My mother died nine years ago today.

I’m not trying to be maudlin; that’s just how it is and what can you do about that? Some sentences are like that, especially when they push against the swelling wave of all the Mother’s Day messaging that starts rolling towards shore this time of year, crashing into me the second Sunday of each May and leaving me soaked in some unpalatable mixture of longing and resentment.

Each Mother’s Day, the fact that I myself am a mother, that Rowan and Isaac are going to bring home some kind of sweetly crafted double–Mother’s Day gifts, feels like an afterthought: that’s nice, dear, but where do I send my card?

Okay, that last sentence was maudlin.

But that first sentence: “My mother died nine years ago today.” It has two parts, and I am pondering the difficulties of both: the simple modifier-subject-verb of the first half and the descriptive clause (is that what we call that? I’m supposed to know those things, but today I’m not looking anything up. And is “modifier” correct?) of the second half. “Nine years ago” is just as unbelievable as the fact that she actually died — how is it that she’s been gone for nearly a quarter of my life? And yet, she shapes it, informs it, almost daily, and the memories and emotions are as clear now as they were then, unless I’m fooling myself into thinking otherwise. Am I?

That’s the most difficult thing about death — what I know today about the past nine years and what my mother doesn’t, can’t. Those two boys, of course, but all the tiny, daily things that make up a life, like what we’re having for dinner and that the roof is still leaking. I imagine daily phone calls in which we discuss these things; I imagine seeing her name pop up on the call display and sighing because I have things to do besides talk; I imagine picking up the phone anyway, every day. I console myself with the ways in which she does shape my life. I talked about it with a friend in Los Angeles last week, as she and I made up the guest bed in her home for me. “Really,” I kept protesting, “you don’t have to help. I can do this by myself.”

“Nah,” she said, stuffing a pillow into its case, “I can’t let go of the way my mother raised me.”

And we talked about that, the ways in which neither of us believe in ghosts but feel our mothers’ presence all around, live our lives according to (occasionally, or often, in defiance of) the way they would have, but always with them around us.

So she’s gone, has been for nine years now. But she’s here, too, so today, Sunday, every day, we’ll focus on that.

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Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Annie Turcotte.

I still can’t read through that list of names without tearing up. We remember.

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Oh, yeah: I have a blog. It’s just that I have been submerged at the bottom of a sea of deadlines. And so I have been Writing Things for Other People (all lovely people, by the way). And when I am not doing that, I am Shuttling Children to Summer Activities. In particular, I am shuttling Rowan to soccer-related activities. Thus far, his summer seems to consist of soccer, with a side of soccer, with a wee soccer chaser and the occasional soccer nightcap. All washed down with some great big thirsty guzzling gulps of swimming pool.

I’m working on a longer post about how weird it is to have a sporty kid when one is avowedly not sporty. But for now, I just wanted to note that all this shuttling of my son to and from soccer has left me seeing an awful lot of this kind of thing on various minivans around town:

And, at the risk of alienating any of you perfectly lovely folks who have such stickers on your minivans, they make me barf a bit in my mouth.

It must be something to do with their reeking of heteronormativity, practically an advertisement for Mom+Dad+boy+girl+dog+cat. Or the fact that they reduce “family” to a set of mix-and-match stickers, all of whom seemed to be Caucasian and happy. Or that anyone should care so much about just exactly who’s riding in your minivan, or that you’re so damn proud of it that you need to put it on your car window for everyone to see.

Or maybe it pisses me off that some kind of families can put those kinds of stickers on their cars and not worry about getting rear-ended.

As someone who drove a series of my parents’ dying cars for the majority of my driving life, maybe I’m just averse to the idea that your car should be a reflection of your personality or, say, your lifestyle choices (ask me about this later when I acquire my red MG, but for now let’s live in the present moment, shall we?). Maybe driving a 2000 Buick Regal for the past six years, and an aging Chrysler before that, and before that a Cadillac Sedan de Ville that cost me $60 a week to fill well before gas prices got crazy (but, now, there was a smooth ride) made me happy to dissociate my car from my personality. Or maybe it just was a raging advertisement for my own frugality (or my parents’ taste for big cars) — who knows? When we finally sucked it up and bought our own new vehicle, it was with some reservation that I finally stuck a Pride decal to our rear window. What if someone keys us? I thought. What if someone smashes the window, or gives me the finger as I drive? What if, what if… For those reasons alone, I decided to bite the bullet and affix the rainbow sticker, if only to prove myself wrong. If only because I have perhaps internalized the corporate messaging from LuluLemon that you should do things that scare you just a little bit.

