He delicately unwrapped the package, eyes wide with hopeful anticipation. When he reached the end of the wrapping, he found another color paper spun tightly around the treasure.
And another.
And another.
Until finally…
He thrust his hand up in the air, triumphant. “Yes! This is the best birthday of my life!”
He turned twelve and we gave him a phone. He has his own phone number, a case, and the capability to text emojis. Basically, we made his entire life in one short night.
It was never our intention to give him an iPhone. It felt frivolous to do such a thing. An iPhone at 12?!
I DIDN’T GET AN iPHONE UNTIL I TURNED 35.
But we had an upgrade, and we had this working phone, and it actually made more sense to give him an old phone than to purchase a new one. But we don’t take the responsibility that comes with owning an iPhone lightly, nor do we expect him to fully understand the power, both good and bad, of the much coveted device.
And so we sat him down at the table, and we slid a paper across to him. There was a copy for him, and a copy for us, and we all read it together.
We read through the contract and talked with him about WHY. Why would we take the time to set these rules, and what were our expectations?
We made it clear that we’re giving him this phone because we trust him to have it. He’s twelve, and he’s old enough to begin handling more responsibility. But we would be foolish to just throw him a tiny computer without giving him some direction on how to use it.
After discussing the terms, and the agreed upon consequences if any term is broken, we all signed the bottom of the paper. This contract is active for one year. Next year, when he turns thirteen, we’ll reevaluate the contract with input from him. What worked? What no longer seems fair? We’ll give him a say, but we will have ultimate Veto Power.
Because we’re the parents.
My job as Sloan’s mom is to prepare him for the world, and the world he’s growing up in is a digital one. He has access to things I never did as a young kid, and a lot of that is good.
But there’s evil lurking in the wings.
Studies show that the percentage of young children being exposed, and becoming addicted, to pornography is on the rise. By age 18, it’s estimated that 93% of boys will have been exposed to pornography. And that’s a conservative estimate.
Between ages 12 and 13, 22% of boys are estimated to have been inadvertently exposed to pornography.
A smart phone in the hands of an adolescent is something to be watched carefully, because even if they aren’t looking for the danger, sometimes the danger finds them. An innocent YouTube video ends, and a graphic ones appears in the list. An ad pops up, which leads to a website and suddenly the a path is made available that can lead to devastating results.
There’s more than just danger to be wary of, though. We want our children to see that, although there’s benefit to having an electronic device, there’s much more benefit to living life in the present. Having a phone at arm’s reach is a temptation. Even I have to fight against constantly checking my phone.
It’s for this reason that we’ll wait another year before letting him jump into social media. There’s no reason to introduce the responsibility of a phone AND social media all at once. Because social media use will come with it’s own contract. Things like:
I will enjoy social media as a side pleasure. I will not live my entire life there.
I will never post something that could embarrass myself, my parents, my siblings, my friends, or anyone else I meet.
I will not get into arguments with strangers online. Life is too short.
I will be wise in how often I post, and what I post.
These are just a few of the things that we will be discussing with him over the next year as we prepare him for the responsibility of social media. But there’s no need to dive into those things now. Because for now, he still gets to be a kid, albeit a big kid. He still gets to enjoy the pleasure of real life, face to face interactions without having to learn the delicate art of online relationships.
[Tweet “In this digital age of fast paced living, children must learn the intricacies of the online world. “]
This is a huge responsibility for us as parents, and it’s not something we should take lightly. We’re the first generation to deal with raising such digital kids. No one else has done this before us.
So we’ll do the best we can to wade into these waters with our kids, one step at a time.
What about you? How are you helping your young children navigate these waters of digital living?
His voice drifted from one room to the next, clear and sweet, piercing my heart with one of those melty motherhood warm-fuzzies.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”
The sound was sweet, indeed. Annika got shots yesterday, which threw everything off. Naps were later, meals were sporadic, and there was a lot of crying. It was finally bedtime, and I was exhausted, having dragged myself from bed yesterday morning just before 5:00.
“I’ll try to calm her down if you want, Mom,” he said. I agreed. I didn’t think it would work, honestly. I figured she’d just keep fussing until he had to hand her off to me, but I was grateful for his willingness to try.
