Don't Go There

Yesterday was not a good night in Orloff-ville. I had to drive Oldest Son to his new high school. He is in a special program for math geniuses like himself. And they were having a pizza party to get acquainted with the new kids for this four-year magnet program. I had to drag Demon Baby and Baby Girl since no one (of course) was home to watch them (alas, they get dragged around a lot) and Oldest Daughter was at her friend's house.

Aside from the fact that Demon Baby had to pee so bad we had to stop and let him go by the side of the road on a mere 17-minute drive . . . I dropped Oldest Son off at the wrong entrance. I don't know this school. Because he and Baby Girl both get bussed to magnet programs, this isn't a school I am familiar with, though obviously for the next four years I will. It is far from home, as is her school. ANYWAY, it soon became apparent I had made a major gaffe--he was in the wrong building. So I parked the car, LOCKED it, and told Baby Girl and Demon Baby, "Open the door for no one, I'm going to find your brother and tell him I sent him to the wrong building."

It was dusk. The school building was abandoned. You know how it is for summer. Hallways end with locked "cages" or gates with chains wrapped around it. Everything is dark. It echoes. I started screaming his name. I love my kid, but he is the original absent-minded professor. I knew there was a distinct possibility he would wander the halls forever. Then I started imagining a serial killer/janitor and really started freaking out.

He didn't respond to my calling for him. I ran back outside. He wasn't there either. I drove to the next building, and did the same thing. I felt trapped. Bring Demon Baby with me, and there was a distinct chance he would, if I didn't hold him fiercely, slip behind a locked gate and decide to play hide 'n' seek and then I would be the Really Awful Mother with TWO kids lost on the eleven o'clock news.

I could go on for the twenty minutes of hell this was. Eventually, he wandered to the right building and had a great time. When I got in the car, knowing he was safe, I was shaking. I need a clone--one for Baby Girl and Demon Baby and one for Chauffeuring duties. This is only going to get A LOT worse this coming year. Two schools, opposite sides of the city, each kid with different after-school interests. One Demon Baby stuck being dragged along.

But the thing was . . . I had been really scared. In that way moms sometimes get. You turn your back for two minutes in a store, and your Demon Baby decides to hide in a clothes rack. One time, Demon Baby SWORE to me he could walk instead of ride in the cart, and he wriggled free of my hand and RAN (and I mean for all it's worth) to the refrigerator section and hid from me for five full minutes while I was ready to shut down the supermarket entrances and call the cops. I have gray hair for a reason. But this was Oldest Son. And yet . . . you can open a newspaper and kids that age . . . they disappear. Bad things happen in this world.

But I know, deep in my heart, I couldn't write a Jodi Piccault book. I can't write about teens shooting each other in suicide pacts or kids with cancer or . . . I can't. It's NOT that I don't know fear. Even if it was for twenty minutes, I knew fear. I've been sick enough with Crohn's to think I might die. I know that feeling. And I can "mine" my life. There are 100% parallel elements to Lily's life in Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven and my own. I mined my fears of dying and leaving my kids. My last will and testament is a LOT more detailed than most people my age, I think, because of that. So is my living will. And my best friend PRAYS TO HER PAGAN GODS every night she does not end up the guardian of four kids, I can promise you that. (THAT would be a novel!) She gets my kids if I die. But I can't write kids in jeopardy books. Can't. Do. It.

I can't write Joe Konrath's books of violence. Can't. Do. It.

I was DEEPLY disappointed that the author of Julia and Julia has decided to mine her own extramarital affair for her next memoir.

I have written pieces of funny memoirs. I even have a funny memoir about Demon Baby in a half-finished state. Some things I am willing to mine. Some not.

Yet, I know . . . recently, it appeared I had a heart attack (I didn't . . . just have a new wrinkle in my EKG's Q-wave). It's a long story about the many years of medical insanity I've undergone over the years. I have taken more immunosuppressants than probably the average cancer ward. And they do damage. Hence, I take NO medications now and just . . . well, suffer. Since the wear and tear on my body just isn't worth it anymore. And the thing is, my first instinct was to write about my strange heart odyssey. I've had a cardiomyopathy . . . I gave birth to Baby Girl (Child #3) with a catheter in my heart (inserted with no anesthesia, in an emergency, while I was in labor . . . no lie, it would make for an interesting story). And yes, I've thought . . . "Some of this I want to write about . . . and I might use it some day." My first instinct was to WRITE my way through what's been happening lately.

But there are some things, like last night . . . some fears that come too close. That I can't mine. I am less afraid of death than of harm coming to my children. There are some fears that leave this lingering aftereffect that makes me kind of queasy. And those . . . I am not that writer.

I'm just not brave enough.

Thoughts?

What Are Your REALLY Afraid Of?

When I was a little girl, often my father's mother would babysit us. She was from Russia, and what I remember most was she made me drink tea. Before bed. Tea I hated the taste of. She also used to curl my long hair by wrapping it in newspapers (old technique . . . especially if you were poor, as she was after she came to America). She was a pessimist, but it was only much later that I understood why--she had been wealthy in Russia, the Communist Revolution destroyed everything she and her family had--they murdered people she knew . . . family, she came to America, penniless and alone, lying about her age (she wasn't even 18 yet), struggled under great poverty in the melting pot of the lower East side of NYC. What was to be optimistic about? So I don't think I understood her because I was just too young to grasp all that. She was a chronic worrier. But now, of course, I realize she had everything in the world to worry about. But what I most remember was she was TINY. I mean, teeny-tiny, maybe 90 pounds soaking wet. In baby-sitting parlance, this meant that, were a bad guy to break into our house, were a marauding band of crazed mutants to break into our house, she would merely be a fragile little snack cake for them. THIS I understood quite clearly in third grade.

