Breeding and Writing: The only two things I want

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

Anytime I see this question in one of those legacy journals  at the bookstore or philosophical posts on a “mommy forum” (gag), I have the same answer.

What do you want for your children?

Personally, I want them to be: a) sincere and b) creative.

That’s my answer, every time. Sometimes I forget one or the other, depending on the day. If my toddler has just painted the bedroom in oatmeal (yes, that’s happened), “creative” may not be at the top of the list in my mind.

But these two qualities, above any other, are all I want.

I realize that I’m something of a liberal, and that I’m setting myself up for disappointment in hoping my son becomes a rock star heartthrob and my daughter becomes the professional photographer slash ghost hunter slash Bigfoot-discoverer she currently wishes to be. They’d have to rebel and be accountants or something, just for the sake of the regular rites of passage. They can’t out-shock me any other way.

But I’d be not-so-secretly glad if they end up weird like me and my husband.

Fuck that. I’d love it.

I’d prefer they be more comfortably paid, perhaps, but that’s another blog post.

I want them to be original and independent. I want them to know themselves, and not bother with the fake stages we all seem to go through as teenagers and sometimes even adults.

Maybe that’s because I’ve tried to be other people in my life. I’ve paid those dues already, and normal doesn’t work for me. Oh, I’ve held waitress, sales clerk, office lackey, daycare teacher, fast food drive-thru guru, and probably ten other equally glamorous titles. Most of them included cleaning up other people’s used food, and it taught me a lot. I’ve kept those lessons.

Sure, some were more bearable than others. Not all of them sucked. But in the end, what I want to be is a verbal artist. A wordsmith. Known outside of my house for phrase-twisting, whether or not I ever get rich off it.

I want to be a writer.

I need to be.

That doesn’t mean I can always (ever?) write worth a single half-shit—but I lie awake at night sometimes thinking about it. I practice. I submit. I work, I read.

I want my children to have something of that drive in them. I don’t care if they hate the arts; that’s fine. I’d love them to be able to tell me that.

Just know who you are.

It took me too damn long to find out, and I see my job as helping them get there sooner. You miss so much life that way and their lives matter too deeply to me to allow any one of my children to live as the wallflower their mother was.

And then, of course, ya gotta wonder—

Is that what our very mothers wanted for us?