It’s a truth I should have remembered from childhood: The fun in pretending lies in making up the stories, not so much in acting them out. It’s the creation, not the execution.
So I should have realized that my role in playing “pirate ship” with Alex has nothing to do with actually speaking for characters and moving them around the room. My role is to sit and listen to him narrate his story, and perhaps occasionally give him a new twist to send the story spinning off in another direction.
I absolutely detest playing, so this was a good realization. It made me dread this particular mothering task a little less. Of course, it wasn’t all lying on the floor and being a “Mommy rock” that Alex’s pirate ship speedboat (Rescue Heroes) had to get around to reach the buried treasure (the front end tractor weight from his John Deere tractor, buried beneath the load from his Fisher Price dump truck). We shot cannons; we had the green soldiers with machine guns and the brightly-colored FP pirates with scimitars bash each other; we made a paratrooper walk the plank. And a lot of my ideas Alex didn’t care for. (Clearly, it will be a while before Mother and Son are able to collaborate on a best-selling novel. 🙂 ) Nonetheless, the experience was not as painful as I anticipated. Far more painful was coming upstairs afterward and dealing with Whiny Daughter and Overly Attached Baby at the same time.
Storytelling moments keep flashing by me these last few days. Driving to Kansas City, I saw five flower-wreathed crosses flash past. I only caught two of the names: Scott and Amy. But it was clear that an entire family lost their lives in that spot, which set me to wondering (amid choking up) what their story was, who they had left behind, what they saw and what passed through their minds in the last moments they spent on Earth. I leaned forward on the steering wheel and caught a whiff of Polo residing on the rubber where Christian rests his hand on Sunday mornings and family trips.
These are story moments—snippets of time fraught with beauty or sorrow. But recognizing them is easier than bringing them to life on the page. Reality is such a rich, complex tapestry that whatever I manage to put into words inevitably looks washed out and two-dimensional by comparison. Maybe that’s why I write so much nonfiction, even though when I set out to start writing, it was in pursuit of fiction.
Maybe someday I’ll go get an MFA. Maybe someday I’ll get it right by sheer bullheadedness. And maybe I won’t. Maybe it’s part and parcel of the writer’s experience, to be forever unsatisfied with the way ideas transfer to paper (or bytes). In the meantime, at least I have this to be grateful for: that having children lets me exercise the storytelling muscle in real life as well as at a keyboard.
Kathleen M. Basi 