Within 15 minutes, he had her sound asleep as he crooned in her ear.
“Was blind, but now I see.”
He walked into the kitchen and threw his arms in the air, triumphant. “She fell asleep on my chest!” he exclaimed. “It was so cute!”
She slept threw the night last night for the first time in months. Coincidence? Maybe. But I informed Sloan this morning that he officially has the job of Bedtime Master for his baby sister. He thought I was joking.
I’m totally not joking.
Yesterday I did a lot of things. Lots of mom-things, and writer things, and a few lazy things, and most of them were good things.
There was one thing, though, that I didn’t do enough of. Today I want to do more of this thing, because today is my only chance. Today I want to hug my big boy – the first one to call me mom. Today is the last day he will be eleven.
Tomorrow we’ll wake up to a twelve year old. A dozen years ago, I held him for the first time. It feels like a blur. I have one more year until I become the mother of a teenager.
A TEENAGER!
I don’t even know how to feel about that. On the one hand NO! NONONONONONONONO! NO! I’m too young to be the mother of an almost teenager.
On the other hand, “YES PLEASE!”
Sloan has become a lot of fun to parent in the last year. The thing about that big loving first born of mine is he’s always kept us on our toes. He’s gregarious and precocious, and loves arguing like I love eating Nutella.
But the past six months have brought a new change. He’s maturing, calming down a little, gaining the perspective of a bigger kid, and his patience is slowly lengthening. It’s really delightful watching him mature into a young man. I genuinely love watching him get older.
As much as the idea of being the mother of a teenager freaks me out, I also cannot wait for these teen years. People always make it seem like they’re something to be feared, but I think they’re to be celebrated.
With each passing year, this boy of mine becomes more independent. Now, instead of just telling him what to do, we get to have deeper conversations about why he should do the right thing. And he gets it.
He’s smart and kind, a huge servant, and he loves his baby sister in such a unique and special way. A few weeks ago he asked me if she could come live with him when he’s all grown up and out of the house. The idea of leaving her brings him some fear, and I’m fine with that.
Photo by Avodah Images
Maybe he’ll stay close to home after graduation.
Or maybe he won’t. I don’t know, really. All I know is that today, I still have an eleven year old. And I’m truly delighted to be that kid’s mom.
This picture was taken three years ago…when he was still shorter than me.
I’m also delighted that he’s so good at putting his sister to bed.
I work in a profession that requires thick skin. I put my heart out there, tapping each beat to the rhythm of my keyboard, and I hand it to a friend, an editor, the world via a blog post, and then I wait for the feedback.
I learned to accept criticism in college. My senior year, the class Writing for the Popular Market would be the training ground for giving and accepting constructive criticism.
That was also the year that I began to associate editing with coffee.But that’s a different topic for a different day.
Once a week, my classmates and I, along with our professor, sat in a circle in the local coffee shop, or on the couches in the room above The Sub, and we’d dutifully hand the ten pages we’d written in our novels that week to the person sitting just to the right.
Then we’d sit back, sip our coffee, and read one another’s words.
There were only six of us in the class, and by the end of the year, we each had a completed manuscript. This would be the first draft of my novel. It was the beginning of learning to communicate through story.
I’m grateful for the lessons learned in that small class. I’m glad I learned to hear someone criticize what I wrote, and not take it personally. It’s a necessary skill, and it’s one that’s served me well over the last fifteen years since I graduated.
When I shared the news that my novel would be published last week, I received so many wonderful, encouraging messages and comments from all of you. And I cried a lot as I read through them, because fifteen years of waiting and dreaming of seeing this book published suddenly took a realistic turn.
I received a lot of rejection letters for the various drafts of my novel. For a long time, I kept every rejection letter I received. After reading Stephen King’s book, On Writing, the notion of a stack of rejection slips seemed almost romantic.
[Tweet “There is a refining power in rejection. It either makes you, or it breaks you. “]
See, when I started the process of trying to get my book published (an earlier version of it that is nothing like the one coming out next spring), I did it the old school way. I mailed letters – actual letters written on paper.
