Babies are Going to Cry

This was the best piece of parenting advice I received, and it was from my dad. I was pregnant, and we lived several states apart at the time. On a short visit to see me during my final trimester, he leveled with me about what I would be facing, with this emphatic and simple phrase, "Now. Babies are going to cry." 

I imagine he was remembering when he would be the one to carry me around the yard during my fussy early summer evenings. I imagine it being hot, my mother worn out by my sister and me, a dinner that was making up its mind about how it would turn out, and a dog running in circles. Everything was fine in the all-American dream, but yet I cried on, as my sister had done before me. As have all the babies who, ungratefully, were walked up and down yards, streets, alleys, hallways, staircases, elevators, beaches, dirt roads, river banks, and snow drifts.

We all want the babies to stop crying. The babies want to stop, too, although it never feels that way at the time. It feels like they are relishing the sound of their own wail. The crying feels like a problem to solve and I am a problem solver by nature. Maybe my dad sensed that I would go into motherhood high strung and over-identified with the crying baby. He was just telling it to me straight, from one parent to another. There are going to be times when there is nothing precisely wrong, and so there is nothing precisely right to be done.

The same is true for self-expression. There really is no right way to do it. Sometimes tranquil silence is the blessing of a quiet state of mind, expressed like mother's milk, sufficient and plenteous. But, as a writer, I'm never sated, never satisfied with it. Clamorous thoughts and emotions rise up and create tension, which in turn creates a problem. I thought this tension itself was my problem until I read:

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem. -- Roland Barthe

This explained to me my constant need to come back to writing, over and over again, since the time I first saw my mother draw pictures on a piece of paper and write their names under them with a red felt-tip pen. The outline of a coat with fur trim and then beneath, a tight, round bond of letters suddenly fused with her real coat. These letters meant my mother's coat. How could this be? It was like torture, this newfound joy. And thus, my problem was born.

However, my writing projects feel nothing like caring for a baby, even though that analogy gets overused-- that our work is "our baby". Yes, we create it, but I'm really not worried that something I wrote is going to get sick or break itself or fall in with the wrong crowd. I am not writing a baby into life to look after and coax and cajole into independence and recognition.

In my act of writing, I am the baby. The writing is tending to me. The writing is something I need to do to be well, to be engaged with life, to be fed, to explore, to be nurtured. When I write, I'm the one getting walked around the yard, or through the hairpin turns of of my mind. The writing is always there for me, thankfully, because I'm a writer, and writers are going to cry.

And Bono will tell it to you straight, from one person to another: Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own 

Tough, you think you've got the stuff
You're telling me and anyone
You're hard enough

You don't have to put up a fight
You don't have to always be right
Let me take some of the punches
For you tonight

Listen to me now
I need to let you know
You don't have to go it alone

And it's you when I look in the mirror
And it's you when I don't pick up the phone
Sometimes you can't make it on your own

We fight all the time
You and I that's alright
We're the same soul

I don't need, I don't need to hear you say
That if we weren't so alike
You'd like me a whole lot more

Listen to me now
I need to let you know
You don't have to go it alone

And it's you when I look in the mirror
And it's you when I don't pick up the phone
Sometimes you can't make it on your own

I know that we don't talk
I'm sick of it all
Can you hear me when I sing?
You're the reason I sing
You're the reason why the opera is in me

Hey now
Still gotta let you know
A house does not make a home
Don't leave me here alone

And it's you when I look in the mirror
And it's you that makes it hard to let go
Sometimes you can't make it on your own
Sometimes you can't make it
The best you can do is to fake it
Sometimes you can't make it on your own