one’s essence is what inner conflict is all about. I think most of us get that. Super-scary.
“You can be safe and unfulfilled,” says Michael Hauge, “or you can be fulfilled and scared shitless.”
Here’s the message to both ourselves, and our characters: “You can have everything you long for, or need on one condition: you must give up your Identity and live in your Essence.”
Can I write characters like this? Oh, how I hope so.
But more than that, I want to live it.
So what does that look like for me, I wonder?