I was always watching. Always listening. Always reading. Always waiting for the day I would feel like I belonged in the conversation.
I've always loved to write. English classes were easy. Grammar made sense. Doing a crossword puzzle was preferable to watching a football game with my big brothers. I inhaled books, one after another.
The poor librarians could only shake their heads during the summer reading program when I finished the reading list in one week. Maybe it was because I was born the fifth of five children, and ten years after the others. Maybe not.
I grew up in a household of adults. I paid attention. I tried to fit in -- tried to be more mature -- yet with a ten-year difference, there was always something going on I didn't totally understand, or comments made that I wouldn't let on I couldn't follow. Instead, I went to my room and looked up words in the dictionary. I went to the library and inhaled stories about people who were older than me.
My childhood was spent on the pricey quest for adulthood.
If only I'd been mature enough to realize that adulthood would be inevitably reached, and when it was, there wouldn't be another level to shoot for after that (unless I were to count death and the afterlife, which even my childhood self understood was not something to hurry toward) maybe I would've chilled out a little about the whole growing up thing.
It's not as bad as it sounds. I managed to have fun. I rode bikes down our country gravel road. I fell off said bike and picked gravel out of my knees. I waded in the irrigation ditch. I went on picnics. I acted out scenes from the books I'd read, letting my imagination conjure up playmates and villains and worthy dueling partners.
I was put in charge of a new piglet, which I named Hamlet. My dad gave me two baby goats. I named them Shakespeare and Dickens.
I glued together and painted cobblestones I'd gathered from the ditch bank, forming them into likenesses of various creatures, because my mother felt I needed an artistic outlet. They made pretty good doorstops.
In Mom's defense, I never introduced her to the cast of colorful characters living in my head, or she may have skipped the rocks.
I played with toys and did my best to act like a child, but to be honest, I was always watching. Always listening. Always reading. Always waiting for the day I would feel like I belonged in the conversation.
That day came soon enough. I was editor-in-chief of our high school yearbook. I marched with the B'Cadettes. I earned a Soroptimist scholarship with an inspiring essay. I went off to college, exhaling in relief that I would finally be part of that adult conversation, no longer the impostor. But I found that my inner dialogue was still ahead of my reality. I had to force myself to act like a college student and enjoy the moments, instead of wishing for the next stage of life. What was wrong with me? I'm still not sure.
I found my niche in my Business Grammar class. I found I had an aptitude for Gregg Shorthand. Perhaps it was all the listening I had done. I had trained my ears to pick up each word. And for a quiet girl who stood on the periphery of every conversation, I learned I had a talent for public speaking. By talent, I mean that my knees didn't buckle and I didn't faint or collapse behind the dias during my Business Presentations class.
I took a Creative Writing class to offset the Business Writing class that was all about block letter form (indented paragraphs had no place in business correspondence.) I wrote a story about two people having a conversation as they swung back and forth on a swing set. My professor asked, "Why did you write this?" I answered with, "It was what I wanted to write." He nodded in silence, and I knew he was looking for kind words to tell me it was neither creative nor writing.
That ladybug cobblestone I'd painted to fool my mother into thinking I was a child? It settled heavily in my gut.
And then, without warning, my professor slapped his palm to his desk and said, "Good! Keep writing what you want to write. That's the problem, isn't it? We are too concerned by the publish or perish threat. We should be writing what we want to write. Your dialogue has potential. I see it. I hear the conversation. Promise me you'll keep it up."
The ladybug boulder vaporized, and its heaviness with it. Sure, my professor was clearly under some professional publishing stress of his own, and maybe his words were more for him than they were for me, but I still recall the feeling of standing in front of his gray Steel Case desk, with its worn-through laminate wood-grain desktop scattered with ungraded assignments, and felt a reason sprouting in my chest. The reason why I had been listening quietly my entire life. So he could see the potential in my dialogue. So he could hear the conversation. "I will. I promise I will keep it up. Thank you," I'd answered.
It turns out I lied.
I lied because I finally caught up with that next stage of life. I got married. We had four kids. I worked in an office while my husband finished his bachelor's and then his master's degree. The block letter rules I'd learned in Business Communications came in a lot handier than Creative Writing's dialogue with potential.
