THE PENNY PUB

What Made Me Want to Write?

Finding my creative self

My younger self wanted to be a dancer.

I took lessons, yes, but I did not have the talent, flexibility, and fortitude to become a professional dancer. These days, I satisfy my need to dance with Zumba classes, and I dance around my house, Swiffing away the dust bunnies and Labrador Retriever hair.

There was a time when I thought I would love to perform on Broadway or be a lead singer. Realistically I had as much chance of doing either of those as I did being an astronaut.

Money was a factor, and my mother an obstacle. Mom believed that singing lessons were for the mediocre. You either had talent, or you did not. I remember she once belittled the lead in a high school production of Oklahoma where she taught.

“ Well, she took singing lessons; her voice isn’t that good,” my mother scoffed about the girl named Charmaine.

Harsh.

Weird coming from a woman who had grown up in New York City going to the Metropolitan Opera every Wednesday with her parents. I wondered, “Did she think opera singers didn’t have vocal coaches?”

It never made any sense to me.

I had clarinet and piano lessons and was not very good at either, though I did get a medal at the New York State School Music competition for playing the ‘Merry Widow Waltz’ on the clarinet.

I didn’t like to practice. I could blame lack of discipline on my mother who, with every wrong note would make some kind of a loud groaning sound and say “Oy!”

Being a sensitive child, I gave up after a while. I wish I could play the piano now. When I tried my hand at writing as a little girl, it was my mom who I let get in my way again.

My mother, Betty, went through my desk and found my diary. Of course, it had a lock on it with a tiny clasp and an even tinier key. If I were to guess, I would bet she was able to pick the lock with a bobby pin in no time.

She must have read my diary to find out just what her pre-teenage daughter, who shared very little with her, was up to in her life. Rarely did I trust her with who I was or what I liked, and I told her little about myself because it would come back to haunt me.

My mother was easily triggered. She would launch into a long tirade or, worse, throw something back in your face at a later time when you weren’t expecting it.

Her reading of my diary invaded my privacy, and yes, she went ballistic over what, I will never know. It was in the ending scene of Bridget Jones’s Diary where Bridget says to Mark, “Everyone knows diaries are full of crap.”

I wish she had realized that back then.

Her reading my diary stopped me from writing another word, except for college papers where it became obvious that writing was something I had a facility for.

It was riding on the Long Island Railroad on my way to work in the city five days a week that started me writing again. I was shopping with a friend in Rizzoli’s bookstore on 57th Street, and there it was, the perfect-sized journal to carry with me on the train.

The pages were just the right size for me to finish one entry by the time my 35-minute train ride landed me in Manhattan. The book was compact and light, making it easy to carry and stow away in my tote bag.

My goal was to write every day during my commute, one entry on the way in and one on the way back, depending on if I had a seat. As long as I wrote each day, I kept my promise to myself to write something, anything.

Once I got present to who I was, a writer, a storyteller, and a talker who loved to tell a tale or two, writing in my journal was something I looked forward to.

Why did I write in my little book? I was looking for a creative outlet.

It was there all along. I come from a family of writers: my father was a newspaper reporter in New York City. Ironically, my mother was an editor for Parents magazine, a poet, and a short story writer.

Both my brothers are good writers and write professionally in different fields, so why not me?

Contrary to what my mother might say, I took writing classes for copywriting, memoir, and personal essays. Writing, for me, is an ever-evolving process of learning and re-learning.

Over time, I wrote speeches, press releases, and content for an organizational newsletter and copy for a few websites.

My pieces appeared in local papers, I even had a short piece in the New York Times Metropolitan Diary and, I wrote articles for a now defunct platform called E-zine articles. My work appeared in an anthology, that was a compendium of essays by personal development writers.

Consistency has never been my strong suit. Distractions get in my way, but I always have a notebook handy to write down my ideas. Lately, I have been doing my best to keep going, enjoy the process, and not worry so much about who is reading what I write.

No, I never wrote the book that keeps rolling around in my head. Maybe now is the time to get moving on that, tick-tock, tick-tock.

As John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

Over the years, the memory of my mother standing in my bedroom, berating me about the silly scribbles of my thirteen-year-old self, still shows up. Instead of letting that annoying thought keep me from moving forward, I use the memory as fuel to keep going.

It is a bit late in the day to keep blaming her. At some point, I opted to take responsibility for my behavior. I realize she meant well in her own way.

Why do I write?

Because when I finish, I am happy I got it done. The process of creating something is both challenging and rewarding. Moreover, if what I wrote helps another person who may also have been stopped and put down for expressing their creative self, then mission accomplished for that day.

A yoga studio where I practiced Kundalini yoga, in an old church in my town, had this sign on the staircase as I headed up to the light-filled room.