Is Writing an Act of Bravery? How About Sleepovers?
An act of bravery by a grimacing kid. And a not-so-subtle message unrelated to the rest of the content of this blog post. That is all.
I was so thrilled by the nice response I got to my essay in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Like the other pieces?I’ve published recently, like this one and this one, the essay was deeply personal and more than a little revealing. Besides admitting to sometimes wishing my son would move out to a nice farm in the country for a week or two, I also came clean (again) about my struggles with secondary infertility.
I noticed that when all my lovely friends and supporters?re-tweeted and re-blogged my essay, or shared it?on Facebook, they?kept referring to it?as brave. “A brave essay by my friend Susie Meserve,” one of them said, and another, “Thank you for your honesty and bravery.” Honest, I’ll cop to?always. (Honest to a fault, methinks.) But brave? At the time I posted my snarky little article?about parenting, another friend was publishing a piece about negative portrayals of women of color in television, for which, I’m sure, she received a $%^& storm of offensive comments. And of course I thought about the incredible bravery of?Jim Foley. I was hard pressed to think of myself, in an essay complaining about the boredom and existentialism of parenting, as being “brave.”
I raised this with my friend An Honest Mom, who shared the smart point that we always think of other people as brave before we accept the idea that we ourselves are. And that, for many people, what I did in those personal essays?admitting to pettiness, jealousy, parental ennui, grief, and infertility, not to mention?contending with years and years of rejection?as a writer?is just that: brave. Well, gosh. That made me feel good. After all, I am the woman who spent seven years writing a book about my own anxiety, and how when I traveled around the world with my now-husband, fear kept me from experiencing all kinds of adventures.
That I might be brave for sharing that truth about myself is almost uncomfortably ironic, and more than a little pleasing to think about.
I had been mulling this over for a few days when?I stumbled into a sweet conversation with my son L, who at five seems to have simultaneously inherited his mother’s risk-aversion and society’s ideas about what bravery really is. I was puttering around the kitchen while he drew pictures on the floor and practiced writing “letters” to me and his dad.
“Mama, did you know I’m not as brave as J?”
“You’re not?” I feigned surprise. J is an extremely intrepid friend. He’ll scale anything around.
“Nope. He’s much braver, because he climbs much better than me.”
“Well, you know,” I said in a fit of genius, “people are brave in different ways. Like, for example, I’m not very brave about climbing either, not like Daddy or J. But I’m brave because I write things that people don’t always like, and I write them anyway. And sometimes it’s hard to be a writer, because people say no to you a lot,?and it’s brave that I do it.”
He was enthralled.
“And,” I continued, “I know a way that you’re brave that J isn’t as brave.”
“You do?”
“I do. You do a great job at sleepovers. And J still has a really hard time with them.”
“Yeah!” he said, jumping up and down. “I’m brave at sleepovers!”
“Yup,” I said, feeling utterly content?with everything: my tenuous bravery, and L’s.
This question of bravery keeps coming up. L is more than a little obsessed with it lately. Playing “dinosaurs versus dragons,” he’s constantly asking me which team is braver, and his answers reveal a very narrow-minded idea of courage. For example, yesterday he told me that the dinosaurs were braver because they were winning. I suggested that maybe the dragons were braver for keeping on fighting even when they were losing, but no?that was the wrong answer.
I’m obviously more hip to bravery than L, but nonetheless I wonder whether my own ideas about what’s brave have been a little primitive. Like traveling with B. The entire time, I told myself that he was the brave one, because he seemed to be completely unafraid. But maybe, for pushing through my fears, for not giving up, for ultimately deciding I could have traveled forever, I was brave, too.
I don’t know. But?I nonetheless?like the idea of reframing bravery. For many years, I haven’t believed that I have been very brave at all. But I have started to wonder if maybe bravery is something different than I’ve thought.
And, an aside: NaNoWriMo. The goal is 50,000 words. Me? I’m shooting for 25,000. It may not be an act of bravery, but anyone who meets that goal, while working and parenting and preparing for the holidays, my hat is off to you.
Stay tuned for the 2014 Literary Gift Guide, coming soon!
Susie
I'm working from the premise that motherhood is not just all diapers, tantrums, and setting limits. It's interesting. Okay, sometimes. 