My work site is down
I changed servers and it’s down and out. Argh! I’ve got promotional stuff going on next week so it needs to be fixed by then!
But enough about work. Because I’m caught up on work, which means I’m sitting here updating my blog and tonight I’m finally getting my long overdue hair cut in part because of that promotional stuff I’ve got going on.
The kids are out at park day and I’m glad Brett was able to get ‘em there even though I’m sad to miss it. I’m also missing out on hosting our small Thursday potluck but then again, I’ll like getting my hair done and I do need to edit something tonight that I finished about ten minutes ago. (If I look at it now I’ll think it’s perfect and I’ll be wrong so I’m letting it marinate.)
So! There’s this essay I want to write. I’ve been thinking about it since last fall because as you all know, I’m a slow writer except when it’s marketing stuff and then I’m super-speedy. I guess it’s better than the other way around because lemme tell you, marketing pays much better than personal essays.
The essay that I’ve been thinking about for months and months would also conveniently be a book chapter so I’m seeing this as a two birds one stone thing. One of the reasons I want to write it is because it’d be a personal essay that wouldn’t actually share anything PERSONAL so I think it would be fun/challenging to try to do that.
I want to write about Pennie’s reasons for placing Madison without ever actually talking about Pennie’s reasons for placing Madison since it’s nobody’s business except hers and Madison’s. Instead I want to talk about how we (i.e., me and the reader) can ever really know and also about the fluidity of “knowing” so that Pennie’s reasons can’t be simplified but instead are an inadequate way to describe a huge complex personal decision with the context of a huge complex cultural creation. I want to show that the decision to place Madison — like any life-changing decision — is fluid and our understanding of “why” changes as we change. (Why did I marry Brett? There are a million reasons and every year I look at that decision and see new nuances and outside/inside influences that I didn’t see before.) I also want to use the essay as an exploration of the statistics and as way to talk about stereotypes and realities of birth motherhood as a way to say, “It doesn’t matter why Pennie placed personally but it does matter why women place culturally.” I want to use it as a way to challenge ideas about adoption and first motherhood and also make Pennie more visible to the reader as a whole person with rights and responsibilities without ever actually giving any of her story away. I want to answer people’s question “why?” in a satisfactory but open-ended way that has them understanding why without ever really knowing the answer.
Hopefully that kinda sorta makes sense.
I’m just at the wandering around wondering stage on this. What I have down here is as much as I have down anywhere (mostly scrawled notes) but that’s how I work so I’m stuck with it.
I LOVE this. I’ve been trying to explain - in a not very successful way - that women don’t place for X reason. There’s not a catch all. I was informed that women place because they “believed they wouldn’t be a good parent at the time.” Then I said, No, I would have been a great Mom. Then it was clarified to be that I “couldn’t be a good parent” at the time. Again, I tried to explain that I could have been a good parent. I got frustrated, tried one last time to explain my point and disappeared for a bit of a breather (much like you need to do before you edit tonight!)
Then someone that understood stepped in and tried to explain the complexity that can’t possibly be understood with one large catch-all reason. I think that of all the authors I know you have a great chance of adequately explaining placement in a socio-cultural context.
So yeah, I’m VERY interested in this.
But no pressure or anything.
i can’t wait to read this. you are so damn disciplined and thorough about getting all the complexity in an issue across, and i really appreciate that.
Really interesting essay idea! I think sometimes our “reasons” or the stories we tell ourselves about our reasons change over time, too. I know my mom said that when she and my dad divorced, all the narratives they had about why they met, fell in love, got married, etc had to change and that she’s always interested in hearing those changes among couples who are having trouble or splitting up. Truth is slippery!
i like the approach - to raise the questions, and leave them open, but enough so that the reader questions assumptions and thinks about the issue.