And, of course, absolutely nothing has happened.

They do, for the record, have decals of little boys playing soccer. Or maybe they’re little girl with short hair? Or maybe the long-haired figures on the site are actually boys with long hair, which is what I hear happens to boys when you don’t cut their hair for a year and a half. I haven’t checked to see whether they have decals of little boys dressed in tutus, which is what Isaac wore to preschool this morning, along with a pair of Rachel’s heels. And, true, there’s nothing stopping me from ordering of decals of two mom figures and slapping them on the rear window of our car because I’m just so damn excited about our family. Apparently, you can get Star Wars decals as well: I could possibly see my way to having two Princess Leias wielding light sabers up there, along with two little R2-D2 droid figures, one in a tutu and one with a soccer ball (any takers?): it would be a way to sum up just about everything that my children have brought into my life, in all its complicated glory. Maybe if I still had the Caddy…

But really, I overshare about my family plenty already, right here on the Internet — do I really need to boil them down to an uncomplicated set of bland conformity on my vehicle? I’ve already got a basic-model car, no heated seats or six-CD changer here: but my household? Anything but.

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If it weren’t soccer, it would be something else.

Right?

This is what I tell myself in my lower moments, during the times I wish the game had not been invented or at least that Rowan had never heard of it, had never put foot to ball and in that moment of connection found something thrilling and addictive. This is what I tell myself during each of the dozen or so daily negotiations about when and for precisely how long I will play soccer with him in the backyard and what must happen before or after in terms of things like eating breakfast and practicing piano and going to school and keeping one’s hands to oneself and the like.

I sound like a monster. I understand this. I realize that I am complaining about my son’s passion for engaging in a wholesome, healthy, outdoor form of exercise, instead of, say, online poker or dealing crystal meth. I understand the value of encouraging physical activity and team sports. I know that the fact that he wants, desperately, to play with me is a gift, something I should treasure now because, “You know, in eight years, he’s not going to want to have anything to do with you…”

I know all this. It’s just that I’m not really an organized-sports kind of girl. Sometimes I would rather not go outside and kick around a ball. Sometimes, I have had enough. Sometimes, I have other things to do, like make dinner or read the Styles section of the New York Times or alphabetize the spices or simply do anything but go outside in the snow (“snoccer”) or the sunshine or the rain or the darkness and play. Sometime over the last seven months, soccer has worn thin for me, even as Rowan’s passion for the sport seems to increase daily.
Sometimes, I just don’t want to play.

But if it weren’t soccer, it would just be something else, like — God forbid — hockey. It’s not so much the sport as it is trying to make my seven-year-old understand, as gently as possible, that I simply don’t care about it as much as he does. He doesn’t get that yet, doesn’t understand how I’m not elated each time I score one of my rare goals, why I don’t roar “YAAHHHH!” and pump my fist. He doesn’t get that I score far fewer goals than him not simply because I am the worse player, which I may well be, but because I don’t try nearly as hard, don’t throw myself after the ball, don’t insert my small, fast-moving body in between it and anything else in my way, as though it’s always and forever the most important thing in the world. For him, “fun” and “winning” are intertwined, while for me, soccer would be a whole lot more fun if winning weren’t quite as important.

And if it involved reading the Styles section of the New York Times while quietly sipping my tea at the pristine kitchen counter.

This is one difference between me and my seven-year-old son. Another difference between us is that I don’t try to convince him that he, too, might really enjoy a decaf latte and a section of the paper as much as I do.

(On the other hand, that’s not entirely fair. I suppose that I do, daily, try to convince him of other things: that he will probably like that cube of marinated tofu if he just tries it (an incorrect assumption); that his foot will fit better in his boot if he takes the time to fish out and uncrumple his sock and put it on his actual foot (I was right); that 900+ Pokémon cards are enough (we continue to disagree on this one); that as difficult as it may be to fall asleep in your bed right now, it is far more difficult to fall asleep while standing on the landing and talking about how you cannot fall asleep (I’m right about this, too); that whining is not an effective negotiating tool. Etc.)