I sent query after query in the mail, along with book proposals and sample chapters. And I included in each stamped envelope, a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE) for the publishers to send me his response…which was usually a big, fat no.
Every once in awhile, though, there would be a glimmer of hope. A note, scratched at the bottom of a form letter from the editor encouraging me to keep writing.
Those rejection slips went to the top of the pile.
I tossed the folder of rejection slips when we moved, because I was over the romanticism of it all by then. And the world had moved on to email, so now I had the privilege of receiving electronic form letters, and that felt a little less nostalgic. I wish now, though, that I had that stack of “No’s”
Because I’d love to see it dwarfed next to the contract that says “Yes.”
I haven’t really minded all the rejection, if I’m honest. I’ve been impatient at times, of course. And there were days when I’d feel terribly discouraged over it all. But in all the years of waiting and hoping, it never occurred to me that I should give up on the book.
There are some stories that just get under your skin, and this story that I’ve written is one of them. The characters crawled into my very being, and I knew that someday I’d see them really come to life in print.
So I waited, and I pushed, and I simply refused to take no for an answer.
[Tweet “Rejection doesn’t mean the end of a dream. Rejection says you’re on the right track.”]
If you’re in a place where “No” is the only word you’re hearing, can I just urge you not to give up? Sometimes you have to wade through a whole lot of “No” to get to “Yes.”
And when that happens, you’ll find that the “Yes” is so much sweeter after the waiting.
I don’t really know where to start this story. Julie Andrews says we should start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.
So maybe I should start in 1995, when I was a junior in high school and I visited Kiev, Ukraine for the first time. While there, I was invited to dinner at the friend of a friend’s house to meet her grandmother, a World War II survivor.
That dinner changed the course of everything.
I sat at the table of a small, grey haired babyshka named Maria who told me her story of survival in a German slave labor camp. Maybe it was the twinkle in her eye, or the way the light glimmered in her silvery hair, but something happened inside me that evening.
That was the night I fell in love with the Ukrainian people – the night the story was born.
***
But maybe I shouldn’t start there. Maybe I should start 1999. I was twenty-one, and I sat behind the desk as the professor explained the goal of our two semester course.
We would leave Baylor with a finished novel.
He encouraged us to begin brainstorming what we’d like to write about, but I already knew. I wanted to tell the story of Ukraine, of the devastation at Babi Yar, the darkness of those desperate years, and the partisans who pushed back against the Germans.
I also wanted to encapsulate Maria in a character, right down to the way she tutted over a plate of food.
***
Of course, I could easily start the story in 2003, when my mom and I (and my five-months pregnant belly) hopped a couple of planes and returned to Ukraine where we would tour the country for a month interviewing countless veterans as I continued on my quest to publish this book of stories.
I already had a publisher lined up at that point. It would all end up falling through at the last minute, but the stories I pulled in that month would simmer a little longer. They waited for me through the birth of three children.
The story needed me to tell it, but first I had to live a little.
***
Technically, I could start the story in 2011 when I finally found the voices of each character. I knew, in the flourish of a few sentences, that the book was taking the shape it was always intended to take.
I tapped away at the stories in the tiny slivers of my day. Nap time. Early morning before the kids woke up. The occasions now and then when I was able to sneak away and write. It was a slow process.
I guess I could start the story in 2012 when I attended the Blissdom conference, and I sat in Jeff Goin’s break out session on writing. I sat at a table with Anne of The Modern Mrs. Darcy, Megan from Sorta Crunchy, Ruth from The Better Mom and Laura, the Hollywood Housewife, and I sort of vomited out my dream of finishing this book and having it published.
They were all beyond encouraging, and supportive, and genuinely sweet. And perhaps slightly baffled by my tangle of words trying to explain my need to finish this project?
***
I can’t tell the story without looking at 2013 when we saw the collapse of our adoption. Writing was the only thing that pulled me out of depression. Tapping into the heartache of others healed my own wounded heart. I typed THE END in 2013.
The only other place I could see beginning this story is last fall. Two years after finishing the book, I still hadn’t been picked up. I’d queried so many agents and publishing houses, and was always met with the same comment:
“Love the concept, and the writing is great. But fiction is a hard sell.”