Overactive imagination? Oh yes. After all, I've become a novelist. And one night, my sisters and I worked ourselves into a shrieking mass hysteria because we were certain a man was waiting outside our bedrooms to kill us. We saw his shoes there at the doorway, lurking there. We screamed, we cried. My grandmother was hard of hearing.

Now, the other part of this is my parents frequently partied until at LEAST dawn. Many a time, in later years, I'd leave for high school and they would be toddling in. One New Year's Party were threw lasted until January 3rd. So our mass hysteria lasted until amost dawn when my parents came home to shrieking children and a sleeping mutant snack of Russian origin. The serial killer outside our bedrooms was ACTUALLY a pair of my father's shoes. Just shoes.

So it is with writing fears. Recently on the blog, some people opened up about a fear of rejection. But that's not it at all. You don't fear the rejection letter. A rejection letter is nothing more than shoes. What you FEAR are the mutants. The mutants could be:

• The Mutants of Humiliation. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, SOMEONE out there knows how pathetic a writer I am. I am embarrassed.
• The Mutants of Reality. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, I have to face something I am not ready to about my writing--that I need to learn more craft, that I am not "ready" to send this out there even though I thought I was.
• The Mutants of Inner Tapes. Now that I have this awful rejection letter, that negative internal tape I love to play over and over and over again . . . is just louder and louder and louder. That I've wasted my time. That I am kidding myself. That my mother/high school English teacher/ex-boyfriend, etc. is right.
• The Mutants of People Who Know Better. You know them. The negative bloggers. The people who have given up. The people who tell you that you can't succeed.

See? A rejection letter is just a SHOE. It's the mutants. What are you REALLY afraid of?

The other half of this story is that in the light of day, the shoes weren't terribly frightening. They were JUST shoes after all. When you bring the mutants out into sunlight, as ANY zombie-movie fan knows, they will turn into a shriveling, burning mass of flesh and die. Mutants can't take sunlight.

LEARN what your REAL fear is. Then bring it out into the light. Then you can move forward bravely. You need not fear being a snack cake.

Thoughts? What are you REALLY afraid of?

Bad Clowns

On the way to the circus yesterday, Baby Girl suddenly confessed a mortal fear of clowns. She might have told me this BEFORE I spent $150 on third-row seats. I spun a tale of the difference between "evil clowns working for the Dark Side" and the "good clowns who only spread cheer." She didn't buy it. Nonetheless, she ended up meeting some very nice clowns--not the evil ones--and had a wonderful time. There is even photographic evidence she laughed at the clowns, and she got to do a tug 'o war with four of them in one of the rings.

Which got me thinking . . .

We've had discussions on the blog before about 1) fears, and 2) quirks. When I ask what do you fear most on this blog, I get a lot of very serious answers: death, a child dying, Alzheimer's, fire . . . . illness.

But I realize too, that a lot of us have completely nonsensical fears. I mean, they make sense to US, but . . . to the rest of the world, we perhaps look a little nuts. Which then is more like a quirk. And we've talked before how sometimes writers can go on quirk overload. I've been asked to critique things that get so cluttered with oddity, and my only reaction as editor is WHY? So I think as writers, when we ponder quirks, they should feel less tacked on, more organic. They can still be completely nonsensical. Can still enhance the story. But . . . somehow they are rooted in that sort of nonsensical neurosis, which makes sense in the character's universe. That they are not quirks of the writer's cleverness but of . . . the character's reality.

For example . . . Baby Girl wants a hamster. But she cannot abide gerbils because they have tails. The logic on this one escapes me. But there you go. It HAS a logic. It might not be YOUR logic. But there's an order to it. A rule of quirkiness.

Me? In a strange hotel room when I am on the road, I cannot even contemplate sleeping until I look under the bed, in the closet, and in the shower. Now . . . I am not sure what I would do, should I discover the boogeyman in any of these places, but there you go. I was a chronic "check-under-the-bed" kid. Still am.

Another fear-quirk? Jumping spiders. You see . . . spiders are fine. I actually usually capture them and put them outside. But once, after I got divorced, I went to kill (pre-Buddhism) a spider. And it jumped. High. I was utterly freaked out. And for the first time, I didn't have a man in the house to kill it for me. Frankly, that was about the only good thing about marriage. Having a handy spider-killer. So I did what any self-respecting fraidy-cat would do. I called my best guy friend on the phone and he TALKED ME THROUGH killing the jumping spider. And the entire time, I kept shrieking, "It's trying to kill me. It's jumping because it wants to get up to my neck and kill me." Jumping spiders? Still kind of freak me out. Daddy Longlegs? Not so much.

I always make sure, in my humorous novels, to include these oddities. But I would never just have a character sketch that said, "Afraid of jumping spiders." I might put, "Afraid of jumping spiders. Long story." Or "Afraid of evil clowns. Don't get her started on the topic."

Maybe it's just a difference in my mind. But I really think when you talk about organic writing, it helps to not just "tack on" oddities, but root them in real lives.

So here are mine:

1) WHATEVER is under that bed

2) JUMPING spiders (only . . . regular creepy crawl ones . . . fine)

3) Evil clowns (not the good ones)

4) Rats (but not mice)

5) The serial killer up the street (he may not REALLY be a serial killer, but the guy seriously freaks me out)

6) Close talkers. PLEASE respect my space when you talk to me. Hence number 5.

7) Confined spaces. Even after death. When really . . . will I care? But I think I will. Hence I will be cremated and PLEASE no pine boxes, family. (It's all spelled out in my will, along with my song selections for the party I want you all to have.)

I could go on. And on. I am a neurotic mess. But in my life . . . it's organic.

Thoughts? Anyone afraid of evil clowns? Does anyone else think about the difference between neuroses and tacked-on quirks?