We’ve gone through a few soccer balls over the last several months: the freeze-thaw cycle isn’t particularly kind to the dollar-store variety of balls we’ve purchased until now. Shredded octagons of white plastic litter the backyard now, cast off by the balls as they slowly fall apart. I’ve taken to calling our latest one Wilson, after the volleyball that Tom Hanks’s character befriends in that movie Castaway: Rowan, I daresay, is possibly as emotionally dependent upon our Wilson as Hanks’s Chuck Noland (does anyone else besides me think that the name’s a tiny bit too heavy-handed of a metaphor for a man thrown up on a desert island?) was upon his.

Also, I think that Chuck’s Wilson is in a lot better shape than ours.

Yes, we have signed Rowan up for leagues. We plan to max out the amount of organized soccer we can fit into everyone’s schedules, in order that Rowan can get his fix in while I can sit on the sidelines with a thermos and a novel and look up occasionally to cheer. And, in our rare, unscheduled, moments, I will continue to try to seek some kind of balance between playing his games and playing mine. Even more, I will do my best to actually play when I play with him, to see where and how I can find the fun in this activity that I barely tolerate but he loves. Loves. Loves.

This is the parenting philosophy I try to cultivate, known as Everybody gets most of what they need most of the time. Because, frankly, I’m never going to be the kind of parent who’s able to give it everything she’s got, all of the time.

And maybe, one day, many years hence, the two of us will sit in a café somewhere, quietly sipping caffeinated beverages and reading companionably, together.

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It’s Rant Thursday!

For those of you who are too polite to ask, yes, I’ve been working on my novel. It’s a humbling process, this: this coming to the realization that my manuscript, in fact, wasn’t and won’t be dictated to me by God. Or, perhaps it was/will be dictated to me by God, but man is that Dictaphone in rough shape and only about one in every three sentences is legible. I am learning all sorts of Useful Lessons, though. For example:

a)    Just because you have read lots of novels, it doesn’t mean that you are qualified to write one.

b)    Just because you have edited novels, even if you have won awards for editing books, it doesn’t mean that you are intuitively capable of writing a decent novel.

c)     The fact that you are good writer in no way guarantees that you will write even a halfway decent novel. Good writing is not the same thing as a good novel.

And so on. As I said, humbling.

My first draft was pretty much pulled out of the air: sitting down and semi-desperately trying to tune into that staticky voice of God over the shoddy celestial Dictaphone and getting down the words. For my second draft, I’m working from the ground up: going back to basics, reading books on the craft, doing the kinds of exercises I have tended to avoid. In essence, I’ve designed for  myself a one-year Masters degree in fine arts, complete with textbooks, assignments (e.g., pick a novel I like and break it down scene by scene in order to analyze its construction) and a thesis: my second draft. At the moment, I’m creating the equivalent of a thesis proposal: a plot treatment, a sort of Rosetta Stone for the entire manuscript wherein I list, in order, each scene and its structural function: who’s doing what, where, and why? How do these actions further the overall plot? What, by the way, is the plot, exactly? The theme? What does my protagonist want, and what  antagonistic forces are preventing her from getting it? What is her fatal flaw of character and how will she overcome in order to fulfill her desires? Just simple stuff like that. The kind of thing that drove Anne Lamott on a booze and cocaine bender — and that was after she did what I’m doing and then her editor rejected it, again.

But that’s for later.

Right now I am just chugging along, doing the exercises, reading my books. Which leads me to the real point of this post, and this rant. Here’s what it says on page VI of Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

NOTES ON THE TEXT

To deal with the pronoun problem I have avoided constructions that distract the reader’s eye, such as he annoying alternation of “she” and “her” with “he” and “him,” the repetitious “he and she” and “him and her,” the awkward “s/he” and “her/im,” and the ungrammatical “they” and “them” as neuter singulars. Rather, I use the nonexclusive “he” and “him” to mean “writer.”

