Writing KIDS AND COCKTAILS DON’T MIX

KIDS AND COCKTAILS DON’T MIX: A MEMOIR started with a balustrade that my cousin, Jonathan, salvaged from my family home. He’d gotten wind that the buyer of Mom’s house was going to raze the old colonial and dashed over to 127 Fremont Place looking for tangible evidence of where we came from—an actual “thing,” he told me later, “that you can hold in your hand.”  

In the pile of debris in the driveway, the balustrade was sticking up like a sword in battle along with the lantern that had hung on the front porch and a cheap crystal chandelier from the dining room. 

The balustrade was my prize. “Here,” he’d laughed, handing it to me. “This and a couple of crystals from the chandelier in the dining room is all we’ve got left of Fremont.” 

I’d held it in my hand, marveling at the layers of Moe’s bad paint jobs now chipped away in places to reveal raw mildewed wood. I went home and placed it in front of me at my desk.  And then I started to write an essay. Bernadette Murphy, my writing mentor, looked me in the eye after I finished reading it to her. “Heather, this is a book.” 

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My Aunt Carolyn, a staff writer at Disney Studios, gave me a diary on my eighth birthday. “You can write all your thoughts in this book,” she told me. “A diary is a secret place where you can express yourself using words.”

A few days later after a fight with my older sister, April, I reached for the diary in angry haste. “I hate April. She’s so mean!” It felt so good to write it down. I even felt good when, two days later after my blowup with April, I admitted on paper that April wasn’t that bad after all.

Keeping that diary began a life-long practice of writing about my experiences, grabbling with myself on the page, trying to understand what had happened by objectifying what I’d been through and shaping it. Over the years, I began to explore the craft of good writing. When my oldest was a senior in high school, I began writing a series of essays about his life and left them with him in a spiralbound notebook I’d had printed at Kinko’s. 

When I returned home from settling him in, tough, I was at a loss. I would do the same for my other children, but that was several years away. Without those essays to write, what would I focus on?

I enrolled in a class on Writing the Personal Essay at UCLA Extension where the professor, Bernadette Murphy, saw something in my writing. Soon, I began working with her in a small writer’s group. 

I’d listen to the other writers read their work aloud and I’d feel small. Their stories were fiery and textured, lyric and nuanced. I felt like I was writing “see Spot go” in comparison. But, something inside me kept at it. Bernadette, my friends, and family encouraged me. “I love reading your stories.”

When I published my first essay, I realized the power of getting my work out there. I found out that writing is magic, and I could craft words that made a world come alive out of thin air. I could get readers to laugh or cry, to feel with me what I’d felt.

I also realized that writing wasn’t like a magic wand, but that elbow grease and craft go into how the words appear on the page. Good writing takes an incredible amount of discipline, time, effort, and resilience. By trial and error, I worked on learning my craft.

When I finished the first draft of my memoir, I felt as if I’d finally done it. Let’s pop the champagne! But Bernadette pulled me up short. “Great, now the real work begins.”

I didn’t want to hear that. Hadn’t I done enough? The journey so hard to get this far. Weren’t we there yet?

I was frustrated and put my chapters aside to write essays instead. I could be funny on the page, and those essays gave me a quick fix, the rush of publication, a moment to feel good. Yet, the memoir loomed in the back of my mind, and in stacks and folders on my desk.

I wasn’t ready to do the real work.  Also, I needed an ending. 

One evening I was discussing the book with my husband and he looked at me across the table. “You have to give it your all, Heath,” he said. “You need to finish it.” He was right and the timing was excellent. I was finally ready to do what was required to honor the story as fully as possible.

The next day, I started in and for three months, day and night, I never let up, though I still didn’t know how the story ended. I tried different options, but nothing seemed right. Then, on a visit to my mother in her nursing home, she told a secret about an interaction with my father, something she’d hidden that changed how I saw things.

I had my ending.  

I dove into the editing and rewrites. All said and done, revising that first draft took ten years; ten years of learning my craft, polishing my sentences, questioning my memories, writing about people I loved and bringing them to life on the page. I’ve never been so proud of sticking with a challenge endeavor as I am with completing this book. 

Now though, that the hard work is over. The book will be released in June, I feel again the loss I felt after I dropped those spiral-bound pages of essays in my son’s college dorm.

I miss writing the book.  I wonder what’s next?

—
Heather Haldeman lives in Pasadena, California. She has been married to her husband, Hank, for forty-one years. She has three grown children and two granddaughters.

Her essays have been published in The Christian Science Monitor, Chicken Soup for the Soul, From Freckles to Wrinkles, Grandmother Earth, The Mom Egg and numerous online journals. She has received first, second and third prizes for her essays.

Follow Heather on Twitter https://twitter.com/pasadenawriter

Find out more about Heather on her website https://www.heatherhaldeman.com/

 

KIDS AND COCKTAILS DON’T MIX: A MEMOIR

 

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