Writing as a Relationship

As I am writing this column, my husband Peter and I are getting ready to celebrate our 20^th wedding anniversary. Reaching this milestone has caused me to think about enduring relationships and why some last and some don’t. It also made me think of the other kinds of long-term relationships that I have in my life, which of course, brought me back to my longest and most dysfunctional relationship, me to my writing.

My very first memory is of writing. I remember I was about 3 years old, sitting on my parent’s living room floor and hearing my grandmother complaining that she wasn’t feeling well. I took a piece of paper and a crayon and scribbled out a “prescription” to make her feel better. How I put all that together at that age, I have no idea, but I think I’ve been trying to make people feel better with my writing ever since. Perhaps I would have been better off interpreting that as a sign I should go into medicine…at least I would have made my accountant feel better.

For the last 44 years writing has always been there in one form or another. Sometimes lurching and lumbering below the surface, like Bruce, the malfunctioning mechanical shark in JAWS, but occasionally taking center stage and bursting with joy and energy, like a graceful dolphin leaping and pirouetting through the waves. And it’s those moments I think, whether they’re about your relationship with your writing, your spouse, or with yourself, that make you WANT to hang in there day after day, stringing those moments together until one day you turn around and shockingly, you’ve had a happy life. May your moments be as numerous and joyous as mine have been and here’s to another 20 years worth!