On Writing Waiting for Adeline

This past year, I discovered a poet named Major Jackson. On his Instagram feed, he has a video of an approaching storm, clouds moving swiftly across the sky, that he captioned, “How poems come to me.”

I’d never been able to put my finger on it, but this man explained with one image and in one sentence what I’d been experiencing for a lifetime; what creative energy feels like. It’s a storm that moves in, unstoppable, and then you go out and run in the rain.

I have always loved to write, and the storms came nonstop when I was young. I was moved to write by what I saw, what I heard, and whatever overran my heart, which was often most things and most people. But as a young mom, the writing came to a halt; I was tired. Whatever creative energy I did have, I threw into my life with my children. Learning letters. Singing songs. Baking cakes. Playing outside. Building legos. I took my job very seriously.

But I didn’t stop noticing things. I noticed and studied our family dynamics, and I watched my children playing with others. I wrote things down here and there, but I never ever got into flow, feeling like any approaching rain storm would be too inconvenient — I was busy, for heaven’s sake. But over time, what I noticed about Lynda, our youngest child, was that she was trying to speak but couldn’t. She made some noise but the words were not there. Most people brushed it off, but I knew, like Moms know, that something was going on with her. At the time, I didn’t know how to help her and I felt the weight of that constantly. But mostly, I just really wanted to know what she was trying to say. I wanted to give her a lifeline. So I picked myself up and paid closer attention, taking my job more seriously than ever.

More time passed and I watched my kid’s relationships grow. It became important to me that our oldest children, Alice and Henry, understood what I did; that she did have something to say, and she was saying it the best way she knew how — with her emotions, her body language and her actions — and we all needed to respect this until her words would come. And so one day, moved by this thought, I sat down early in the morning with a cup of coffee and piece of paper, and I wrote “her exclamation point is a giant jump into the pool, and her question mark is her head tilted just a little” and I knew that the storm was coming whether I liked it or not.

I wrote and wrote and wrote after that. I wrote in between practices, while I was making dinner, or late at night. I sent a draft off to a friend of mine, and she suggested a change of voice. I changed the narrator, making the oldest child the storyteller, but I kept the same slightly Southern tone in her voice. Classic storytelling lives large in the South, and that’s what I was after; a story you might hear on the front porch. And then after I’d written it, re-written it, and gotten it just so, I sent it in to a publisher.

Why I did that, I’m not quite sure. I think I just really really believed in the message of the book. My husband refers to Lynda as a “fighter” — our warrior child who has been in physical, speech and occupational therapies since birth — and I just kept thinking, other warrior parents might want to hear this story, too. Maybe it would be helpful.

I do hope Adeline’s story is helpful to you in some way, or that you enjoy the tone of it, or the language, or the beautiful artwork. Hopefully all of it. It has been the very best labor of love, and I’m still learning on the fly about writing, editing and publishing. But I will tell you this; if you’ve let your creative energy go dormant like I did, let the storm come. It might be inconvenient or distracting or maybe you’re beat down, but it is better than no rain at all.

xx,

Lauren