When Perfect People Turn Out Not to be Perfect

A reader once commented to me that one of the hard parts of The Opposite of Normal, for her, was reading about the rabbi and some of his failures as a parent. (I don't think this is giving anything away if you haven't read the book yet!)  She was bothered by the idea that she had such high ideals about rabbis, and she didn't like to think of them as not being "perfect" or at least, shining, in an area they are supposed to guide us in, like parenting.

Recently, someone I trusted to be, maybe not perfect, but certainly someone I thought was on my side, who I looked up to, surprised me with doing something I thought was wrong.  Now, while I didn't expect her to be perfect (or maybe I did), I did expect something other than I got when we were dealing with a thorny issue.  

It's hard when there are people in your life who you greatly admire and you find out they are not always so admirable, but it happens to all of us, I think. This isn't the first time I've been disappointed by someone I've always looked up to or admired, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

It's important for me to remember that no one is perfect.  Even our strongest leaders, people whose opinions we value, people who are supposed to be our greatest examples -- parents and grandparents and teachers and clergy and doctors -- they are all fallible. When we put our head in the sand about their imperfections, we hurt ourselves.  I was hurt by this person I thought was on my side, and turned out, kind of wasn't, but I learned from it.  I reminded myself not to be so one hundred per cent trustworthy of some people. I usually have good instincts, and I need to be a little more wary, I suppose, because while I have good instincts, I can put all my trust in some people when I shouldn't.

I hope my reader learned from The Opposite of Normal that yes, rabbis make mistakes, even in their own families, and that's okay. And I learned from my experience. Imperfection is perfectly reasonable. Perfection is not.

Impatience!

I am an impatient person.  I've never been good at waiting for something to happen, waiting for people to do what they say they will do, waiting for the next step in a process.

Two things have helped my impatience: Motherhood and being an Author.

Everything in the publishing world works at a snail's pace.  Finding an agent, getting an offer from a publishing house, receiving the contract, and the actual publication of the book all generally take months and years.  As an indie author, I bypass a lot of this stuff, but I can't avoid certain aspects of the process.

I finished my new manuscript last week.  When I say finished, I mean, the first draft, plus my own first edit, are both done.  I've decided on a title -- The Place We Say Goodbye -- and I'm feeling good about it. The next steps are hearing from the beta readers and my editor's work.

I sent my manuscript off to three beta readers last week. Beta readers are the people you choose to ready an early version and then give you honest feedback about your manuscript to make sure it is working the way it's supposed to.  Who you choose as beta readers can change from manuscript to manuscript and indeed mine do. I try to find people who are heavy readers in my particular genre and who may have more than a passing knowledge of my topic.  Of course, none of my beta readers gets paid, and I'm so grateful to them for being willing to read for free; I know they all have other jobs and families and lives; they are doing me a huge favor. I expect that it will take them a while to read for me. Still, though, I get antsy the minute I send the manuscript out. Now I have nothing.  

I try hard to fill the time. I read more than usual. I try to sleep a little later. I bake. I work on the book's blurb -- those few paragraphs that will try to sell the book for me. I think, in the most general terms, about my next book. I should look at this time as special. My brain is getting a break from thinking about my characters and my plot and who is going to do what next and how I'm going to solve their problems.  But instead, I just feel, well, impatient.

I know two of my readers haven't even started the manuscript yet. I don't blame them. As I said, they are busy. But part of me wants to go to their houses (which would be hard to do since one lives several states away and the other lives on the other side of the country) and shake them and sit there and force them to read.  Of course, I am calm and cool and collected when they tell me it might be "awhile" until they start or they will get to it "soon." I smile and nod and say yes, of course I understand, take all the time you need.

Then I sigh and go try to entertain myself with something else.

