A Mom's Year

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King shares a story about his son, Owen, who, when he was around seven years old, was so inspired by Clarence Clemons, sax player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, that he asked for his own saxophone and lessons. King and his wife were thrilled. Maybe their son would be a prodigy! But King figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to happen because Owen, he said, only practiced when he had to and never played just for fun during his free time. King didn’t see the point in making his son, who was less than enthusiastic, stick with it. “What this suggested to me was that when it came to the sax and my son, there was never going to be any real play-time; it was all going to be a rehearsal. That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher.”

King tells this story to encourage writers to read and read and read. His point is that people who want to become writers should think of reading not as a chore, but as a joyful activity that they should want to do all the time if they’re serious about writing. Duly noted. But this story has always resonated more for me as a parent trying to navigate the endless stream of opportunities available to our kids.

I wrote a Facebook post recently about rituals and my worry that while we’re doing online distance learning, our two high schoolers would feel the loss of the myriad ways their school creates community through morning announcements (including recognition of birthdays), saying the pledge, playing music over the loudspeaker between classes, Candy Fridays—plus I’m sure a bunch of other ways that individual teachers provide consistency while defining values and identity. The idea of losing these meaningful rituals at a time when my kids need more stability, not less, bummed me out.

Our daily rituals were more obvious when the kids were little, especially the favorite night-time routine of dinner, bath, and bedtime stories. My hope is that the intentionality of those rituals helped our kids become secure, well-functioning young adults. And I want to continue to help them feel secure. But after doing a lot of thinking on the topic, I started to feel like the best thing I could do for my teenagers was to trust that their teachers would find ways to create those rituals remotely and instead focus on creating my own routines and goals and holding myself accountable to them. Lead by example, as it were.

A friend shared a joke on Facebook: “Last year, it was do one thing every day that scares you. Now it’s do one thing every day.” Oh, I can relate. In the spring, with the uncertainty of not knowing if we’d be going back to “real life” any minute, I found it difficult to commit to any long-term projects, like Organizing All the Photos. Mostly, I found it hard to concentrate. I spent a lot of time trying to keep up with information, both medical- and policy-related, about the coronavirus. Plus, all of a sudden, Tim was working from home and the two who’d left the nest were back. I was glad to have everyone safely under one roof, but there were a lot of distractions. At the end of the day, I decided to go easy on myself and just focus on being as present as I could and keeping the place going as gracefully as possible.

A few months after Tim’s spinal cord injury in 2010, some friends stopped by the house with a pie. We sat around the table and they asked how he was doing. Tim was asked that question a lot, but this time he stopped and thought for a moment. Then he said, “Other than the accident itself, this has been a wonderful experience.”

Today is Tim’s birthday and maybe this seems like a strange thing to be thinking about to mark the occasion, but I’ve thought about his words a lot over the past month since the coronavirus took over our lives.