This article first ran January 24, 2008, after a visit from my grandsons. Their visit over this past Martin Luther King three-day weekend had me thinking again about the way watching children’s reactions to our adult judgments and commands can help us become kinder to our writing and our writing selves, so we can better facilitate our creativity.

This past weekend, my daughter and her family spent a couple of nights with us in Port Townsend. This was their first trip out here since Thanksgiving weekend. On that visit, I had had the happy feeling that the youngest, two-year-old Rafe, was memorizing the toys at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I smiled watching him look seriously at the objects his older brother, five-year-old Toby, was taking out of the cabinet we store toys in. The next time he came, I thought, he would look forward to opening the door to the toy cupboard himself and looking for the little ball with suction cups that he could throw and stick on the door. He’d remember there is a box of alphabet refrigerator magnets to carry into the kitchen.

As soon as his jacket was off, Rafe asked his mom for something I didn’t count on him remembering–“the broken book.” Emily had no idea what he was talking about.

“I think he means the Halloween pop-up book that he ripped last time you were here,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Emily remembered.

“Well, I threw it away because I thought it wouldn’t be fun anymore with the little windows and doors all torn off. What was I thinking?”

Luckily, Rafe’s attention was easily diverted to a magnetic construction game he also remembered, and luckily Grandma was able to find another pop-up book when she went shopping at the local supermarket. Just because the original pop-up book came with little windows and doors concealing characters and objects doesn’t mean there’s no fun in seeing unhidden characters and objects, I reminded myself. In fact, having ripped the book, Rafe would probably have had great fun revisiting his handiwork. So what was I thinking throwing it away? That the repair I could make to the book would be unattractive or not worth the effort? That there was no reason to keep a beginner book about a once-a-year event when next year, Rafe would be able to deal with a more advanced book? Whatever I was thinking, I was thinking like an adult, and, not least of all, like the kind of adult my dad taught me to be: throw out the clutter, keep everything fixed, and if it doesn’t look ship shape, get rid of it.

All week long my father worked as a traveling pharmaceutical salesman. On Saturdays, he managed his household of a wife and two grade-school daughters, a household cluttered with toys, games, books, paper, pencils, crayons, housewares, slippers, mittens, belts, scarves, boots, jewelry and what we called chotchkies. Out with the squashed, the chipped, the never-will-be-used; he directed my sister and me to fill grocery bags with stuff for the garbage cans behind our first floor garden apartment in New Jersey. In with tri-folding laundry and making our beds with hospital corners, with putting away and picking up. My father was raised in an family compulsive when it came to neatness and he was further trained as a late teen by the US Navy. Organizing was a routine he was bent on teaching our family. The result all these years later: although I knew Rafe was building a cognitive map of his ever-extending world and although I was thrilled that Grandma and Grandpa’s house was going to be a landmark in this map, I threw the broken book away (well, into the paper recycling bin).

 Now, two days after my daughter and her family returned home, and I’ve washed fingerprints off the windows and walls, I am still thinking about that broken book’s premature demise. I am beginning to see a metaphor concerning how living up to my father’s standards affected me as a writer. When I first came to writing seriously, looking to control pile-ups and to keep everything orderly kept me from engaging fully in the invention stage of writing. Beginning something new requires running across the page in zigzags of frenetic motion like a mad scientist in a laboratory. But I had a hard time with the “pots boiling over” messy first stages of writing. When living up to the standards of my childhood didn’t keep me from the invention stage, it often kept me from keeping the drafts I’d worked from after I’d completed a poem. I didn’t want to see earlier “broken” pieces of writing once I’d created a finished piece. Sometimes when I was writing, I had trouble working because the margins of my notebook were cluttered with additional images and comments I thought I might use but wasn’t certain I would. Also, I didn’t want to let “bad” writing accumulate anywhere in a notebook or on a computer.