Mr. McKee. Robert. Bob! Can I call you Bob? Can we get all chummy like that? Well, no, actually we can’t. We can’t because you don’t think I exist. We can’t because you are still mired in the antiquated miasma of sexism that thinks it’s perfectly okay to verbally exclude more than half the world’s population from your ideas, all the while protesting that in no way are you being “exclusive.”

Bob, look: I’ve been over this before. But just in case: women exist. They exist as actual people, of course, but also as novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, copywriters, editors and characters in stories. We exist as writers. And very few of us, I’m willing to bet, would find it “annoying” to see our teachers and so-called mentors acknowledge that existence. I’m sorry that you think that the simple phrase “his or her” is distracting; personally, I find it distracting to be constantly reminded that the so-called expert advice I’m reading comes from a person who doesn’t think I’m alive. Personally, I think it’s annoying that, well into the 21st century, it’s still perfectly acceptable in your imagination to perpetuate the myth that men are the default, “neutral,” writers of this world. You know what’s actually awkward? It’s awkward when somebody won’t shake your hand or make eye contact with you because you’re a girl, when they go to great syntactical lengths to avoid acknowledging your existence and then insist that they aren’t sexist, not exclusive at all. No-ho.

(Something else that’s annoying, by the way, Bob: the phrase “put emphasis on.” Say “emphasizes.” It’s briefer and more elegant.)

It’s especially annoying because I’m reading your book on the heels of reading Dara Marks’s fantastic Inside Story: the Power of the Transformational Arc, which has given me all sorts of wonderful tools and insights into this process. It is, in my opinion, a better book than yours: much more practical; take-home points on every page; written with a certain economy that you lack — and this despite the fact that Marks uses “he or she” and “his or her” and other gender-neutral terms throughout. Guess what? It’s not distracting in the least. It’s respectful. It’s also realistic.

Bob, I’m prepared to be humbled by this process, but I’m not really prepared to be ignored, devalued, discounted, solely on the basis of my gender. If you’re going to dismiss me, do it for a real reason — like the quality of my writing or the structure of my plot. And I’ll try to take the few helpful points you provided and make them work for me. But that’s gonna be hard, because I don’t trust you very much: I mean, how am I supposed to take seriously your claim to be a “master of the craft” of storytelling when it’s clear that you’ll never be able to write a fully formed female character?

In other words, Bob, the pronouns aren’t the problem here. Misogyny is.

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Hey! It’s Rant Thursday! Here goes:

Dear Chris,

Can I call you Chris? I mean, of course I can. You asked if you could call me Susan, and, obviously, I said yes. I’m not sure if you’ll remember me, but I bought that family-friendly car from you last week, flew all the way to Toronto from Thunder Bay because cars are less expensive in the big city and I wanted an excuse to visit my family and friends, not to mention to navigate the drive home along the north shore of Lake Superior solo. It seemed like a rite of passage.

But I digress.

What I wanted to say, Chris, is that I love the car. I mean, it’s difficult not to love, what with the windshield wipers that actually wipe and the brights that stay on without me having to hold down the lever and the door locks that actually lock and the acceleration that actually… well, you get the picture. I’ve been spoiled with freebie, hand-me-down cars for more than a decade now, and I am eternally grateful for them, but I have to say I am kind of giddy about having a new one.

You must be familiar with that new-car feeling, Chris, having grown up in the industry. Your dad, you told me, owns several dealerships, and you’ve been around them your entire life. “But things are really different now,” you told me, conspiratorially, as I signed the papers for my new vehicle. “I mean,” you said, looking around the dealership, out near the Toronto airport, “I’m the only white guy here.”

And, you know? You were the only white guy there. It was, objectively, true that all the other salespeople at the place were people of colour. I honestly hadn’t paid much attention until you pointed it out. And while I thought that was weird that you pointed it out, I was prepared to grit my teeth and let it go if you didn’t say anything else. So I initialled the first page of the contract and then we moved on to the second, the one where I signed to confirm that I was whom I said I was and not some imposter trying to buy a car on Susan Goldberg’s behalf. “I mean, it’s easy to tell who you are,” you told me, Chris. “I mean, with everyone around here, you can’t tell who’s who: everyone is Mohammed Abdullah Singh. They all have the same names.”

