Come on, Feel the Alleynoise! (Part 3)

When I first sat down to write about noise, I was thinking about babies, not because I want to have them, but because visiting Illinois made me realize how people my age beyond the L.A. foothills-coast-loop live. And how they procreate. I have to be careful here, because I could very easily slip into contempt, which is not what I want to do. I have respect for people who choose to be parents -- it seems sort of akin to joining the army or maybe the peace corps, complete with the tagline, "The hardest job you'll ever love." Fine. Great.

But as everyone knows, I have respect for deep sleep, reading corners, days spent at the computer. I have respect for the late movie and the buying of (sometimes) ridiculously expensive cockatils at fun restaurants. Most importantly, though, I don't know if I could be a dedicated parent and a dedicated writer. It seems to me that, as Anne Lamott put it, "When a child comes out, it arrives clutching a third of your brain." So the issue isn't so much that I don't like kids, but that I like writing (and ridiculously expensive cocktails) better. I'm not sure, but I don't think good parents are allowed to love other things more than their kids. And that I want to keep my as much of my brain as possible.

So it's obvious why there may be compatibility issues here.

But being in Illinois sort of threw me for a loop. There were babies and children everywhere, spilling out of minivans and roaming like organized herds through the malls. It felt like almost everyone I know had a baby, or at least wanted one. Even my friend Rebekah, who had at one point joined me in wrinkling her nose at the prospect of kids, now looks forward to the day (way in the future, granted) when she and her man will start their family. And that's all fine by me. It's a question of values, I think, and deciding what you value. Kids are definitely worth valuing and so is writing. So is anything that you love. What happened to me in Illinois, though, was that I began to question what I valued because there was no one else around me who valued it. Appreciated, definitely. But it's not the same.

I was at my aunt Kathy's wedding when all of this struck me. It was sort of a strange day, because I hadn't seen most of my cousins or aunts and uncles in a few years, some even longer. As I was reaquainting myself with my cousin Tom, who is close in age, my cousin Ricky, rambunctious and seven, ran by and Tom stopped him. Ricky had no idea who I was, and so Tom told him that I was his cousin who lived in California. Ricky looked at me for a moment, then shrugged and said, "Okay." I smiled at this response because it felt so authentic for a seven-year old boy -- so I have a girl cousin I've never met before who lives in California. Big deal. (Ricky later told me that I was old enough to be a grandma, which really tickled me.) Tom stopped him from running off and said something along the lines of, "Hey, you guys are cousins. And cousins have to hug." So Ricky gave me a hug and I hugged him back and then he ran off, probably to wash off the cooties I'd inevitably given him via contact.

I've thought about that moment a lot, not only because it was touching of Tom to say that and for Ricky to give me, this grandma-old cousin he's never met, a hug, but because I've always thought that having family was difficult. My parents didn't get along, my sister and I fought for days, my dad was always causing havoc with his sisters and parents -- and it struck me that maybe part of why I've never been interested in forming my own clan was because everything familial was always so grueling. Granted, I've had some fun with my parents and my sister; not everything was Flowers in the Attic. It was just always a lot of work to keep treading water, keep myself above the fights and arguments and incessant noise that happens when people who don't really like each other all that much are forced to interact on a regular basis as family.

This is where my thoughts started looping themselves, as in, maybe all this time, I've been valuing writing as a future because it'd always been easy, uncomplicated. Maybe all these Illinis have it right, that cousins have to hug, that hanging out with family might not end in tears, that children might have more to offer to me than noise and confusion and whininess. That even those horribly posed Sears family portraits have their place in the world.

When I got home that night and dived back into Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, my love for good writing and clever plotlines and characterization was renewed and even heightened. That isn't to say I didn't appreciate my new insights about how families can be easy and breezy, but that I remembered again what is my core and that's writing. Kids are great, too, but they don't fit as comfortably on me as they do on some of my friends. Not that kids and writing are an either/or proposition -- but I figure if I'm going to split my time between such huge commitments, I better have more of a balanced admiration. And at this point I don't. Nor does having a family of my own seem easy. And that really matters, I think. Not everything that is hard is right.

There was a time in college when I wanted to study aviation and become a pilot. I thought it was an honorable profession, one in which I could work with organizations I believe in deeply, doing the kind of work that would change the world, one food drop or rescued refugee at a time. (I believe I saw Schindler's List around the same time.) But as I looked at all the math and dimensions that pilots work with, I knew that it would be a case of hard and not right. And though I wouldn't be flying supplies, like I'd dreamed, into war-torn countries, it didn't mean that working as a writer was any less valuable. It was less tangible, but not unimportant in the world. It harkens back to George Bailey (as so much in life does) -- he owned a Savings and Loan, a pretty meager existence, but look at how so much falls apart when he's not around.

In the past, I've felt a wee bit freaky for needing so much quiet time and for the feelings that came up when people like Donnie and my dad impugned on it. I've wondered about whether preferring to raise novels over children was going to turn me into a prematurely weird cat lady. But these are things I really value, freaky or not, and I want to embrace them. While it's sometimes hard to value things that only feel like they get an eyebrow raise from others, I like the fact that I'm shaping my own existence. Perhaps I'm just one of those square pegs when it comes to these things. Accepting it is always the first step to freedom.