November challenge: rewriting archetypes

Kissing them all sweetly?

November is National Novel Writing Month, so I expect you all to get cracking, and have a novel completed as of December 1.

Too ambitious? Yeah, for me too.

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My mother has kept diaries for as long as I can remember, transcribing her thoughts into burgundy leather-bound ledgers with shiny gilt-edged pages. They are reference books, an encyclopedia of our lives.

Jenn Mattern, a writer and blogger, has written an essay on the significance of insignificant moments, or rather the significance of recording these moments. "Wild Surmise" brought me to tears.

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I'm not leading a glamorous life. My house is cluttered and messy: unfolded laundry on the couch, Fruit Loops under the table, cat fur in the corners behind the doors, action figures and Polly Pockets bathing in the sinks, pacifiers tucked in any nook accessible to little toddler hands. My clothes are second-hand; the children's clothes are third-, fourth- and fifth-hand. I go to the coffee shop, I take my WIC coupons to the grocery store for cheese and juice and bulk cereal, I pick up my daughter from school, I make dinner, draw baths, tuck people in, check my email, and read the online journals of people whose days are spent the same way.

Why?

A post on "Writing for the Web," discussing the value (or not) of online journals as literature, makes the following point:

In other words, we need to see the archetypes in blogs, the recurring symbols, images, and phrasings, just as we need to see them in Shakespeare's sonnets or Scott Fitzgerald's novels.

And that is it. For the same reason the works of Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood resonate with me, I want to read a mom and her camera and the NieNie Dialogues. They are like me. They are moms with many small children. The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe is our archetype.

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do
She fed them some broth, without any bread
She whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed.”

It’s perfect with its alternate ending, where instead of whipping the children she kisses them all sweetly before sending them to bed. These women with their clutches of children, all so young and close together, like mine, are living the same struggle I am: pushing to be the mother who kisses them all sweetly.

That is why writing is important, even when the subject matter is not lofty. Through the documenting of our daily lives, we reinforce, sculpt, and become part of the greater archetype.

I won’t be writing the next bestseller this November, but I will be writing. It won’t be exciting, probably, but it will be a breadcrumb trail along a path I’ll never walk again, for those who come after.