(I have to admit, Chris, that I wasn’t really sure how to take that one coming from a white guy named, well, Chris. Which is, basically, the Christian equivalent of, say, Mohammed, isn’t it? But here, I am perhaps the pot calling the kettle black, having grown up a Susan in a world of Susans. Admittedly, there weren’t too many Chrises at my Jewish parochial school, but it still seems to me that there’s no real shortage of Chrises in North America, if you know what I mean.)

Now, I knew I had to intervene. Because I have made a pact with myself and the world to speak up in instances like this. Because not to do so is to be part of the problem, yes, and, more selfishly, because when I don’t I feel like an ass for weeks after. Months, even But it’s difficult to know how to intervene. It’s so easy to be caught off guard by the bad behaviour of others. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily leave me with a whole bunch of prepared remarks for these kinds of situations. By the time you commented on the fact that, “You know, they’ve got 15 or 16 guys are living in one house and one guy goes down to the licensing office with another guy’s ID to try to get his license,” I finally managed to get it together enough to look up from my contract and say, “You know, I really don’t want to have this conversation with you.”

Was that enough? Likely not. But it was what I came up with at the time. And at least I succeeded in letting you know that, despite the colour of my skin, we don’t share the same values.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not racist. Because, Chris, you were right: I am. Sometimes, I see someone from any random ethnic or cultural group and an unflattering or sometimes even downright mean stereotypic thought flashes through my brain like some particularly vile form of Tourette’s syndrome. And I marvel, frustrated, at how deeply ingrained these kinds of thoughts are, at my brain’s persistence in thinking them. It’s like that song in Avenue Q: “Everyone’s a little bit racist, sometimes.” I’m working to explore that part of myself I don’t like, to acknowledge it, to figure out where it comes from and to work against it.

I didn’t walk out of the dealership in a huff. I mean, I had come too far already and contract was mostly signed. Plus, we got a really good deal. But I wonder if you would later tell someone about how I “Jewed you down.” I mean that’s what happened to my friend Susan (my God! We’re everywhere! It’s amazing you can tell us apart, all these white Jewish writer Susans) when she bought a car and the salesperson told her that she better not Jew him down any more. But that was 30 years ago. You said that things are really different now, Chris, but are they?

So maybe I didn’t say enough at the dealership, which is why I’m writing this letter. I haven’t decided yet whether I will copy you, or maybe your managers, on this link. But in the meantime, here are a couple pieces of advice for you, nuggets that I omitted to mention at the dealership: first, don’t assume that just because I’m white, I’m like you. And second, to paraphrase my mother, if you can’t think of anything nice to say, shut the fuck up.

Susan

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(Woot! It’s Rant Thursday! Here you go, dearies:)

I got an e-mail a few weeks ago that went (and I’m paraphrasing slightly here) something like this:

Hi Susan,

Remember me? I’m that guy who hired you to write his website, oh, eight or 10 years ago. You know, the guy who supplied you with a whole bunch of plagiarized content without telling you that I had simply taken it from other websites and intended to pass it off as my own, with some light editing and organizational work from you? Ring a bell? And when you finally cottoned on to the fact that I had no integrity hadn’t actually written the materials, and explained why you couldn’t work with them, I got really mad at you and stiffed you on your fee?

I seem to recall that I called you “unprofessional.”

Yeah, me.

Sooooo, what’s your availability like? I need someone to review and create some text for a new website. If you’re still doing this kind of work, please forward your contact information.

Thanks,

That Guy

Here’s what I wrote back (no paraphrasing at all):

That Guy,

I’m not the right writer for the job.

Susan

(I’ve been hesitating to write this post, because of well, the whole “unprofessional” thing I reference in the title. At least some of my clients read these pages, although I have very little idea how often. And so talking about other clients, no matter how long-ago or fleeting or abusive, seems somehow unprofessional. But really, if you are my client, now, and you are reading this, rest assured that at this stage of the game, you are my client because I ENJOY WORKING WITH YOU. You are pleasant, you have integrity, you are committed to your cause, you pay me, and you appreciate the work I do. And I appreciate you for it.)

