Day 32: The Best Part

The best part of sharing my blog with my children was their laughter and delighted squeals as they heard me say bad words and even talk about peeing on the sidewalk. 

No, the best part is Rebecca continuously — to this day — asking me which sidewalk I plan to pee on, despite my insistence that I employed this only as a literary device. 

Actually, I think the best part was sharing stories about my dad (whose 6th yahrzeit is tomorrow) with my kids. They attended his memorial services at ages 5 and 2, and did not understand, nor do they remember, much of what they heard. 

Oh, wait, the best part was their outpouring of dozens of bright, insightful ideas for future posts, some of which I have already incorporated.

Maybe the best part was hearing their love and support for me and my passionate pursuit. 

“Wow, you’ve really worked hard on this, Mommy,” they said, when they saw the main page of my blog. Yes. True. 

And in exchange for future posts including these brilliant ideas (though in truth I needed no incentive), they consented to let me use their picture on the landing page and mention them in my posts. Pretty sweet deal for me. 

They have also kindly agreed to make room for me and my desk in their designated space, the book nook. Just a few short months ago, I was asking a friend how to encourage or entice the children back into the book nook, instead of seeing them argue about who had the right to hang out in their shared bedroom. 

Turns out all I needed to do to make it the most desirable space in the house was want to use the space myself! I’m sure you’ve experienced this, right? When your favorite spot on the couch, favorite cup, or favorite pen (ha!) becomes coveted by everyone in the family?

Start with me spending more time in the book nook, throw in the Alexa, a few plants for whom the outside has grown inhospitable, new art supplies and lego sets from our gift bonanza of a December (two birthdays, plus Chanukah), and lots of spare time over winter break and BAM — we now all want to hang out in the book nook! 

The book nook remains a standard, South Philly row house 3rd bedroom, renovated a few owners back to make room for an extra large 4-piece bathroom, but its tininess only serves to increase its coziness. 

At the moment, the book nook houses a closet, a dresser, a bookshelf and two desks, plus probably 3,000 legos, (hundreds of which are currently scattered around the floor, and many constructing amazing lego homes, apartments, hotels, treehouses, science labs and aquariums), and a corner full of paints and canvases that have been painted and repainted numerous times. 

The book nook brims with creative energy and joy, passion and hard work — but not the drudgerous, up-on-Monday-morning, dread-descends-on-Sunday-evening kind of work. The animating, just for me, soul kind. 

Seeing my children engaged in their soul work — the beauty, the intricate details, the creative innovations — feels so gratifying.

I feel so incredibly grateful that no matter what work they choose for pay or profession, they can engage in these engrossing, all-encompassing, flow-state pursuits. 

In reflecting on my own passionate pursuits when I was 8 or 11, I realize I spent most of my hours reading and writing. 

In grade school, one of my stories won a prize and earned me a trip to the state capital to share it. The story, titled The Secret Wall, had a pretty solid descriptive lead-up to the wall, but I cannot for the life of me remember what was behind the wall. I think I got tired and stopped writing, as 8 year olds do, or took an easy route out narratively. Behind the secret wall stood friends, a secret garden, another secret wall! 

During the 1996 summer Olympics, I wrote an entire news article, (perhaps it more closely resembled a news package, including art and a sidebar), about Dominique Dawes and her heartbreaking step off the mat during the floor routine.  

My article was mostly likely heavily editorialized (because I loved me some Awesome Dawesome), but the pull, the compulsion, the natural inclination to write strikes me most now. 

In middle and high school, I wrote for the school newspaper and even occasionally for my hometown’s community paper, The Las Cruces Bulletin. 

And of course, in college I won David Nelson’s famed tomato. 

The spark for writing has always burned inside me. 

However, I found I did not want to write other people’s stories and lacked the maturity, not shockingly at 20 years old, to write my own. 

My amateur journalist’s career included a story about bioluminescent fish and one terrible day attempting to get quotes from overweight people at a Popeye’s drive through. I was directed to gather their opinions on a study suggesting fast food makes you fat. 

“For color,” my editor said. 

I also got lost three times, consciously or subconsciously, on the way to cover a middle-of-the-night house fire. I could not handle the reality of seeing and writing about that. 

So, staring down the reality of a dying journalism industry, endless nights full of town council meetings about how tall a given cellular tower could legally be, and days spent trying to get quotes from children whose schoolmate had just been tragically killed by a garbage truck, I decided to choose a different path. 

During my newspaper internship’s final review, my editor commented that I just wasn’t “hungry.” 

Man, was he right. 

When it came being a newspaper reporter, I was not hungry at all. I was downright fed up. 

At the same time, I also interned with an amazing program called Breakthrough Collaborative, which placed me in front of a real classroom with real students and real responsibilities all summer, and I loved it. 

I was hooked on teaching. It lit me up — and still does. 

Teaching parlayed my love of reading and writing into a chance to offer kids and families the same quality education that changed my life, and promised job security, transferability and paid vacation to boot! Sign me up!

So, I threw myself, as I do, into the work of my career: into my students, their families, my schools, and later into my marriage, my children and building our family. 

And I shelved the writing — except for the occasional journal entry or thank you card — for more than 15 years. 

Now with this challenge, I can gratefully pick up my pen again, not as career, but because it constitutes my passionate pursuit, just like Sarah’s legos and Becca’s crafting. 

I cherish both the pull factors (that quiet voice inside me, my desire finally to speak, the love and encouragement of family, friends and acquaintances), and the push factors (the dislocation wrought by the pandemic, seeing my contemporaries get very sick and die, a sense of living on borrowed time) that led me here. 

And most of all, I cherish the space — temporal, in my one hour per day, and physical, in my little wall of the book nook — to allow my writing to grow. 

I’ve got it! 

The absolute best part of sharing this blog with my children is offering them a glimpse of myself at their age: a quiet, studious, exceedingly earnest, and possibly a tiny bit lonely kid with too big glasses and a scrunchie in her side ponytail, whiling away the hours alone in her room. Writing, crafting, polishing and publishing her stories simply because it’s her heart’s greatest gladness.