So I waited, and I sent more query letters. So many queries. And last fall, someone took a chance on me. A literary agent saw potential, and she appreciate my passion. She took the manuscript cautiously, and two weeks later I received a text:
“Just finished your book and WOW can you tell a story. We’re going to see what we can do with this.”
But that’s a lot of beginnings, so maybe I should just begin with the phone call I took three weeks ago with Kregel Publications when they told me they would be publishing my book next spring.
Did you hear that?!
My novel will hit bookshelves in the Spring of 2016.
After our conversation, in which we spoke of the novel and topics for potential future books, I hung up and walked out to the kitchen. As soon as I saw Lee, I burst into tears.
It all felt overwhelming. Twenty years of dreaming, of writing, of perfecting and refining the story all came to fruition in a minutes long phone conversation.
I’m a novelist.
I can’t wait to share this book with you all. Stay tuned for more information!
(And for more on my publishing journey, check out this post where I share the news that my second book will release in September next year. 2016 is going to be crazy!)
I haven’t been able to blog, to work on the book, or to make edits on another project. We’ve been on vacation, and I purposed this year to be fully engaged in that vacation. In the past, I’ve always pulled away to blog, feeling as though I had to keep the ball rolling so as not to lose momentum.
This year, I had to stop.
Babies change things. Having another baby makes it harder to pull away and work. I’m obviously okay with this, because have you seen how desperately cute that baby is?!
But I needed to make it a plan in my head that I wouldn’t steal time from my family to write words that may or may not be read. I needed to be present, fully, and I was. And it was awesome.
But today it’s time to get back in the swing of things.
Photo Courtesy of Tammy Labuda. TammyLabudaPhotography.com
Tonight, two of my creative besties will land in Florida. They’ll make their way across the country from California, and land on the hot tarmac here in Tampa. Tomorrow, the other three will join them, and the six of us will spend the rest of the week cheering one another on as we press toward our individual goals.
We’ll work on books, on photography, on lesson plans for the coming year. And we will do what we’ve always done best. Encourage one another.
Photo Courtesy of Tammy Labuda. TammyLabudaPhotography.com
This will be our 5th Annual Creative Retreat, and it will be different this year. We’re on a different coast, and we’re all in different places in our lives. Time will be spent less on creating the perfect meal, and more on the projects that beg for our time.
Tammy doing her thang at our 3rd Annual Retreat.
There’s been a lot of stress leading up to this year’s retreat. Coming in from vacation the day before you’re hosting such an event is not something that I would generally recommend. And it’s the first year my mom hasn’t been around to help with the kids, so a sitter is coming to the rescue.
We work at these retreats, yes. But we also rest, and rest is imperative for the creative soul.
All these things beg for my attention, threatening to steal the joy I feel when I surround myself with these talented friends of mine, but just as I had to purpose not to work during vacation, this week I will purpose not to worry while away from my family.
[Tweet “Sometimes moms pull away from the art to focus on family. And sometimes it’s the other way around.”]
Photo courtesy of Tammy Labuda. TammyLabudaPhotography.com
The kids will survive a few days without me, and Lee assures me he’s got this handled. Despite the stresses inside his own job, he’s given me a wide blessing to chase after this dream I have of writing books.
So this morning, I’ll get the baby settled for a nap, and pray she takes a long one. Then I’ll head out to pick up groceries, and I’ll prepare myself to leave for a few days. To step away into my craft.
It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we’re willing to pull away for a few days. Even for a few hours. I pulled away from blogging for almost the entirety of our twelve day vacation, and I found that the quiet spaces actually provided me time to think.
Imagine that.
All the words I need to write began to simmer in those pulled back days, and they’re ready to tumble out. At least, I hope they are. I really hope they are.
And pulling away from my family for just a few days will offer a similar peace of mind so that when I return I’ll have less of the book hanging over my head, and I can focus more fully on them as we continue to enjoy our Summertime Agenda of Awesome.
[Tweet “Pulling away from life for a time leads to soul refreshing that cannot be duplicated.”]
I’m looking forward to the refreshment of simply diving into the work this week. And next week?
