Why do you write so much?

Is it narcissism?

Here’s a draft of a personal essay I’m calling “Bird’s Nest.” It seems like an appropriate thing to share for my 40th birthday even if (or maybe because) I’m sure it needs a couple more rounds of revision.

Bird’s Nest

One evening after putting my son to bed, my sister said, “That was a lot.”

If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I’d have thought it was just an empty cliché, but I understood she meant it as a genuine salute to me and all that I do as my son’s primary caregiver. Clichés become clichés for a reason: they emerge from something true.

My sister had come to visit while my husband was away. To help out and also hang out. Though there wasn’t much of the latter with a toddler around. At dinner, we got to talking only for my son to fuss and throw his food, demanding my attention. I tried everything so I could finish with my sister: sat him in my lap, put on “Elmo’s Song,” let him play with the silicone muffin cups that I prefer to keep clean for the muffins I never bake. When none of that worked, my sister pulled out a big piece puzzle of a dog that she’d brought for him, a relic from her and my childhood that she’d dug out of storage. They put it together while I got a few more bites in.

My sister and I wound up doing as much, possibly even less, “hanging out” that weekend as when we’re a thousand miles apart. Most days, we text each other all day. Our thread is basically a joint stream of consciousness that contains her dream of becoming a kindly crossing guard when she retires, my ongoing project to craft a found poem in bumper sticker pics, our mutual mistrust of shrimp, and our favorite inside jokes from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Christopher Guest. Every so often there’s something more serious—a rant about our dad or Donald Trump—but mostly it’s a lot of jibber-jabber.

“The Two Sisters,” Berthe Morisot

In a way, our texts have become one of my primary writing outlets. For nearly a decade I’ve written almost every day. With a baby, I’ve had to get creative. Most of the first year, I tapped sentences and scenes into my phone while he contact-napped on me. Lately I use things I’ve texted to my sister the way some writers pull notes from their notebooks. One way or another I’ve kept up my practice. I’ve had to. I worry sometimes that my compulsion to write is evidence of my self obsession. A cliché about writers is that we’re all solipsists, or worse, narcissists, and clichés are clichés for a reason, right?

At least my text thread with my sister is about us, not just me. Years ago I heard a famous writer say that they write to connect. I can no longer remember who it was, but I adopted it. It rings true, like a cliché. Every time I read a passage of writing that speaks to my own experience, I’m struck that someone writing years, decades, or centuries before shared the same thoughts or emotions. I feel connected to another person, to an idea, to literary tradition, to something beyond myself. I feel less alone. That can’t be narcissism, can it?

It can, at least in my case, since I’m not a famous writer and most of what I write does not get published and can’t connect with anyone. Unless you count my texts to my sister.

“For some reason white asparagus creeps me out” was one I sent shortly before her visit when I thought I might get my son to eat a vegetable if it wasn’t green. (This didn’t work.)

“Corpse fingers” she replied.

“Yes!” She’d spoken my truth before I’d even known it.

---

After my son had gone to sleep, my sister and I plunked down on the living room sofas, finally free to talk, but a bit too tired. And honestly that was fine. My sister and I enjoy each other’s company, but (because?) we also enjoy quiet time. We’re content to sit and read things on our phones and comment occasionally. We’re like that couple in Best in Show: we love talking and not talking.

“How do you know if you’re starting perimenopause or just a lifelong member of the sweaty kids club?” she asked after some silence. I looked up from my phone to see her locked into hers, probably skimming an article on the topic. She twirled her hair with her free hand, like when she was seventeen. It reminded me of the walks we used to take when we were teenagers. We walked at least six miles every day on the bike path that ran beside the highway behind our house because we both had eating disorders at the time.

On these walks we might proceed in silence, while wondering how many miles to thinner thighs or how many calories in a pack of sugar-free gum and if the act of chewing burned those calories. Or we might play a game we’d made up called “bird’s nest.” When one of us spotted a bird’s nest, she’d point and shout, “bird’s nest” before the other could notice and shout it. In theory this was how you scored, but we never kept score. The purpose of the game wasn’t to win, but to remind each other we were both still there in the little prisons we occupied.

By prison, I don’t just mean our eating disorders. Our walks weren’t strictly a march toward thinner thighs, they were also an escape from our house and our dad’s temper. Sometimes we talked about this. After a particularly bad outburst, we’d vent and cry. But sometimes we didn’t have the words; it’s hard when you’ve been bullied into silence. So hard that even decades later now that I’ve found a voice, I’m writing around what happened. Why? Fear, loyalty, a fantasy that things weren’t really so bad, a preference for lighter topics—something that’s always driven me crazy about my mom.

Anyways, my sister and I often walked without saying much, or we played our pointless bird’s nest game, and either way it was good, because we were together.

“Maybe you’re both: old and a sweaty kid,” was my response when she brought up perimenopause.

“True.”

