Recreating Passion

I feel as though I'm surrounded by a baby boom and am one of the few women not participating. Children, therefore, have been on my mind a lot lately, and not just because I desperately want to be a mother but, as of yet, have had no luck. No, I have somehow been getting past that and have been thinking about parenting, about all of the wonderful fathers and mothers I have seen recently, about how lucky I was to have my parents, and about what kind of parents I want us to be. I want us to be the kind of parents who teach our children respect -- both for themselves and others -- and who discipline so they learn right from wrong and who encourage so they grow up to passionate, creative contributors to society.

And it was on that subject of encouragement that I found myself dwelling for a bit. I remembered a friend of mine, Jeff, talking about his daughter Abby and how much she LOVED to draw. He once said that she'd be fine skipping school, dinner and playtime if she could just have a box of crayons and paper. An artist himself, he obviously encouraged her passion.

I had passion like that, too, once. Mine was for writing. When I was 9, I wrote a short story just for fun and showed it to my parents. My dad, who worked maintenance at a warehouse in Chicago, was so proud, he took it to his work and showed it to all of his buddies. Now, I tear up thinking about that, but then, I was just happy he liked it. He and my mom encouraged me and my writing for many years after that. The plays I wrote for class and for kicks in grade school -- none of which were very good, of course -- the poems I wrote in high school, and ultiumately, teh fiction I wrote in college. They supported my decision to pursue my MFA in creative writing (fiction), a degree I still have not finished but that I can't seem to let go of.

Somewhere over the past decade, it seems that I let all of that passion I had for writing slip away. The fearlessness I had in showing my teachers and parents my creative output was replaced was self-imposed critical thoughts of "it's not good enough; you're not good enough" and eventually every word of fiction I wrote became a chore that tied my stomach up in knots and brought on feelings of guilt for not having sat down to write it so much sooner. And now, my desire to finish my degree seems to be more out of the need for closure and to make my parents proud than to make use of it in a professional sense. After all, I still think both I and my writing are not good enough.

I've lost my childhood passion for writing, and it shows as my thoughts aimlessly wonder around on the page, my characters remain flat, my plots confuse or bore the reader, my description either drones on or falls horrifically short. If I could have one wish granted today, it would be to somehow find within me that sense of innocence I had when writing as a child, that abundance of confidence, that courage to write word after word, sentence after sentence, oblivious of the critical editor within. If I could have two wishes granted, the second would be for Rich and me to have a baby, so that we could support that child in whatever he or she found passion in. And maybe that enthusiasm would be contagious, and I could borrow a litle bit to keep me on track for the rest of my life.

But alas, wishing-granting genies do not exist, at least not in my fiction, so I am faced with having to create my own passion. Unfotunately, I am baffled at how to accomplish that feat.

I'll leave you with a Deep Thought from Jack Handy:

"The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face."