Mine, mine, mine

There is a habit that my mother got into whenever we had the infrequent phone call.
“Well," she said, "you could always put this in your book!”

“This” refers to some incident she was recounting about a student she worked with or a relative that she’d recently visited back east. Or it was in reference to an experience she had at the store when inserting herself into the life of a stranger or engaging with a previously seldom referenced neighbor.

No matter what it was, I was uniformly uninterested in her well-meaning suggestions, her insistent desire to insert herself into my “writing process”.

A natural promoter she’d say, “You should get together with this person. They are fascinating. Can I introduce you when you fly in next Tuesday? You could write about them.” Of course the answer would be an unambiguous no.

“I don’t understand how a person who wants to be a writer can be so uninterested in people,” she’d say with obvious frustration. “How can you write fiction if you’re not interested in meeting people? I’m feeding you these wonderful stories…how can you not want to use this material?”

How indeed? But I wasn’t interested in the people my mother wanted me to be interested in. I didn’t want to talk to her myriad of diverting friends and acquaintances. And I had no desire to be displayed to her friends as “my daughter the writer” and then later pimped out to profile her pals as characters in an anecdotal narrative, a benefit as it were to her associates for being her confederate.

Out of frustration, one day I finally said, “Mom, I’m not a fiction writer”.
“You aren’t?”
“No. I don't write stories”.
“Then what kind of writer are you?”
I struggled to come up with something.
“I’m a technical writer. I like writing help texts, manuals...and maybe and reviews and publicity”

“Oh…well sorry all this time I thought you wrote fiction.”

The next time we spoke she said. “I have a wonderful project for you. I’m trying to put together a cotillion for girls of color, a societal coming out party for them and I want you to do the PR. Won’t that be a wonderful opportunity for you? Plus we’ll get to work together!”

“No Mom. That's not what I want to write about.” I had no intention of publicizing an event that taught little girls how to dress up and be pretty prizes for boys. I think she must have had temporary amnesia about my 14-year marriage to a woman.

“Well, then what DO you want to write about?” Apparently if she couldn’t see it, couldn’t sing my praises about it to others, and couldn’t get it for free, then my writing seemed more fiction than reality.

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Later, she privately wondered to my sister if I were passionate about anything.

Well, I am. But these conversations got me thinking about my writing and why I so loathed her trying to put a name to it.

My writing has always been an escape, a very personal shelter that I rarely let others into. It is unequivocally, in all it’s flawed execution and stilted phrasing, in it’s inexact and imprecise use of language, in it’s self-referential and dubious thematic structure (almost done here) in it's damaged, broken and warped way, MY misshapen offspring. And I don’t want to share my ugly baby with my mother right now, no matter how desperately she wants me to share it with her.

It’s one of the chief reasons I blog anonymously. I then get to devote a small portion of my universe to exploring me without the confines, obligations or designs of anyone (read especially my mother).

If this makes me a hateful child, so be it. But this is a singular act of defiance for a daughter who was the good girl for most of her formative years.