This Writing Life – the Drunkard, the Hook and the BML

I’m a freelance writer, which means I will write anything, including a grocery list, if someone will pay me money to do it. When I am feeling professional and composed, I tell people at networking luncheons that my work “includes a lot of variety.” When I have a glass or five of wine with my girlfriends, I say, darkly, “I never know what’s going to happen next – or not happen,” and because they know me, they know that this is not a good thing. But still, I show up at the keyboard every morning, including most weekends. There is a mortgage, and there is college tuition, so nobody’s asking for your opinion, I tell myself. And then I sit down at my desk and get ready to meet the next deadline, whatever the next deadline is.

Here is how my writing life went last week: on Sunday morning, I got up early and noticed a frantic email message from an agency account person. So I had a conference call with her at 7 a.m. (yes, on the Sabbath), then spent the rest of the day doing research and writing snappy magazine-format copy for a leave-behind for a pitch to a major telco that was going out the door the next evening. On Monday, I talked to three different pediatric neonatologists for a story in a U of M publication about optimizing infant brain health, and because no question a journalist asks can ever be called stupid (to her face), I got to ask the head of the pediatric department what is was that red blood cells are supposed to do, anyway, and he told me all about it without calling me a moron (because he is very polite, not because I’m not).

On Tuesday, I pulled together a big mess o’ “fun facts” for a nonprofit theater company for which I volunteer, because a local magazine had agreed to run a feature on our twentieth-fifth anniversary season. It was fulfilling and time consuming, which might describe whole big chunks of what happened to me last week, except for the parts that were scary and frustrating, which was the rest.

On Wednesday, I interviewed district mangers for one of my customers about a program they have called BAM, which, it turns out, is about customer bulk orders, and has nothing to do with the Flinstones, even though I kept toying with the idea of “BAM BAM!” as a headline. (Really, I was having a hard time stopping myself.) On Thursday, I did more research for my upcoming MN Parent story on how to cope when your child gets a mental health diagnosis, and started ramping up all the sources I needed to contact for a piece on upcoming trends for a meetings and events trade magazine article that will appear this winter.

On Friday, I had an interview for a profile of a woman who is the new President and CEO of the oldest and largest women’s small business assistance center in the country, based in Chicago. Then, at the end of the day, I had an unsettling phone call from a couple who had been sources on the mental health story, who decided that they didn’t want to be quoted after all. It involved shouty talk on their part, the kind I hate. When I finally hung up, I realized that I needed to write an email to my editor about the situation, so I got that done. But still, I wanted to cry, especially since one of the chief reasons it’s good not to work in an office is that my coworkers aren’t around enough to make me cry (just my family, but that’s another story).

And then, just as I was thinking that surely, surely, I could stop for the day, I saw an email from a friend, whose subject line indicated the need for a favor. It was a writing favor, I knew, before I even read the message, because that’s the only favor anyone ever asks me to do. The other things I can do really well besides writing – worrying, going to bed early, reading too many books, worrying some more – don’t tend to be things for which people really require extra assistance.

Writing is one of those things that people think just naturally happens, until they have to do it themselves. I’ve had friends who try to gloss over the enormity of what they’re asking me to do by saying, “it’s already practically written,” or using phrases like “wordsmithing” or “polishing up.” I hate that. I’m not a polisher, I’m not a smith, and if the thing were actually already practically written, you wouldn’t be coming to me. This friend, though, was honest. She knows that I don’t have a Disney-princess cageful of writing pixies to unleash on my projects, and that putting all those nouns and verbs together in an actual working order does tax my increasingly diminishing brainpower to a significant degree.

Still, she really needed help. She’s single, she wants a kid, she’s been investigating adoption, and she’s at the point in the process where she has to write what is called a BML, or Birth Mother Letter. (Too bad, I mused, thinking about what I’d written on Wednesday, that it’s not called a BAM, or I’d already have a great headline.)

