A Farewell to Aims or ...My Son Also Rises

by Melissa Russell

"Hemingway never took his kids to Six Flags Over Anywhere!"

That's me yelling. I'm at the end of my rope, at the end of my wits, at the end of original thought. The summer I've looked forward to since school began last year—the summer of extended periods of inspired writing—has turned into a series of suburban clichés: carpool rides to basketball camp and to baseball tournaments; smack-in-the-middle-of-the-day appointments to have teeth straightened and hair razor-sculpted; parental filibusters in front of the mall's ear-piercing pagoda; tactical searches for that athletic shoe worn by what's-his-name in the NBA; and overheated arguments in the drive-thru at the Sno-Cone Shack.

My oldest son wants to go swimming now. I don't. He whirls around and "accidentally" knocks my stack of papers to the floor with his huge fluorescent La-Z-Boy® float. "GET OUT!" I shriek, stooping to gather up my manuscript. It was a simple picture book, but now scattered across the carpet—no longer a "linear story" with a beginning, middle, and end—it has become, thanks to a surge of adolescent hormones, experimental fiction.

"I'm starving!" my son wails. (He can build a go-cart with two beach chairs, a pair of in-line skates, and a gate, but he can't make a sandwich.) "Here are some breadcrumbs," I say, thrusting into his arms a loaf of Mrs. Baird's Partly Wheat. "Now go into the woods and fend for yourself."

He takes the bread, then slams the front door and hollers from the other side, "I wish I had a real step-mother!"

Oh, sure, I’m responsible for some of the problems I have getting my children to support my writing efforts.

My youngest son hasn’t spoken to me since my last book rejection. In a fit of rage after reading the form letter, I tore off the head of "Blah-Blah" (his selfless stuffed lamb) and mounted it on my office wall like one of Hemingway’s giant marlins. Now, two or three times a day, my son arranges his blankie underneath the lamb and sits with his eyes closed for the better part of a half-hour. I am not allowed to type during these guilt-producing sessions. (My son has control issues too.)

"Hire a baby-sitter," a writer-friend told me on the phone. "You haven’t written anything all summer or been to critique group since school let out."

"I haven’t been able to find a sitter since my middle son broke the next-door neighbor’s nose while they were 'pretend' wrestling. That was four years ago," I explain, "but the woman put the word out and no one’s willing to watch the boys. Of course," I tell her (it’s a good time to talk now because my youngest son is sitting under the lamb’s head again), "if—like Hemingway—I could prevail on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas to double-team my sons, then I, too, could manage to write the children’s books I’ve already titled: A Moveable Snack, For Whom the School Bell Tolls, and The Young Boy and the C."

What? You say it's good for a juvenile writer to spend time around children? I may switch to adult fiction—it takes less courage. What did Hemingway expect to see in the sights of his elephant gun but an elephant, or at the end of his harpoon but a swordfish or whale? Yet every day I face the unknown by reaching barehanded into the deep pockets of my sons’ jeans and withdrawing heart-flipping, unrecognizable, gookish things. I don’t make headlines after my big game-hunting expeditions. I make beds.

My writing is my sons’ downfall; my sons’ needs, my writing's demise. I am at cross-porpoises. That reminds me—this weekend is Sea World.…

Hemingway didn't schedule his writing to suit his kids. He grabbed his cojones, a blowgun, and a fifth of whisky and headed east to face the wild beasts in Africa and the war in Spain.

But what did he know about the urgency of untying a wet knot while a child dances cross-legged in a damp bathing suit? Or how to crack a glob of chewing gum off a mohair sweater with a single ice cube? Or how important it is to fish the "real" out of homemade lemonade?

Ah, perhaps my life informs my writing more than I know….

Melissa Russell is a freelance writer. Her humorous essays have appeared as back-page features in several magazines, including one about the "Antiques Roadshow" in Smithsonian magazine. A serious piece was published this year in Chicken Soup for the Golfer's Soul.

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