Celebrating 20: Getting Out of the Teen Years

Our society likes to choose some birthdays as more important than others. We fixate on 1 (for the parents more than the kids -- Yay, you've kept your baby alive for a year!) 13, (You're a teenager! -- Why this is something to celebrate is beyond me!) 18, (the age of majority), 21, (the age when you can drink legally), 25, (It sounds grown up), 30, (Your childhood is over), and then every round numbered birthday after that -- 40, 50, 60, and so on. We also like 65 (the beginning of senior citizenship) and anytime a person survives long enough to be 80, 90, or 100. My aunt is turning 80 next week.  I couldn't find one funny You've made it to 80 card.  They were all somber, like, great, you survived thus far but now you're practically dead.

But I want to focus on another special number that none of us seems to think about. 20. That's right, TWENTY. Twenty is sandwiched between 18 (You are now able to vote, be sentenced as an adult, get married, play the lottery, and a few other things) and 21 (You may now get your liquor from a bartender, as opposed, to, say, your dorm friends.)  Twenty, as far as I can tell, is overlooked, and for no good reason.

My older daughter is turning twenty next week. I'm planning on celebrating big.

Twenty indicates the teen years have come to an end.

Though the teen years technically start at thirteen, they definitely pre-start, for girls at least, around 11, maybe 11 and a half, definitely by 12.  Somewhere in there, your daughter begins to think you know nothing, that she knows everything, that spending an afternoon at the mall is better than spending it with you, that her phone is somehow her most important possession. (Okay, maybe as adults we continue to think that.) So by twenty, you've now been through nearly a decade of this, not to mention raging hormones, contemplating what you want to do the rest of your life, college applications, the drama of middle school (UGH!) and the drama of high school (UGH! again).

Being a teenager sounds pretty cool when you're twelve. I remember thinking I was hot stuff as I went from 12 to 13. But then...being a teenager goes on for far too long.  You're a teenager forever. You've shed more tears than you can ever remember doing before. You've learned to drive (and maybe crashed the car). You've made (sometimes) unreasonable demands on your parents and friends and teachers, and you've graduated to adulthood.  But you still have '"teen" after your age two years into college! Two years after you earned the right to vote! Two years after your parents could no longer -- at least technically -- tell you what to do.  And then, finally, you turn 20.

Twenty sounds infinitely better than 19. It signals adulthood, for sure. It signals that you are no longer in that horrible not-quite-adult-like-place-but-expected-to-act-like-an-adult phase.    Twenty is, like, the first time you might actually be taken seriously. By at least one person.

In your twenties, you graduate from college. Your career starts and may take off. You may very well get married, have your first child....You go from barely two years out of high school to maybe a homeowner. Living completely independent of anyone else. And did I mention...finally being taken seriously?

So rejoice in 20! Celebrate it as a special birthday. Even if there are no greeting cards specifically for it.

Happy Birthday to my very favorite 20 year old.

How a Story Starts -- and a Sneak Peek at my Next Book

I'm always in awe of those writers who are able to write from some place or time that is totally foreign to the here and now -- those novelists who go back to a time they've never lived in --like World War 2 Nazi Germany or the Civil War Era.  Without ever experienced it, they're able to transport us to a place and time that feels as real to us as yesterday in the grocery store might. Or what about science fiction authors who create, literally, an entirely new universe, or Dystopian YA writers who are able to make us believe that teenagers are killing other teenagers?

Nope, that's not me. For one thing, I absolutely hate research. For another, I'm not creative or imaginative enough to pull off anything like that. For me, I like to write what I know.  That's not to say that my books are representative of my actual experiences -- I've gotten that question a lot, actually -- certainly not. I'm not my main characters, and most of what happens to them is not what has happened to me. But I inform their stories through my life, so, for instance in Child of Mine, when midwife Katie went through infertility, I was able to draw on my own infertility experience, and my love of all things pregnancy and birth.  In The Opposite of Normal, I was not Hannah. I did not lose my mother when I was ten. I didn't have a Rabbi for a father. But I did go through adolescence, and I do question my religion, the idea of God, and I am Jewish, and those things helped me draw on what I needed to do for the book.