I am, myself, an adoptive mom, but my little girl was sitting in an orphanage in Wuhan, China, when we started to create the paperwork mountain that made her part of our family. The Chinese government was not interested in Birth Mother Letters, which are essentially chatty, cheery “pick me” acts of desperation that make online dating profiles seem like the height of authenticity. The Chinese government wanted Proof of Income and Guaranteed Payment in American Dollars, and that was pretty much as far as it went. (Later, after Emma had come home, they added restrictions to the effect that the adoptive parents’ combined ages couldn’t be over 100, and that they couldn’t be morbidly obese, but back in 1995 China, things were pretty much wide open for the ancient, the fat, and the generally infirm, as long as they were toting the correct number of greenbacks.)

In 2013 Minnesota, I discovered, not so much. There are rules, a lot of rules, and they are clearly rules written by women who went into social work because teaching first grade wouldn’t give them enough opportunity to boss people around. My friend attached a five-page set of instructions she’d been given on how to create this letter. I’ve answered enough RFPs in my life that I am usually just fine with reading a long list of requirements on what I’m about to write, so I scanned through the directives. The horror quickly mounted, as did the exclamation points: Three-dimensional decorations, like ribbons, it turned out, are strictly forbidden, but be sure to show your creativity! (All I could think was – ribbons? Who would ever do that?) Everyone in all your pictures must be smiling! But there can be no pictures of you in your wedding dress because -- um, well, you know, seemed to be the general gist on that one.

Then I read this gem [punctuation theirs]: “If your letter has a winter theme, be sure to change it in March to a summer theme! The opposite is not true; a summer themed letter is still appealing in winter!”

Did they conduct focus groups with birth moms to find out which seasonal clip-art was most appealing, I wondered? I felt so terrible that my friend had been forced to subject herself to the sort of people who clearly saw the adoption process as a good opportunity to slip in some of the wisdom they’d picked up in those marketing classes back in community college. In 1988.

No topic was too small not to be the subject of the written equivalent of a shaken finger-in-the-face. After pointing out in an underlined directive on page four to “Run spell check on your computer each time you’ve made changes,” the instruction-giver switched things up by repeating the Exact Same Information, but this time reaching for the big formatting guns – italics plus multiple exclamation points. This accounts for page five’s perky admonition: “Reminder: spell check your letter!!” Was there no formatting mish-mash to which this person would not stoop?

I began to get a picture of what my friend had been going through, because I just knew that someone had made her sit in a badly lit conference room this letter was read aloud, slowly. I knew this because someone who would write this many instructions would really enjoy adding to the torture by reading them aloud to a captive audience. I could picture myself in my friend's situation, only I’d be sitting in the back row, doodling on my paper and not paying attention, then livening things up with some smartass remark like, “So, Ms. Halvorson, how do you feel about spell check? Do you think it’s something we ought to consider doing And where do you stand on exclamation points, by the way?” 

It was clear that no one would ever let me adopt a baby these days, not with my sassy mouth. But I had what my friend needed to possibly reach her baby goal, so I got to work with the notes she provided and starting writing a letter. I began, as I usually do, with some research, checking out the other prospective parents on the agency’s web site. Happy. Very, very, very happy people. Lots of cheeks pressed together, as if there had been tragic superglue accidents just moments before the flash went off. The three most common words in the introductions were “Suburban,” “Married” and “Christian,” not that I have anything against Suburban Married Christians, or Christian Married Suburbs, but I saw what my Urban Single pal was up against.

I took a long walk and thought about her, and how much I admire her and and enjoy her company, and what a good mom she would be. Then I went to bed. I got up at dawn and started writing. I tried to think about the person who would be reading these letters. I doubted that she would care very much about the hobbies that the prospective parents enjoyed, which seemed to be a big part of every letter. Really? Kayaking and jigsaw puzzles -- hopefully not at the same time, right Kayla and Chip? (Not their real names!  Just the most Christian ones I could think of at the moment.) Desperate for a place to start, I tried to remember the last time I had read a stack of applications for anything, and that was when we had interviewed for a nanny 15 ½ years ago this very month. It was hard to keep track of all those forms from the nanny agency, not only because every single girl’s name ended in “i,” but because they all just seemed so drearily similar. One of the questions was about alcohol use, and each of  the girls wrote something to the effect of, "I never let demon rum touch my lips." Only Leah wrote (and I still remember her phrasing):  "I like a beer now and then."

