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Most elevator rides vanish from memory because they are non-events, this one lingered. The opening events of the convention had concluded so Mary and I were headed to our shared room on the 9th floor. With us in the small space were half a dozen other people bound for some floor beyond ours. At six the doors opened and a teenaged girl stumbled into the elevator with a gasp that could have been the intake of breath after uproarious laughter or might have been the end of a sob. We all stepped back to make room for her, as one does on an elevator. She turned and leaned into a corner, her face was red with tears and she continued to give shuddering gasps.

Usually the sight of someone crying fills me with sympathy, I reach out to help unless the situation is already under control. Yet something in this young woman’s face declared “Look how distraught I am. Pay attention to me.” The girl gasped again and snot blew out of her nose, trailing down her face. She turned to the elevator in general and said “Are any of you going to Great America?” This reference to the amusement park a few blocks away made me wonder if she’d been frightened by a ride, but surely fright would have worn off before she finished the trek to our hotel and up to the 6th floor. No one in the elevator answered right away. None of us moved and yet somehow it felt as if all of us had taken a step back from the overwrought emotion on display.

I’d barely had time to process the young woman’s behavior and my reaction to it when the elevator doors opened again. Floor 9. I hesitated for just a moment before the “it’s my floor I must get off” instinct kicked in. Another woman had leaned toward the girl, obviously intending to help. Her motion triggered the “situation is handled” circuit in my brain. Mary and I stepped off the elevator and the doors concealed the unfolding drama from our eyes.

“I’m a little glad not to be dragged into that.” I said. Mary agreed. Yet thoughts of that girl resurfaced throughout the weekend. Because I walked away I would never know if her drama was the over-reaction of a young person or if she was in true distress. Her behaviors were so out-of-context from everything else. Her entrance was so over-the-top that My brain had to circle through suspicion before I could engage sympathy on her behalf. She was well dressed and healthy. She had no physical injuries. In some ways her behavior seemed like an act, part of a scam. All of these factors bounced around in my brain, but our exit arrived before I had enough data to figure out how I should feel about her.

On the final morning of the convention I was ambushed by an unexpected pocket of sadness. I found myself discussing with Mary my homesickness for California. It was an odd homesickness, because I’ve visited my native state many times and never felt it before. Mary listened kindly as I sorted my thoughts out loud and offered tissues when the conversational paths made my eyes leak.
“I’m sorry.” I said as I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
“Why do people apologize for showing honest emotion?” Mary mused in a quiet voice which made clear to me that she thought no less of me for my tears. Before I could answer her question, Mary found the answer for herself. “Because we don’t want to be the girl on the elevator.”

Displays of emotion are hard to ignore. We’re wired to pay attention to them, to react. The emotions of others either draw us in or repulse us. I wanted to defend myself from the emotions of the girl on the elevator. Whatever she was feeling was strong, like an undertow with the power to pull a swimmer out to sea. I am not surprised that I reacted by stepping out. Social convention says that we only reach out to strangers when we are truly desperate, that level of desperation was out of place in a hotel elevator. If the girl had stepped on the elevator calmly, if she had been trying to hide her tears, I would have felt differently about our encounter. It would have demonstrated a level of rationality which would have increase my belief that she really needed help. How odd it is of me to be more ready to help someone who has a measure of control rather than one who displays open desperation.

I wish I had better or more solid conclusions to draw from this. All I have are observations about how easy it is to decide to step out of someone else’s crisis.

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.

On the Sunday after Prom, many of the young men and women who attended wear their formal attire to church. I love this tradition. It lets the clothing be worn more than once. More importantly, it lets me have the chance to look closely at the beautiful dresses. Kiki paid more attention this year because she is two weeks away from being 16. In the not-too-distant future she may be one of the girls in a gorgeous dress. I think she was also primed to pay attention because I’ve been asking her opinion on the dresses that I am altering. A long-buried part of me is very glad that my life now contains excuses for me to wear formal dresses. The first of these events will arrive on Saturday when Howard and I will attend the Whitney awards gala. The Whitney awards will be quite relaxing since we’re attending to be able to applaud our friends.

