My father once said he really liked being important and hanging out with important people.  I replied, “I don’t. The only thing I hate worse than kissing ass is having my ass kissed.” (My father brought out the worst in me.)   
   
Emily Dickinson said it much better:

 I’m Nobody! Who are you?
 Are you – Nobody – Too?
 Then there’s a pair of us?
 Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

 How dreary – to be – Somebody!-
 How public – like a Frog -               
 To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
 To an admiring Bog.    

   click

I can’t stand show offs.  Raconteurs annoy me.  Some men in my family indulge in monologues – I once clocked my father at 32 minutes without a break.  In law and academia people tend to hold forth.  When you combine these into a law professor, watch out!  I worked 23 years at a law school; I was surrounded by bloviators.
   
I have always felt my opinion is not called for on every subject.  Better to hold your tongue and be thought a fool than speak your mind and confirm it. If you use your ears more than your mouth, you learn a lot.  My mother taught, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”  But underneath this quiet, discreet exterior is the little girl saying, ‘Look at me, look at me.’  Deeper down is my yearning for everyone to like me, and my astonishment when someone doesn’t.  And surrounding it all is a completely distorted self-image.
    
For instance, I consider myself tactful and well-behaved.  My friends are astonished when I reveal that.  Apparently what I am is extremely blunt.  It’s true I sometimes say what no one else will, but I never get credit for all the times I hold my tongue. 
   
When I worked at the law school, I often gave speeches at conferences or to community groups.  I enjoyed giving the speeches, a nice mix of information and advocacy.  I was usually preaching to the choir, and I liked the audiences’ responsiveness, the admiring cluster of people coming up afterwards to agree with me.  After the talk, though, when I was alone, I quickly descended into self-loathing. What a know-it-all.  Who gives a shit what I think.
   
When I discussed this with my sister Luli, she sent me a cartoon captioned, “Lizzy receives the Nobel Prize for peace, literature, and general wonderfulness.” It was a picture of me with a brown paper bag over my head, muttering, “Pond scum, I’m pond scum.”  As you can see, she has a sharp wit, a skilled pencil, and an exaggerated view of the marvelousness of me. 

                            click  click

So why would I decide to write a blog, to throw my opinions out into the world for anyone to read?  Clearly, Ms Lookatme is in charge.  But more than that, with the complexities of raising Amanda, the writer I had struggled to create after retirement was expiring.  She needed time and attention.  Like Tinkerbell, she needed to hear me say, “I believe in you.” 
   
It’s been well over a year since Amanda came to live with us,  but I’m not yet ready to pick up my novel.  This blog helps me keep the writing going as I adjust to motherhood.  And I’m finding unexpected advantages in writing it.

Like many writers, I struggle for self-discipline.  If you’re a teacher, you have to show up every day, ready or not.  If you’re a baker, you have to provide the daily bread.  A mother’s work stands in front of her, insistent, a dozen times a day.  But the world is not waiting for my writing.  No eager audience is clamoring to hear from me.  I’m the only one who cares whether I do it or not.

When I was working on novels, I could always find an excuse not to write.  A novel takes at least a year just for the first draft.  What does it matter if I skip a few days?  I can always justify it with the idea that the whole thing is simmering inside.  But if I’m writing mini-essays, I can’t pretend I have weeks for them.  They’re not worth weeks.  And they’re a manageable size.  I can dump all my thoughts on the page in a morning or two, and then tidy them up.

Habit is taking over; each day I write makes it easier the next.  I remember reading an essay years ago in which a writer said that every day you don’t write, you’re not a writer.  This strikes me as both neurotic and male.  Every woman writer knows that family will interfere.  So I’m pleased to be writing almost every day.

And of course there is the practice – whatever you write, you are practicing your skills – the right word, rhythm, fluency of thought, editing.  The passive voice, present participles, cliches all raise red flags. Oops, there’s one now.

I didn’t anticipate how much I would learn about myself.  In my diary, my counselor and comfort in the darkest times, I usually simply ramble until I understand what’s troubling me.  In these mini-essays I choose a subject and find out what I think about it.

I’ve written and edited seven of these,  and have a dozen topics waiting.  I wanted to have a store of them, to avoid the paralysis that might come if I faced a deadline and an empty page.  (I’ve never been a journalist.)  I also wanted an assignment to keep me occupied during our extended stay in South Africa.  Six weeks is too long to be a tourist, too short to make a life.
   
The private me is still uncomfortable with the whole idea. Silence creates a peculiar power, a promise of deep water beneath the surface.  Maybe the voice of the duckweed is a shrill quack, and underneath is just muck.  But even Emily Dickinson wrote her letter to the world.  Do you suppose she would have pulled her poems out of the drawer and put them on the Internet?

Frog in duckweed. Copyright 2000 Narciso Jaramillo, used by permission.    click