Adventures at Midlife

Hel-lo! I was very surprised at the response to my last post about finding a voice. It actually sat in my file for several days after I first wrote it, and I almost didn’t post it. I thought it sounded a little whiny, and I didn’t think anybody had such issues but me. Not so. It was one of my most-viewed posts ever, so finding a voice is a topic of concern for a lot of bloggers.

I still think that list by Kurt Vonnegut is a good place to start, and I was particularly taken by two of his points. I’ll expand on them in two posts. The first:

Sound like yourself. “The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child.”

When I am writing or even speaking comfortably, I know I sound like my father. He was 49 years old when I was born (a fact that I only began to appreciate when I turned 49) and lived a very colorful, although not entirely successful, life. He was, at various times, a tramp, a bootlegger, a businessman, a municipal judge, a rockhound, and an amateur archeologist/geologist/theologian. (The tension created by that last combination was particularly interesting.)

The youngest of eight children of a itinerant politician and his long-suffering wife, Dad was on his own by the time he was 15, riding the rails with hundreds of other men, looking anywhere for work and being taken advantage of in ways that I can’t begin to imagine.

He wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, but that simply wasn’t possible, so he scraped together the means to attend pharmacy school, where he learned Latin. He would recite to me dirty limericks in Latin, laugh uproariously and then refuse to tell me what they meant, although I did finally learn the meaning of one of his favorite phrases, “Illegitimi non carborundum.”

His speech was anything but ordinary. People weren’t poor, they were “impecunious.” Couples didn’t shack up, they “lived together without benefit of clergy.” I wasn’t picky, I was “persnickety.” Occasionally I’ll be talking with someone, and they’ll give me a curious look, and I’ll realize I’ve just used one of my father’s words or phrases.

He came to religion late in his life, as much to please my mother as anything, and taught Sunday School classes to those even less churched than he. But his background as a scientist never left him. My older brother always called him “the Old Skeptic.” He had a prominent gap between his front teeth, like the Wife of Bath, and his favorite contemplative pose was leaning on his arm, a thumbnail wedged between those teeth.

He was proud of the small business he built and where we all worked to help out, but the invasion of the big chain stores ultimately forced him to close his doors. A childhood of neglect and poor nutrition plagued him all his life and finally caught up with him in his sixties. He died in pain and afraid, not certain of what was going to happen to him. I saw it in his eyes.

He encouraged his children to think for themselves, and insisted we not expect anyone to take care of us, not even him. In an area and an era that offered young women limited acceptable choices, he made me feel like I could do anything.

Mother’s voice? I seem to remember endless variations of NO, usually delivered in a way to make us feel guilty and ungrateful for asking in the first place.

“Why do you always tell the kids no?” my father asked her once.

“Because I want them to stay little,” she replied. (I think that answer alone could account for at least one of my years of psychotherapy.) My two older brothers had blown her off by the time they were teenagers, which left me as her chief object of disappointment.

So the two major voices of my childhood were a tug-of-war of “Yes, You Can” and “No, You Shouldn’t.” I feel that tension still, every day, and managing tension can be the bedrock of good writing. So I suppose I should be grateful for that tension, and exploit it in my writing whenever and wherever I can.

What childhood voices are in your head?