"Will we see your book this year?," my brother-in-law, Tom, asked me after I thought I had said goodbye to everyone, including him, this Christmas after the celebration at his and my sister Dianne's house. He couldn't let it go, could he?: his high expectations of me. He couldn't let it go: his reasonable expectations of me. I have a million years of schooling, most of it accomplished quite successfully. I like to write---journals, letters, Facebook entries, whatever. Ephemera. But a book? "Don't pressure me!," I wanted to yell at him. "Write your own damn book!," also came to mind. "Forget that I was valedictorian of my high school class---that was eons ago. Just let me be who I am, now." What is that? Someone who will never write a book?
My answer is the same one I give to Sarah---now, my friend, my confidante, my mentor-in-all-things-human; first, and formerly, the foster mother (well, the final foster mother) of my daughter Janex---when she asks, essentially, the same question.
"I do have a book in me. But I'm not sure it's ready to be written. I want to write about the adoption of my daughter, her first years with us, and her life before she came to us, including life with her birth family. But all of that is so private. And I'm not sure it's for me to tell. I think I should wait until she's older. Maybe we'll write it together. It's really her story, after all. And she's only XYZ years old. She can hardly give consent, yet."
OK, so all of that is true, but it's not completely true. Because once I get consent, or figure out the privacy thing, or persuade her to co-write the thing with me, or turn into a novel, or whatever, I am still left with myself, and my history of starting big projects and abandoning them. Well, specifically, one big project, rather similar to writing a Book: writing a dissertation. The Dissertation. And failing miserably at it, though I'd completed all the course work and exams in English, specifically Modernist Literature and 20th Century British and American Poetry in good style (even with Honors on my exams).
Well, maybe "failing" isn't the right word. I just gave up. I couldn't do it. Literally. Actually. I had nothing to write. No ideas. No motivation. No desire. No interest. No belief that it mattered any longer. Not "mattered in the big scheme of things." A dissertation in English literature never matters in the big scheme of things; I'd realized that long before. But it no longer mattered in any scheme of things, except that it was a huge sink of time, money, resources, and ticking-clock minutes, hours, years, that I'd devoted to getting ready to write The Dissertation. And it turned out that the preparation was all that there was, for me. Whatever I had once had, was gone. There was no more. I try to explain it more articulately when I discuss it in society: "I realized I didn't want to teach at the college level." Or, "I realized that was not the kind of writing and research I wanted to do." Or, some other explanation that seems similar to some other explanation that I've heard someone else give. But the truth of it, for me, is that it was just an absence. A loss. What I needed to complete the process was gone.
And as soon as I faced that, it was time for me to have a child. Boom. And I set about it, in the way that I'd long wanted to: through adoption.
And, thus, I believe, begins my book. No, wait: My Book. Because that's how it looms over me. My Book, The Book, The Book That Is Me, The Book That Everyone Expects Me to Write.
But I don't want to write that book. I want to write a book like I write letters. You know, just me, writing to you. And you are wise and funny and irreverent and fallible. You tell me to buck up when I'm self-pitying. And order me to get a grip when I'm doubting my value. And occasionally you confess to not really being as all-those-things-I-know-you-are as you are, and you provide me with some proof of that. And in your fallible humanness, I just admire you all the more. And I want to hear your book, though perhaps you won't write one. Just as I may not write one, this one. Truly, it won't matter. Because you're delightful, and I so enjoy spending time with you. Seriously. As in, become one with joyfulness in your presence. And if we tell each other our truths, what does it matter if we put them down on paper? Because no one else will enjoy them as much as we do now in the telling of them to each other, right? Won't the writing simply be too much?
Too much ego? Too much about what-is-not, rather than the here and now? I know I can write to you. Know I can talk to you. Know I can grow wiser and stronger through both of those acts. I know it is reciprocal, that we have changed each other over the years. But a book? Isn't that something else entirely.
I can write to you. I just don't know if I can (or want to) write to the others, who won't read me with your kind of eyes. They might have the power to take it "all" away from me. That's what I think, that's what I worry about. If I write my book, if I write completely openly, on paper, for publication, all the things that I share with you.
You see, I've made mistakes, some possibly unforgivable. And I've broken laws (whether minor or major, I'll leave until later). And I want things for my future, which I think that writing a book, my book, my completely honest book, may take away from me. I want them so badly, I'm fairly certain I may not get them even if I don't write the book. But not being all out-there seems my only chance.
In particular, right now. I want to adopt another child. And I need permission. From our social worker. Who might read my book, and decide that, "No, after all, the Marianne that I thought I knew from the home study, and the Marianne who I see, now, in her book, are too far apart." The public and the private Marianne are not interchangeable.
And I am good at privacy; I am good at "keeping to myself"---that old phrase which has become so loaded of late, because it's so often attached to the serial killer who no one suspected had it in him. Except that, now that we all think about it, he did "keep to himself."
So, let's say, I'm thinking about starting to write a book about adoption through the foster care system. The adoption I completed, of Janex, and the adoption I am contemplating, with hope, for the near future.
But if the words imperil, I will go silent---and keep them to myself. There are things I want more than I want to write a book if a book will get in the way. If.
