My first Mother’s Day was a celebration of sleeping baby atop Poop Mountain.
Sherwood worked graveyard shift. He offered to “watch” the napping baby while I went to church. He didn’t mention that he would be napping while watching.
It’s a little reported but true fact that napping babies wake up. Napping husbands who work the graveyard shift not so much.
Our eight month old woke up. His father did not. Our eight month old, unable to rouse his father, entertained himself by sketching, smearing, wiping, trailing, painting, and possibly ingesting through his ear-holes—poop, his own. I came home from church to a Mother’s Day tribute of poop-encrusted child, napping—once again—on an artful poop mound. The nursery smelled like a scene from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
I cried.
Three more children quickly followed. They also tended to poop. I cried a couple more times—off and on. They cried.
Then they laughed and brought me wads of flowers ripped from the ground, trailing roots and dirt. I taught them to read the great books of their people, and sacrifice for the good of others, and dance the dance of duty versus personal fulfillment. Mostly, I raised them not so much to kiss me but to kiss their children.
For this, I am accused by my silly, short-sighted, materialistic society to be a do-nothing, stay-at-home mom. I have nine grandchildren and if each of those children have spouses and produce four children . . . well, you do the math.
That first kid, the poop artist, he grew up and went to the Amazon as a warrior. Then he went to Greece, and Spain, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Texas as another kind of warrior.
This Mother’s Day he sent me a zombie novel, a rifle, and a note:
"To the greatest survivor I have the honor of knowing. In this text lies a story of great adventure. Happy Mother's Day.
From: Your Son--Stay Alert, Stay Alive!
And I earned every word! By the way, I finished a five hundred page zombie novel in three and a half days and harvested a butt load of green beans from my garden, pressure washed a chicken coop, and finished the second draft of an eighty-thousand word manuscript on a new book and . . . . try to keep up . . . would ya’.
Linda (Barefoot and With Child) Zern
When I was little I loved cemeteries because of the flowers, not the dead people. I didn't know about the dead people; I was only four.
Happy, happy spring flowers . . .
WRITING MY WAY THROUGH THE DICTIONARY WEEK ONE: A is for Ameliorate
I don’t know anyone who isn’t writing a book, who isn’t thinking about writing a book, who hasn’t already written a book, or having written a book isn’t now planning to write My Book, Part Two—Cash, Check, or Charge. All of which is wildly exciting—also bewildering. It’s a brave new book-writing world. Guttenberg would be proud—also bewildered, I bet.
I’ve written a book—of course. It’s a middle grade, soft cover, work of historical fiction called MOONCALF. It’s literature. It contains no sex, drugs, wizards, or rock and roll. I made $1.68 cents in royalties last month, and I’m competing with 700,000 other titles in my category on Amazon. I have eighteen EXCELLENT reviews on Amazon and only one of them is my mother.
The problem with everyone, including my poet house painter, writing a book is not the competition it’s the sheer mathematical mass of the competition. It’s like being one oat in a silo of oats or a jet liner at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Tricky. Very tricky to get noticed.
A writer friend of mine suggested paying for and participating in a Book Blast to ameliorate the trickiness of being one book in the flood of one million plus titles published each year.
I did this and wrote the check. Please don’t ask me what a Book Blast is, because I still don’t know. I think it’s when your book title gets tweeted by a trillion people hoping to win a free _________________ (fill in the blank.)
It was fun. I got lots of strangers wanting to be my tweety friends and email pals.
I also got promptly hacked, causing my new email, tweety friends to send me messages alerting me to the hackage. They were very nice about the hundreds of posts advertising weight loss products that appeared to be coming from my fat bottom. They said, “Hey, you’ve been hacked. Fix that would you.” It wasn’t a request.
My book, MOONCALF, was not mentioned.
And so I ameliorated—a word meaning to make better or improve--the problem of someone pretending to be me by changing all my passwords, ninety percent of which I’ve promptly forgotten.
No worries. I press on. My next book Beyond the Strandline is a young adult romantic action adventure that will fit nicely into the already over crowded young adult romantic action adventure genre.
To ameliorate the potential of being crushed under the endless weight of vampires and death game players, I plan to keep my characters naked for the entire book as they fly from spot to spot while hanging from their own personal drones.
No I don’t. Someone’s probably already written that book.
Linda (Better Now?) Zern