Skip ahead twenty years. My oldest son was in Germany, serving a mission for the church. Our younger son was in high school, our oldest daughter in junior high school, and our youngest daughter in elementary school. I was still working at the university, although my block-style letters had morphed into emails.
It was a Sunday. The day before our tri-annual orientation for new students who would be departing the next day for their study abroad program in Jerusalem. Sunday, April 27, 2008. I fell asleep thinking about the logistics it took to pull off an orientation meeting for 80 students and their parents, and I had a dream. A dream that had absolutely nothing to do with orientations or Jerusalem or block-style letter formats.
I dreamed of a conversation between two people.
A woman, obviously a makeup artist, and an actor who was asking her to go on a date with him. The woman, in no uncertain terms, laid it all out for the actor, making it clear she didn't date actors. She didn't hook up with strangers. She wasn't his type. The woman stood up for herself. She was independent and feisty and sure of herself.
She was working in an industry where she had to be sure of herself. She had lost her parents, and then her newlywed husband, in a short amount of time. She was grieving. And she wasn't having any of what the actor was selling. She definitely didn't have a problem putting him in his place. The most shocking thing about the entire exchange was that the woman was my fourteen-year-old daughter, only in the dream she was 28 years old. She was grown up, and feisty, and independent, and she had lost her parents!
I shot up in bed, taking the covers with me, and woke up my husband. "I've just had the worst dream!"
"A nightmare?"
"Yes! Mallory was working as a makeup artist on a film crew and she was rejecting an actor's advances."
"Was she doing a good job of it?"
"Yes. She was fierce."
"That doesn't sound all that bad."
"We were dead! Mallory's parents were dead! She was only 28, and we were already dead!"
My husband pulled me under his arm and shushed my fears. "It was only a dream. Mallory is 14. We are alive. If it would make you feel better, you could write it down and share it with her when she's older. She might like hearing how feisty she's going to be."
"And an orphan."
"Maybe you could leave that part out."
I agreed. I got up, went to work, handed 80 students a royal blue backpack and a stack of Holy Land textbooks, and headed to the auditorium for the four-hour orientation meeting. While doodling on my agenda during the meeting, it became apparent that my hand had taken my husband's advice, as it had abandoned the usual curlicues and begun documenting my dream with bullet points. I gave in to the idea and filled in the bullets. I wrote down every detail I could remember. My husband was right. It would be cool to share with our daughter when she was older.
Only the next night, I dreamed it again! The makeup artist was persuaded to go on the date. The couple went on a picnic. It was an awfully cool date, and what made it better was that the makeup artist was no longer my daughter, Mallory. Her name was Jocelyn Connor. And the actor's name was Riley Graves. They were making a movie called "Saying Goodbye". I dreamed all night. I woke up at four o'clock in the morning, tiptoed into our loft office, and started writing down everything I could remember.
That's how it continued. I would have a dream, and I would write it down. I started keeping a notebook by my bed so I could write down my dreams before they evaporated into the morning light. But I only really wrote when I dreamed something worth writing down, or when dialogue would start in my head. After a year, I had 1500 pages filled with disjointed conversations between Riley and Jocelyn. I decided I needed to do something with all of it.
I made a list of each scene. And then I arranged. And then I re-arranged.
My family had no idea any of this was going on. They were accustomed to seeing me at my laptop in the evenings, grading medical transcription exams as a second job. When my teenage daughter stopped behind me to look at my screen, she said, "Hey! You're not grading! What are you doing?"
I wanted to cover the screen. My face flushed. I felt like I'd been caught doing something unsavory. And that was when I came out of the writing closet. "I'm writing a story," I answered.
"Why?"
"Because I want to."
"Huh." She shrugged and walked into the family room. I heard her say to her siblings, "Did you guys know Mom is writing a story?" Her inflection was the same as if she'd asked if they knew I'd been performing autopsies on alien life forms in the backyard.
I heard her brother say "She's writing a story? Awesome." And then, loudly, he yelled so I could hear, "Hey, Mom! That's awesome! Keep it up!"
With his words, my memory flew back to the day I stood in front of my professor's old Steelcase desk. It had taken me much longer than I could've ever imagined, but it felt like I had finally made good on my promise.
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