Author name: Sandra Tayler

In the month of April I watched a long time friend, Dave, turn himself into a writer. He’d long been capable of writing things which were entertaining or insightful, but in April he took up a challenge to write 30 short stories in 30 days. He decided they were allowed to be awful stories because he would learn from the awfulness. I think it was somewhere in the second week when there was an almost audible click in his thinking. He changed from someone who occasionally wrote things into being a writer.

About two years ago I was tucking Patch into bed and he told me very solemnly that he’d had a vision for his life. He was going to be a cartoonist and draw Halo comics. He spent quite a long time detailing the ways that he planned for this to work. His plans included lots of practicing and would start the very next day. Morning dawned and Patch sprang out of bed to implement his plan. He discovered that drawing was harder than imagining drawing. Yet he still comes back to this dream and remembers it because it allowed him to picture a creative future.

Several months ago and online acquaintance Silvia Spruck Wrigley talked about becoming a writer. She gave me permission to quote what she said:

I wrote a diary from a young age without much belief in it or any thought that I would be a writer. I remember one day, I must have been about 12, I was upset at my grandfather and started creating my diary entry in my head. “Life isn’t fair! Or at least Opa isn’t!” I was pleased, this was a good opening. I was looking forward to writing it into my journal that evening. I repeated it to myself. It was a revelation that I had composed this with malicious aforethought. I was reading a lot of Judy Blume at the time, so I’m pretty sure that was a part of it, but it was a stunning realisation: that I could plan my words, that what I wrote could be improved, that there was good and bad presentation.

All three of these stories demonstrate an emergent moment. It is the time when a person’s self image shifts and new paths for the future become possible. If you ask any writer, they can probably tell you one of their emergent moments. I remember beginning my first story at 6 years old and being proud of using quotation marks. At 13 I saw that Terry Pratchett had first been published when only 17 years old. I decided to do the same. The results for me were quite different, but belief in that dream carried me through my teen years. In 2005 I wrote a short piece of fiction which made me a writer again after a decade’s hiatus. In 2009 I had an epiphany in which I realized that my blog counted as writing. Those are just my writing emergences. I’ve had them for parenting, gardening, being grown up, and dozens of other life roles. The moment of emergence will be different for everyone, but we all have them.

Emergent moments are inherently vulnerable. They shake the foundations of who we think we are and it does not take much to drive a person back away from the newly emergent possibilities. The first emergence is particularly fragile. My friend Dave had an emergent writing moment when he was 13 and unfortunately phrased criticisms made him shy away from writing. Writers at their early emergent moments need encouragement that this new future they can suddenly see is possible. They need to be told “Keep Going.” Detailed instructions and criticisms can wait until the path is set.

One of the coolest things I get to do as a parent is to witness the emergent moments of my children. I watched Patch’s comics with delighted amusement. More recently there was an evening when Kiki was feeling overwhelmed and doubtful about her ability to succeed at being a freelance artist. She talked to me. She talked to Howard. She did some thinking and reading. Then she came to me and her whole countenance had changed. “I can do this mom. I don’t know every step, but it is what I am supposed to do. It will work.” I looked into her eyes and knew that it was true. Like most paths it may wind some places that she doesn’t expect to go, but the trip will be a good one.

Emergence, like triumph and being grown up, is not something that can be given. Each person must reach out and take it when the time is ripe. However there is much I can do to help provide fertile ground so that those I love can ripen their moments of emergence. I can build patterns of possibility and encouragement into our lives. Then I can meet those emergences with quiet love and encouragement.

I spent 8 hours of Saturday in my office prepping the PDF of Massively Parallel for Hugo Voters. It looks good. Then I sat and watched Spiderman with Kiki. She’d seen it before, but at 15 she has a much better grasp of social nuance than she did at 7. She loved it. I can’t wait to show her Spiderman 2, which she has not seen before.

In all, a very good day.

I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.
-Samwise Gamgee

That quote comes from my very favorite moment in the Lord of the Rings Films. Frodo can’t go on and Samwise carries him up the last slope. It is a moment in time when the quiet assistant character gets to be a hero. It is when the audience sees that without support failure is imminent. Every time I see the scene, I cry.

I thought of the scene this morning when my daughter was frantically typing away at a homework paper and remembered that she needed to bring treats to class. Cheesecake, she declared. She had promised cheesecake. I dropped what I was doing and began making a quick batch of cookies. I couldn’t run to the store for cheescake and return in time, but I could bake cookies. My daughter was not pleased with the substitution. Then she was surprised and contrite when I got upset about her ingratitude. Only in the face of my tears did it occur to her that me dropping work to make cookies was a gift rather than something to be expected.

Carrying someone else is beautiful and heroic. Carrying the same person over and over is exhausting. How many times could Samwise have carried Frodo up the same slope if Frodo kept slipping back down? And what if there were three Frodos or five? At what point would Samwise collapse and need to be carried himself? There are times when carrying another person is the best and only solution. However it is not the only possible solution for most things. Sometimes Frodo just needs to realize that Samwise is tired too and offer to carry his pack for awhile.

Today is Mother’s Day. Mostly I am ignoring this fact because I don’t want to be required to have a good day. I also have no desire to require my family to provide me with one. If the day happens to be good, I will be glad of it. If otherwise, then additional guilt does no one any good. The deep irony of Mother’s Day is that a day has a better chance of being good if it is not overburdened with expectations.

That said, I’ll be calling my mother and Grandmother. I have no idea if they’ve adopted the same zen attitude toward the holiday that I have this year. (Some years I do care, others meh.) It is a small effort from me to call them, I know it will make them happy, and I love to talk to them anyway.

Up side of the day: I actually worked on some of my projects.

Down side: My evening has been stomped upon by my child’s poor homework planning. The emotional stew has chased away all the blog thoughts which I hoped to spin into something interesting.

Sigh.