“Which would you rather? Wait, no. Would you rather be the Pillsbury Doughboy or Ernie the Keebler Elf?” I had snacks on the brain after my unsatisfying dinner. Early motherhood would actually be a great time to have an eating disorder. Not that I consider it another little prison. People tell me I’ll miss this time, and I get it: my son is so adorable I might assume that an AI made him if he hadn’t been cut out of my uterus. Also, it can be a relief to forget myself. Just not entirely. As I learned from ten or so years of an eating disorder, self-denial is best in moderation.

“Ernie,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t wanna get poked in the stomach.”

“Yes and Ernie seemed to have friends in that tree he lived in, but for all we know Pillsbury is the only doughboy. How lonely.”

“Exactly.”

---

The next day I took her to the airport. When she got out of the car, she said “toodles,” the way she has since she was sixteen, and I missed her even before she’d disappeared through the sliding doors.

I drove home, thinking about the night before. Sitting in the living room, it was like I’d heard a knock at the door, then seen a face pressed up against the window, and it was my teenage self. My teen years had been kind of terrible, because of my dad and eating disorder, but they were also great, because of my sister and our bird’s nest game. Maybe I missed them too. At the very least, the fact that they had really happened, and that I was a person with a whole life before all this felt surreal, almost transcendent, like if I hurried I might get back to find teen me waiting on my door step, sneakers laced so we could go off together.

I dismissed these thoughts as the sort of thing that blows your mind when you can hardly get ten minutes to eat a balanced meal. I was a mom who missed being a teenage girl. This made me feel like a cliché, which is also how I’d felt when I was a teenage girl with an eating disorder.

But it was quiet in the car. For once my son wasn’t demanding my attention, just sitting, watching the highway roll by. It occurred to me that he has his own life, too, and that if I dismissed all my musings, I’d wake up one day post-menopausal and realize I’d completely missed mine.

If I’d been in a more absurd mood (usually brought on by lack of sleep), I might have struck up a one-sided philosophical discussion with my son: “Tell me, have you ever stopped to wonder what is self?”

If I’d been with my sister, I could have turned it into a game: “Would you rather go for a long walk with your sixteen-year-old self or on a long weekend with your sixty-year-old self?” Or I’d look her straight in the eye and ask, “Did you realize that we are people with lives passing us by?” and then she’d say something ridiculous back, and we’d laugh.

Neither of these were possible; my best option was to write. In this demanding time of life, writing is my way to slow down, hit pause, find myself—is there any way to say it without resorting to cliché? How about it’s the best way I’ve ever known to go off, and I wish teen me could have had it too. Then she wouldn’t have had to ruminate on sugar-free gum all day.

When we got home, I set my son in his room with the dog puzzle his aunt had brought him. I’d only vaguely remembered it when she pulled it out and found its orange-and-brown color scheme dated and ugly. Of all our toys, I never would have picked it to have a second life, but my son exclaimed “gog!” upon seeing it again.

I grabbed a snack and sat with my laptop at the kitchen table. I had ten or fifteen minutes before he came looking for me. I might get a few rough thoughts down, but that would be enough to get started. I could continue after he went to bed and, if he slept well, before he woke up.

“Girl Writing,” Milton Avery

So what? Who cares? These standard writing questions fired in my head before I could even finish a sentence. They’re good questions—they’ve become clichés for a reason—but if I always start with them, I’ll never write anything. I set them aside. Of course I hoped to turn my thoughts into something that another person could understand. But I also knew I’d enjoy the process regardless. Drafting, discovering, reinventing—it’s like another life. When I was a teen, I made starvation my identity. Now I’m a mom, wishing for twenty minutes to eat in peace. At one point I thought this essay would refute the idea that writers are narcissistic—to reassure myself if no one else—but so far the only person I’ve connected with is me.

So what? Who cares? I’ve never figured out who it was that said “write to connect”—maybe a professor of mine? In fact, I’ve discovered that two of my favorite writers—a pair of very famous ones—said they wrote simply to sort out what they were thinking:

“Writing for me is thinking, and it’s also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don’t like what’s going on.” - Toni Morrison

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” - Joan Didion

Learning this has been a quiet revelation. Simply wanting to know what you think is a good enough reason to write?

At the same time I still wonder if others might relate to what I have to say. So I guess I write to first sort out my thoughts. I then publish (or try to) to connect. It’s like the perennial motherhood cliché to put on your oxygen mask first.

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Later that afternoon, my sister texted me to say she was home safe. I was at the park with my son, pushing him in a swing and hoping he hadn’t also overheard the teenage girls as they walked by playing “fuck, marry, kill.” I asked my sister if she remembered this game, and we tried with some of the muppets: Swedish Chef, Sam the Eagle, and Pepé the Prawn. We agreed to kill Pepé, but didn’t want to hash out the others. It felt wrong; this was not our game. “Let’s stick with would you rather,” I texted.

“And bird’s nest,” she said.

“Ha, I actually started writing something about the bird’s nest game.

“If it turns into something coherent, I’ll share it.

“It might take like six months.

“So you will forget this conversation and then the next time you visit I’ll hand you some loose papers and say ‘here’ then walk away”

“And it’ll all come back to me,” she said.

“I knew you’d get it.”