I just finished the first draft of my new novel, not yet titled. (Hopefully soon! I'm working on it. I happen to be terrible at titles.) But again, I've drawn on life experience to write it.  People have been asking me what it's about and here I think I can finally talk about it, after being tight lipped for a long time. It's about a thirty- two year old autistic man who can't communicate. He can't talk, he can't use a device, like an ipad, to help him express himself, he doesn't use sign language. And he's one of the main characters.

Again I've gone to my own life to help inform my writing. Obviously, I am not autistic (nor do I have an autistic relative). But one of my very closest friends has a 22 year old autistic son, one who does not speak and has no means of communication. I've known this young man his entire life, and even before, when his mother announced her pregnancy at her husband's 30th birthday party 23 years ago.  I remember her excitement over the pregnancy and the baby, and then the devastation as they discovered what was wrong with him when he was diagnosed at age 2.

As we get closer to publication, I'll let you know more about this novel, but for now, that's all I'm going to say as I wade through editing and revisions.  Know that this book is very personal to me, and that I'm doing my best to capture the struggle of a family dealing with this condition.  If you have a story in you, let me know.  I'd love to hear what you would want to, or like to, write about.

What Facebook Told Me

I met Sue (not her real name) about nineteen years ago. We were both actively volunteering for Resolve, the infertility organization. She had a three year old son; I had a one year old daughter.  We both had served in nearly every capacity in Resolve on the state level, counseled hundreds of couples about alternative routes to becoming parents, spoke at dozens of events, run support groups and everything else the organization needed.  Eventually we both sat at the board level, sharing responsibilities. We both loved what we were doing.

We became fast friends.  Once a month, Sue and her husband and son came to my house for dinner, or we would go to hers. One time when we went to her house, she showed me the Internet and instant messaging on AOL.  I was mesmerized by it. I wanted it for my house, too, so I could talk to Sue that way, instead of paying the long distance phone bill, and because it was cool. (Yes, then we had long distance bills. It seems so long ago and yet doesn't seem that long ago at all.) She showed me, even, how she had created fake name profiles so she could spy on other people. She was ahead of her time with this Internet thing. She could see it would be the future.

We lived about thirty minutes apart. We talked on the phone once a day, at least. We shared the joys and tribulations of raising our kids, our luck over being able to parent after infertility, the pain we saw as others went through it. We traveled together across the country to national Resolve events. One Saturday a month, I would get her and drive to our Resolve meeting after picking up bagels for all of the other board members, we chatted the whole way, never running out of things to talk about.

She decided to adopt another child; I was going through infertility treatment once again to have another baby.  She supported me when I went through a heart breaking miscarriage; she'd been through four. I cheered her on as she searched the country for a pregnant woman who would be a match, and helped her steel herself for months of uncertainty when she found a birth mother.  I went to visit her just days after she brought her daughter home.

But something in the friendship started to crack. We were jealous of each other, I think, for different reasons. We began to fight. There were tears and lengthy phone and instant message conversations. We misunderstood each other. We hurt each other. Eventually, one day in late 1998, she hung up on me and never called back. I wasn't sorry. The friendship had taken its toll; her anger at me was seeping into my daily life too much. I had two children by then, a baby who needed to be nursed and a pre schooler who needed my undivided attention.

Over the years, I thought about Sue from time to time. I go to the mall near her house occasionally, eat at some of the restaurants there with various friends. I would wonder if I was going to see her. Would it be awkward if we ran into each other? What would I say? I would think about that for half a minute as I pulled into the parking lot and then forget about it.

Once in a while, what with Google, I would search her name. Nothing would ever come up. It seemed odd, and I would think about that for half a minute, too, knowing how much Sue loved the Internet, understood its power way before anyone else did, and then figure she was probably using some false name, like she had on Instant Messaging. Then I would forget again.

Last week I decided to look her up on Facebook.  She wasn't there. She definitely would be on Facebook, I thought. She would love it. She would love posting pictures of her kids. She would love everything about it. So I typed in her kids' names. I knew those and their birth dates, too.  I found her son but he hid his friend connections from public view.

