Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
Truman Capote took it a step further as it applied to writing when he said, “Any work of art, provided it springs from a sincere motivation to further the understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.”
Years after publishing a novel and nearing retirement from a career as a technical writer, I dreamt about writing small things with great love. I’d become fascinated with Frank McCourt’s voice in his memoir Angela’s Ashes. I began reading other memoirs — any with a captivating voice. It was Anne Lamott’s nonfiction that I blame for making me think writing about my family might be worthy of love and not send me to Hell.
Lamott’s book Bird by Bird stands as the one that allowed me to find my voice and write with a certain abandon. “We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words — not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. You can tell if they’re there because a small voice will say, ‘Oh, whoops, don’t say that, that’s a secret,’ or ‘That’s a bad word,’ or ‘Don’t tell anyone you jack off. They’ll all start doing it.’ So you have to breathe or pray or do therapy to send them away. Write as if your parents are dead.”
But Koren Zailckas, author of the best-selling memoir Smashed, said, “I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there… . Ultimately, I think a memoir leaves its author with more terror than comfort, more questions than closure.”
If I had taken this advice, I might have refrained from exposing my upbringing in a chaotic family these years later. It wasn’t until I began writing about our son that I began to find the love I’d been seeking in the words. I never understood the wisdom required to raise a child until our son was born. And so began my fascination with authors who were wise to the problems of raising a loving child.
In their book Your Three-Year-Old, Friend or Enemy, Louise Bates Ames and Frances Ilg say, “Three is a conforming age. Three-and-a-half is just the opposite. Refusing to obey is perhaps the key aspect of this turbulent, troubled period in the life of the young child. It sometimes seems to his mother that his main concern is to strengthen his will, and he strengthens this will by going against whatever is demanded of him by that still most important person in his life, his mother. Many a mother discovers that even the simplest event or occasion can elicit total rebellion.” Better understanding of his turbulent cycles gave my wife and me insight into normal periods of turmoil, making us feel less like failures. We smiled and commiserated with one another, saying, “How many months until equilibrium again?”
But Anne Lamott’s book also mentions writing about a person whom we love and events with them that change us. In the book, she says, “…there is still something to be said for painting portraits of the people we have loved, for trying to express those moments that seem inexpressibly beautiful, the ones that change us and deepen us.”
An example. When our son was five and I was putting him to bed one night, he gave me an unusually long, hard hug. He said, “You like long hugs instead of short hugs because you get more love with long hugs.” I agreed. Writing about our love as he matured into a responsible adult began as a small thing that overwhelmed my heart as the years progressed.
He called just before my 82nd birthday and asked if I’d like to go up with him in a small single-engine plane that he usually flew on practice flights. He said, “Ask Mom if she wants to go too.” When I did so, she shook her head and said something about not being able to handle it. Maybe she’d come along and take photos of us taking off.
The trouble was, I had many stupid anxieties remaining from a traumatic childhood. Going up in the air in a small plane with an inexperienced pilot who’d only had his pilot’s license for a few months jumped to the top of the list. I hemmed and hawed on the phone, suggesting to him that it might be better to wait for warmer weather. He said the cockpit would be warm enough and that he was going up anyway unless the weather turned bad.
I sensed he was offering this flight as an exciting birthday present and that turning it down would disappoint him. I took a deep breath and said maybe it would be something I could write about. “Yeah, Dad,” he said; “A new adventure to write about.”
That year The Boston Globe published my small story. As I was writing it, I thought how fortunate I’d been to overcome the fear that might have prevented me from having this adventure with my son.
Kurt Schmidt is the author of the novel, “Annapolis Misfit,” and chapbook memoir, “Birth of a Risk-Taker.” As cancer survivor with PTSD, he overcame anxiety to fly in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son. Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and can be viewed among thirty others at www.kurtgschmidt.com.
