Last week I wrote about choosing the stories I wanted to tell about sleepless nights and a wedding in Italy. But just as I thought I was getting the jet lag under control, my three-year-old daughter Noa’s body decided sleep was for the birds. She spent two nights awake for long stretches, wanting to play and do puzzles: funny in its absurdity, if you are not the one up at 2 am trying to convince her it’s actually nighttime. But lack of sleep had removed humor and irony from my toolkit. Instead, I turned into an arm-crossed bedtime officer who David had to shoo out of the room because my energy was the opposite of what she needed to have any hope of getting back to sleep.
“Who’s in charge here?” a friend asked jokingly a few weeks ago when Noa didn’t want to leave a party and we relented, allowing her to stay for the few minutes that can be the difference between a screaming fit and an easy transition. My stomach lurched at this question, fearing judgment about being a lax parent who lets the kid rule the roost.
The true answer, one that having a toddler has taught me time and again, is this: She’s not in charge, and neither are we. Raising a toddler is a dance of competing wills. And just when you think you have it figured out, a new phase comes along and teaches you again that you never did.
“Oh, so you think you can choose which story to tell?” the universe laughed at me last night. “You think you can spin tantrums and sleeplessness in your mind until you are controlling it, instead of it controlling you?”
We writers especially love to believe that we are in control of our own stories. I wrote a novel about a writer who wanted to control her own story so much she edited her own journals to be published after she died. But it’s not just writers. All of us scurry like ants to build our narrative selves—our identities and homes and jobs—trying not to think too hard about the wind and the rain.
I listened to a postcast with Malcolm Gladwell talking about his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point, and how he loves to revisit and reframe his own ideas. I love this. How refreshing, especially in our current times of entrenched positions on everything.
So I’ll make a point of revisiting more often. For everything I write, there are things I miss—including things that may be diametrically opposed to what I’ve just said. And in my exhausted throwing up of the hands this morning, I realized that last week’s post needs a big addendum, one that says:
We might be in charge of the stories we tell, but not the stories we live.
And also this:
Oh, little ant, we see you running in circles, hurt and scared and trying to build again. What if you paused a little while instead, here in this glimpse of the winds and rain? They were always there, lurking behind your story and everyone else’s.
That book you wrote? It was about this too.
Bravoooooo!! I think my brain just grew a buncha new neuropathway thingies while reading this. So many new ways of thinking in here -- especially the addendum and the idea of returning to old work. Love it so much. Another masterpiece.