I found her daughter. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been a baby.  Now she is eighteen, getting ready to graduate high school.  I clicked on her daughter's name and her main page popped on the screen. Her banner shot was of a cemetery, a grave marker bearing my friend's name, her birth date, declaring her as the best sister, wife, mother, and friend, and a date of death.  She died eight years ago at the age of forty six. Her daughter made a reference to her mother being out of pain, at least.

Sue had always been a hypochondriac.  She thought every pain signaled a heart attack or cancer or some other impending doom.  Somehow, I guess, she was ahead of her time not only with the Internet, but with whatever illness killed her, too.

Living through fear

At last night's Seder, I sat with a friend who I hadn't seen in several months. About a year ago, she'd decided to have a form of gastric bypass surgery and since then she's lost about ninety pounds. A couple of weeks ago, she had skin removal surgery to finish off her journey. She said the entire thing was about facing her fear.

That got me to thinking. I am a pretty fearful person and I have let fear stop me from doing things I've thought about, or wanted to do.  And she was right when she said that people who don't do things they know they should, or need, to do, or want to do, don't do so because of fear.

I want to be a more fearless person.  Or at least a person who makes choices less because of fear and more because they sound like good choices.  I'd like to learn to live more through my fear and less because of it.

It's easier said than done.

My daughters are very fearless people. How they got this way, I don't know, because that's the opposite of me.  My older daughter is planning a semester abroad in the fall, choosing a country she's never been to, with people she has never met, to live in and with for four months. On top of that, she's also planning to travel through Europe, to a bunch of countries she's never been to.

My younger daughter decided to take on a new activity this past winter called Winter Guard. It's dancing with flags, rifles, and sabres to music with a group, precisely matching each others steps at the exact same times. She had never danced before. The Winter Guard in our school comes with a very strict, no nonsense, tough coach, as well.  But she wanted to do it. She said she would be sorry if she didn't at least try it.  It wasn't easy, at times, but she hung in there and handled the sport and stress gracefully for four months, and she liked it enough that she thinks she will do it again next year.

So it seems like it might be my turn to learn to live through my fear.  If I'm anything like my friend or my daughters, everything should turn out just fine.

It's Autism Awareness Day!

Today is Autism Awareness day. It's meaningful to me because one of my closest friends has a son who suffers from this condition.

Most people have a general idea of what autism is. They know a person can have trouble with communicating, understanding others' expressions and emotional cues, and other developmental milestones. But most people have never seen the full range of autistic disorders, and some may not realize how devastating a more severe case is.

I like to think of autism as an wide open umbrella.  On one side of the umbrella you may have some individuals or who appear quirky -- they may have serious fascinations with things that most people are not fascinated by, they may not look you in the eye when they speak, or they may be unaware when you're uninterested in what they have to say.

Then there's the whole middle of the umbrella, where individuals may develop language very late and then not speak well or much at all, or may repeat words (echolalia) or not have much meaningful speech. They might not be able to go to regular school or be away from family or progress naturally or easily into adulthood.

Then there are people all the way on the other side of the umbrella, like my friend's son.  He is 22 now, and doesn't speak. He lives in a group home, and during the day he attends a very good program that's teaching him independent living skills and helping to find out what kinds of work he can do, supervised, to contribute to society.  He is sweet and loving, is great at puzzles, and is always happy to watch Thomas the Train videos. He can nod yes. He has epilepsy (a not uncommon byproduct of autism) and tends to be obsessive compulsive and anxious.  He is eager to please and curious, happy to be with his parents, family members, and friends. He's athletic. He's shy.

He's so much more than his autism, but when you see him, that's what you see.  It's hard to miss. He squeezes his fists together and grunts and groans and screeches.  He relies on his caregivers to know his favorite foods, habits, and soothing techniques.  Inside, though, he's a person, like all of us, and he has feelings, like all of us, and I bet, like all of us, he just wants to express them.

In honor of World Autism Day, I hope you'll think about my young friend, and his family, and how much this condition affects everything, every minute, every hour of their day.  I hope you'll remind yourself that autism is not just a quirky little thing.  And then go hug your kids.