It feels like I have more profound thoughts on deliberately dressy clothing, but my thoughts keep slipping away from me. This probably means I should stop trying to write and instead put children to bed.

Stepping Stones book project:
I opened up my book project today for the first time in over two weeks. It feels like it has been longer because my brain has been working double time in the interim. I spent a couple of minutes reorienting myself in the project and figuring out where I left off. Everything about it felt stupid. I could not find any sense of inspiration or flow. I allowed it to all be awful and pounded out some words anyway. I have only one more essay to re-draft, then a bunch of data entry for the hand-written edits in the margins of the print-out. So close, yet not quite done.

Pretty Dresses:
I have now removed all the bits which did not fit my vision for what the dresses will eventually be. Evidence of this feat is strewn all over the family room floor in the form of tiny bits of thread. Gleek was fascinated with the project and did some of it for me. Next comes the more fearful parts. Seam ripping can be undone, cutting can not. However I can not shorten sleeves without scissors. That part will have to wait until I have a few hours available. Nylon chiffon frays badly if the edges are left raw for very long. (I feel cool for being able to attach the right name to the fabric. I know lots of fabric names and lots of fabric textures, but I would badly fail a mix and match test. I intend to fix this as my project continues.)

Raising Children:
My most important and long-term project. I didn’t do anything critical on this today except feed them at intervals and dole out a band aids or two. Sometimes it is nice to have a day when they’re around, but I’m not much required.

Cleaning house:
No progress today.

Gardening:
Ground covered in snow, wind cold. No progress.

Schlock books:
I can’t do anything else on EPD until we get page proofs late next week. I’ve sorted images for the next 4 books. I’ll do preliminary layouts starting on Monday.

Critiquing:
Between my writer’s group, a friend putting himself through an intensive short story writing course, and another friend posting chapters to be read, critiquing has turned into a project. I’m almost caught up with short story friend. Might finish that later this evening. The others I’ll get to.

Blogging:
1 post today. You just read it.

I propelled myself into Monday on a wave of nervous energy. I knew when entering the week that it would be a watershed. The work and decisions of this week determine the shape of things to come. It was important to get it right, so I made a list. The list was my focus. Task by task I was going to get through. I arrived at Monday evening with my list still long and my reserves exhausted. Most of my reserves were expended on emotional management rather than task accomplishment. Tuesday was a complete loss at getting work done. The list lay idle while my attention fractured across dozens of small fears and frets.

Wednesday is the fulcrum of most weeks and this week in particular. Today we can see that Howard will get all the margin art done before the end of the week. The cover is already drawn and out for coloring. I filed paperwork which will transfer my youngest two children to a different school. Now I need to settle my mind about these things. The settling is important because while this week determines new directions, the results of these shifts will not be clear until August. I am afraid of August. It is full of tight deadlines and big events. I have no idea how I’m going to fit a book shipping around the August conventions. I’ve only got a vague idea how I am going to manage the 36 hour turn around from the end of Worldcon to the first day of school. During those 36 hours I have to transport all of us and a load of booth supplies across 8 hours of desert while post-convention exhausted. I don’t even know if the youngest of my kids will be transferred to the new school with his sister, and probably won’t know until the week I’m away at Worldcon, because the schools won’t make their final lists until then.

But at least the decisions are made instead of pending. I’ve mixed enough metaphors for one evening. Time for bed.

Arches National park is a place of stunning beauty. It has been photographed with far more technical proficiency that I am able to produce. Yet there is something about my photos that speak to me in a way that the professionally taken photos do not. I remember standing there. I remember the feel of the camera in my hands and the way the wind whipped my hair as I looked up and up at the spires and arches of red rock.
We were dwarfed and humbled by the sheer size of the place.

We walked trails and contemplated the pathway ahead.

But this I think is my favorite picture. It is not technically beautiful, but it proves that I win at meta picture taking. At least for this trip.