It set her apart. It made her seem refreshing and truly authentic. When we were arranging the interviews with all the “i” girls, my husband kept saying, "When is the drunkard coming? I want to meet her." Saying she liked a beer now and then was Leah’s “hook.” It was the only thing that made her stand out from a sea of sameness. Granted, Kayla and Chip (not their real names!) would have been horrified by her, but we liked her. And then, of course, we loved her, and still do, but that's another story.

I tried very hard to strike the same tone in my friend’s letter – real-for-true, not Happy Happy Happy. I mentioned a homemade gift she had made for a kid she’s close to – at the time I saw it, it embodied for me the kind of person she is – supportive and silly and so full of love for that child, who is supremely blessed to have her in his life. In my letter, I described the gift and its significance. For the mom in me, it was a heartwarming moment. For the writer in me, it was my drunkard hook, the thing that would make my friend stand out.

It must have worked, because when I reread my draft of the letter, I cried, and heck, I had written it. My friend said she cried too. Now we just have to get some scared and pregnant teenager to cry when she reads it, and we’re home free.

Who can say what will happen? This whole business sounds like a total crapshoot. But maybe there will be one Birth Mom who is getting really sick of Kayla and Chip (not their real names!), and maybe she will read this letter and decide that her baby belongs with someone real. And maybe someday, like about nine months from now, I will run into my friend, carrying a squalling baby in one those ridiculous front-loader carriers, and she will look exhausted, and happy, and complete.

And I will think, words did that. Words helped her get there.

And I will be very, very happy.

Cool Cloths

From broken legs to broken hearts, my mother believed there were few human ailments that could not be cured by a cool cloth laid across the forehead. She was, in her own modest way, a master of this motherly art form, making the cloth neither too cold nor too warm, wringing it out to a perfect degree, and folding it in exact thirds. Laid across a fevered brow with a delicate touch, that cloth brought instant comfort of the kind that only a mother can provide.

My days of being tended to are long gone now. I’m the Cool Cloth Applicator in Chief for my own children, and I hope to live up to the high standards set by Katherine Clifford Kendrick.  This time of year, I stay pretty busy. If I can ever find a copy of my kids’ union contracts, I’m sure I will discover a subclause that stipulates that one of them must always be ill, between the months of October and June, on an alternating schedule, major holidays always included (see Appendix A, paragraph iii). I’ve spent the past several weeks getting one young woman back on the road to recovery, only to have the other one succumb just hours later. (Hugo the exchange student, may God protect his upper sinus cavity, has been blessedly well, but the girls have been, well, a bit bronchial.)

Here are some things that I do on an average workday: conduct interviews, write, talk with colleagues, develop plans, do invoicing, and dial in on conference calls. Here are some other things I also do:  walk the dog, eat lunch, look out the window at the runners trudging up the Parkway hill, and think two consecutive thoughts in a row. It is, no surprise, the latter category that tends to get shoved aside when one of the Precious Blossoms is ailing. Instead, I juggle conference calls with cups of tea, deadlines with Tylenol dispensing … and many, many cool cloths.

They each have their own personal sickness style. Mary Katherine always adds a heap of self-flagellation to her symptoms, creating her own little version of Adelaide’s Lament:  “I don’t know why I let this happen. I have too much homework for this to happen. I have to get better Right Now.” Poor Mary Katherine. Her birth mother must have been some sort of guilt-ridden Irish Catholic, because that kid’s DNA seems to have be soaked in Jameson Irish Whiskey and set on fire.

Emma, on the other hand, always finds opportunity for delight during the process of falling, succumbing and recovering from a major illness. She savors the ample time for self-examination, accompanied by minute-by-minute symptom reports, live from the Emma Newsroom: “My left ear hurts a little more than my right, no wait, I think it’s my throat that hurts a little bit more, but more in the front, not in the back ... ooh!  Now my head hurts!”