This is not helpful thinking for a writer who must allow early drafts to sit around for revisiting, who might find something unused in a draft that can spark or fill out a whole new piece of writing, who needs one idea to slide into another and one image to pull associated others from a messy pile in the heart and mind, who requires trusted readers to enter a messy piece of writing so she can see through their eyes what fits together even if parts currently seem thrown about.

“Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” my mother always warned as my father set us all to work cleaning. To write well, I had to start listening to that adage.

And now writing about the way I disappointed one of the most important babies in my life, I am thinking about another lesson I relearned this weekend.

The sun was shining and the temperature had warmed up. Both Rafe and his older brother Toby had exhausted their interest in the toys currently pulled from the cupboard. Just as they were headed to open that cabinet door for another peer into its deep reaches, I grabbed two “pinky” balls (those light, spongy rubber balls that fit nicely in your palm and bounce just right for circling your leg over) I’d stowed out of sight on a high countertop, hoping I could present them at just the right moment. And here it was–I handed each boy the kind of ball I remember playing “hit the penny” with in my childhood. We put on our coats and went outside to the wide driveway. Toby and I played “hit one of the many coins Grandpa Kurt gave him and he dropped all over the asphalt.” Rafe soon tired of throwing his ball into the ring and of watching us. He began happily tossing his ball at his parents’ car parked further up the driveway, watching it bounce from the rear windshield up and over the car’s trunk before rolling into the shrubbery. And then, while I was distracted chasing after the ball Toby had bounced toward me, Rafe’s ball rolled down the driveway and out into the street with Rafe in hot pursuit. His little two-year-old feet were carrying him toward the street faster than I could catch up with him.

I yelled, “Rafe, stop.” He didn’t. And then I yelled again. “Ra-afe. You stop!!!!” And he did. And then he turned toward me with big tears welling up in his eyes. I came over and knelt down so I was at his eye level. I told him I couldn’t catch up to him, and I was scared he’d run into the street where cars might be driving. He held the pink ball as the tears ran down his cheeks. I asked him to throw the ball again and he wouldn’t. Toby came and put his arm around him. Still the tears wouldn’t stop. He had lost all his oomph, all of his delight.

How sad to see this little boy’s joy and confidence deflate right in front of my eyes. Being told to stop is a powerful command with many ramifications. How many of us have been told or have told ourselves to stop writing because it won’t earn us a living or because there are already so many wiser, more skilled writers out there, or because there isn’t anything new under the sun for us to write about or because someone thinks we are not a good enough writer? How many of us have lost our delight in putting words on a page and working with them until they reveal a story we have to tell or lost our delight in getting response to drafts because someone has said don’t write the way you are writing, write a different way.

Not too long after Rafe had finished throwing the ball for his mom to see and Toby had scored ten hits with the ball on coins, I was kissing them goodbye. Toby elected to leave his new instructional book on sketching monsters in the toy cupboard for next time. It was not a surprise that Rafe insisted on taking the new pop-up book home with him. Even though he didn’t break this book, I am sure taking it with him seemed the safest choice.

Now as I sit and write, I am making promises to myself that I will remember my refreshed view into how a young child thinks and into what writers, experienced or not, need when they come to the page: the belief that “broken books” are worth keeping, that writing messes hold babies and bathwater and reading them closely, rather than throwing them away, reveals which is which, that no one, not even the writer herself, can yell stop during the joy of drafting without taking away valuable oomph.

Well, tomorrow, before I start my day, I’m going outside with one of the pinky balls. I am going to play an old game, altered a bit. As I bounce the ball and circle my leg over it as it rises toward my palm, I’ll chant:

W my name is Writer and my Work is Writing.
I love Writing Words and I keep my Working drafts.

W my name is Writer and my Work is Writing.
I Won’t stop Writing and I Won’t stop my Words.

And after that, I’m going to mail a postcard to Rafe and Toby: The pinky balls are waiting for you. They can’t wait to bounce some more. Come back soon!

PS: We bought black super bouncy balls this time!