I debated writing something more, shall we say, creative,  more descriptive, in response to That Guy. In the end, though, I went for restrained. And man, it’s so hard not to be a good girl, not to soften the blow by writing things like, “Unfortunately… ” or “I’m sorry, but…” or “I don’t think I’m…” Or any number of polite, apologetic, wimpy phrases. Because it’s not unfortunate that I will not take on this job, nor am I sorry about it. And I don’t “think” that I won’t let myself be abused and taken advantage of by unrepentant asshats: I know I won’t. Full stop.

And man, even the much more restrained version felt so good. If this is what my 40s are going to be like, bring it.

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(Hey, it’s Rant Thursday! Here you go, lovelies:)

So, I’m working on my novel. I really am. (This, in part, explains a certain amount of slacking off chez this particular blog.) The past few weeks, my office purge/organization has been mirrored by a purge/organization of the manuscript. It’s actually shorter now, because I’ve been killing the babies (God, I love that term): that is, ruthlessly cutting out all the scenes and subplots that no longer actually fit. Of course, I don’t delete them outright (because who knows what genius lies in my every paragraph? This is not for me to judge.) but simply move them to a different folder, a purgatorial kind of file that is the holding place for all those unborn scenes that will never see the light. Pray for them.

And now I am going through what remains, figuring out what blanks need to be filled (and, oh my, are there blanks that to be filled … vast chasms of blanks) and what should go in those blanks. Among other things.

To help, I’m working through John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. It’s a good guide thus far, immensely practical and useful in that it forces me to articulate in concrete terms exactly what this story is about, its premise, its structure, the logical, organic arc of the narrative. Et cetera.

Except I just read this passage, right there on page 40:

From the very beginning of the story, your hero has one or more great weaknesses that are holding him back. Something is missing within him that is so profound, it is ruining his life (I’m going to assume that the main character is male, simply because it’s easier for me to write that way).

And now I’m all pissed off.

John.

John.

John! Come on, buddy.

John, you just spent an entire chapter explaining grouchily to me that “Most writers don’t use the best process for creating a story. They use the easiest one.” Taking the easy way out, you explain, is a surefire way to writing an external, mechanical, piecemeal, generic, and lazy story. One that doesn’t work. Rather than relying on tired assumptions and clichés, you tell us, the so-called “Truby method” is successful because it is “internal, organic, interconnected, and original. I must warn you right up front,” you say: “this process isn’t easy. But I believe that this approach, or some variant of it, is the only one that really works. And it can be learned.”

So John, I’ve got to ask you: why take the easy way out? Why assume that, when it comes to your own writing, that the tired old way of seeing the world from the universal male viewpoint is still acceptable? Because I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. I’m here to tell you that slightly more than half the world does not see the world from “the male hero’s” point of view. I’m here to tell you that lots and lots of women want to — and do — write, and that a thousand times more women than that read their writing, and as far as they’re concerned, “he” is not an acceptable, generic substitute for “she.” Even if it is easier for you to write that way.

Further, I’d like to let you know that as the mother of two young boys, I have a hard enough time finding kids’ books that don’t automatically assume that the main character is male. My kids love to read, and they love to be read to, and they are lucky enough to have shelves full of books, crammed with books, wonderful books that, collectively, share one major flaw: the vast majority of them are told from the viewpoint of that so-called universal male character. When I read aloud, I constantly change pronouns in an effort to reflect my kids the real gender divide of the world, not the false one that so many writers — you included — choose to depict instead.

Is it so hard, really, John, to write “he or she”? Is it so hard to alternate between gendered pronouns? Wait, I’ll answer that question for you: it isn’t. Is it so hard to imagine that there might be a generic heroine rather than hero? Not really — I’ve been doing it for pretty much my entire writing life, which started in first grade. I think you can do it too, John. It can be learned. As you say, right there on page 5, “I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story differently than in the past.”

So, John, how about it? How about, for the sake of your readers, for the sake of my kids, trying to think differently than your predecessors? It doesn’t require a huge shift in thinking on your part, but if every author made that shift, if every author refused to take the easy way out when it came to thinking about just who gets to be a hero and who doesn’t in terms of gender, the collective results would be profound.

Love,

Susan

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