Post #42 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing and Healing – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Writing and Healing: A Theme of Memoir Writing
Memoir writing is vital because it allows us the time to look at our life stories, to understand them and be able to better direct our future life stories. One of the benefits of writing is the process of healing that occurs.
Today, Women’s Memoirs welcomes memoir author Susan Spangler as a new guest blogger. You met Susan back on August 29 and again on September 7. Her compassionate and engaging memoir is a story of personal and family healing. Here are the links to those two posts.
Susan Spangler Discusses Lines on the Page
Susan Spangler Speaks about Memoir Publishing
Now Susan has accepted our invitation to share her thoughts and insights with you on a regular basis.
Words Not to Live By
By Susan Spangler
Author & Illustrator, The Year of the Bird
Women’s Memoirs Guest Blogger
I’m looking out the window on a gray, rainy May afternoon. April’s candy-colored blossoms have all given way to green leaves. Except for the massive, brown trunk of our old oak tree out front, the view from where I sit is entirely green. That amazing fresh green that shines through the rain at this time of year. Spring green. Perfectly green.
Perfect. What a concept. To make sure I understand it perfectly, I look it up. Definition number one on www.merriam-webster.com is this: “Being entirely without fault or defect; flawless.”
Who thought that up?
Well, since you asked, it dates back to Aristotle, in ancient Greece. Perfection, he wrote, was “that which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better.”
In math, there are perfect numbers. In science, perfect models. In music, there are two perfects—harmony and pitch. There are perfect storms. Perfect likenesses. Perfect couples. Perfect questions. Perfect heights. Perfect weights.
Stop it!
Let’s change the subject. All this perfection is giving me a headache. I think I need a nap. And a bag of potato chips.
Because it’s very fine to admire a perfect sunset or a perfectly baked pie crust. But people? Not so much. No. And here’s a perfect example: how about you? Feeling perfect today?
Oh my. Sorry. That was rude. Forget I asked. I’ll answer it: I am not now, nor have I ever come close to being perfect.
Perfect. Flawless. Spotless. Faultless. Pure. Take those words. Please.
Take them. And let me have these two instead: Pretty good.
Also: Oops. Uh-oh. Hmm. Oh, well. Better luck next time. Okay. Tomorrow’s a new day. Keep on truckin’.
Those words all work for me.
They’re words I can live with. Words I have lived with.
Those are the words you need when you’re in the middle of a huge argument with your husband because he wants to keep the bird that your daughter brought home after finding it in a bush at the playground, where she was pushing her three little kids on the swings one day, a year after her wonderful, young husband had died of cancer, and a month after her older son’s seventh birthday—September 11, 2001.
They’re the words you need to get yourself through the years that your beloved daughter has been caring for her wonderful husband and grieving for him, while you’ve been taking care of her and him and your three little grandchildren and your beloved, elderly mother-in-law.
Okay. Deep breath. Tomorrow’s a new day. It’s those words that make it possible for you stop arguing with your husband about a bird and sit down to write about it instead.
And it’s through writing that you realize that it’s not really the bird that you’re both so upset about. It’s cancer and grief and 9/11 and crying children who miss their daddy. It’s everything.
Remember perfect?
It’s nowhere to be seen. But pretty good? Pretty good is right here beside me. When I’m rocking the baby to sleep. When I water the flowers. When I hug my husband. When we give thanks for supper around the kitchen table.
And it’s pretty good when I can grab an hour or two here or there, to keep on writing. To keep on finding the words I need to hang in and hold on.
Eventually, those words grow into pretty good stories. As time goes by, I paint pictures to go with them. They get published as a book, The Year of the Bird—a book about a bird. And everything else.
So—with all due respect to Aristotle and Plato and all the great idealists throughout history—I’m just saying, sure. Perfect is a great idea. An important idea.
But a word to live by, it’s not. When it comes to living, I prefer the encouraging words: Hope. Love. Laughter. Family. Tomorrow’s a new day.
Keep on truckin’.