I can remember the first time I realized that this kid must have an ancenstral link to a major Chinese dynasty. She was about five years old, bedridden and lying against several recently fluffed pillows. I was scurrying around her bedroom, clearing away the tray of lunch, which had included homemade broth that she’d insisted I feed to her, spoonful by spoonful. 

I looked up from my labors and saw a look cross her face that could only be described as Utter Joy. “You like being waited on, don’t you?” I asked, just realizing it myself. She nodded happily, leaned back against the pillows, and began her Symptom Report. This kid would have liked to have her feet bound, I found myself thinking, as long as there was a nice retinue around to carry her around the Forbidden City.

Back around that time, I gave Emma a little bell my mother had let me use when I was sick, and told her to ring it whenever she needed me and felt too weak to call out. The bell got quite a workout one sad, sick weekend, and then Leah arrived for nanny duty on Monday morning. We stood over Emma’s bed, Symptom Report droning in the background, while I explained the details of her condition. “Show her the bell,” Emma croaked. I did. I will never forget what Leah said next:  “No.” Calmly, clearly and professionally, she explained that no bell would be used to summon her. Ever. Emma shrugged, realizing that she was no match for a well-developed psyche and a healthy display of self-esteem, and continued to use the bell to summon me, as soon as Leah had left for the day.

As old as my children are, I am starting to see the end of my engagement in the Cool Cloth business. It can’t last forever, I tell myself. And not that any parent ever gives in expectation of receiving the same sort of affection back, but I do have a pretty good idea that neither of these tootsies will ever be wringing out the cloth to lay across my ancient forehead as I gasp my last lungful on earth.

I got my confirmation of that suspicion this spring. Fifty percent of the family was in China, visiting Emma’s birth city. Of the contingent remaining at home, one was staying busy with the last days of eighth grade and nightly rehearsals for a play in which she’d been cast, happy as a clam with the lovely spring that was unfolding before her sparkling eyes.

The other 25 percent of the family was lying in bed, moaning, and wishing for a swift death. Mary Katherine popped her head into my bedroom every now and then, seeming a little puzzled: “Mom?  Not working?  Hmmm … oops, there’s my ride to rehearsal.” One night, I felt so bad that I began debating with myself about the wisdom of calling an ambulance. It is some measure of how much motherhood has taken over my last bits of personhood that I decided against this plan, thinking that it would upset Mary Katherine if she came home from her rehearsal and saw the flashing lights in the driveway, or discovered that I was no longer at home. I imagined the story being replayed at bitter holiday retellings: “The time Mom called an ambulance for herself and I was so upset.” I decided to roll over and just die in my sleep.

Sadly, I woke up the next morning, feeling just as bad. The phone rang at noon and I found it in among the covers. It was Julie Brown-Price. I already knew that she was my friend. I was about to discover that she was even more so. “I’m sitting here at Q. Cumbers. You’re never late. Are you okay?” she asked. I groaned. We’d had lunch plans. I told her what was happening. She asked me two questions: 1) When was the last time you ate? (24 hours ago, as best I could make out, but I’d been drinking tap water from the little cup in the bathroom, I assured her) and 2) Is your back door unlocked? I said that it was and fell back on the hot, mushy pillows. Oh, for some fluffing.

Forty-five minutes later, there she was, steaming into my kitchen like the deli angel, arms laden with hot chicken soup from Whole Foods, flowers and Throat-Coat tea. She talked to me. She felt my forehead. When I took that first spoonful of chicken soup, I knew I would live, for whatever that was worth, and that I had her to thank for it.

Sometimes the cool cloth does arrive, just not from the place you expect it to. I hope that every person who reads these words has a friend as true and good as my friend Julie, who understands when it's time to stop standing around and get over to someone's back door. And if any of you mothers out there have a bell that you let your kids use when they’re sick, go throw it in the trash right now, I mean it.