What I Want my Failures to say to my Children
I
n 2022, I finished writing a second novel. As with my first, I didn’t find an agent or a publisher and with my eighteen and twenty-year-old children watching me collect rejections, moving forward was proving difficult to do.
I wanted to quit writing but imagined the word “hypocrite” emblazoned on my forehead. Whatever activity or class my kids struggled with, I encouraged (forced?) them to see it through and learn from the experience. I hoped to show my children that while failure may be inevitable, what they do with failure matters—that it’s okay to fail, it’s not okay to quit. They’ve seen me red-faced with frustration and teary-eyed in discouragement when I was President of the PTA, dealing with co-workers and especially when I didn’t find agent representation for my first book. But they’d never seen me quit because I wasn’t succeeding.
Until I started writing.
It took me four years to complete my first manuscript and an inexplicable amount of pride surged through me as I held ninety-four thousand, six hundred, and two words in my hands. But when I didn’t find an agent, I cried—a lot. I snapped at my family. I lingered in bed longer than usual. And besides the hefty burden of rejection and the death of my dream, my failure weighed heavy on me as a parent. Suddenly I judged myself through new lenses—the eyes of my thirteen-year-old daughter and fifteen-year-old son—and those lenses magnified my failure. I felt like I had nothing, outside of motherhood, to contribute to the world.
Sharing my writing journey with my children has been invaluable. They watched me glow with confidence when agents requested my work and handed me tissues when agents passed. Their support meant I had an importance, aside from being their mom.
With friends whose mothers never stopped working as plastic surgeons, teachers, accountants, and business owners, my daughter once said to me, “you don’t work, you’re a mom.” Ouch. Replacing my job with full-time motherhood had been an emotional tug-of-war—on one side, my wish to be there for my children, and on the other, a yearning to contribute to intelligent adult conversations about more than sleep routines, developmental milestones and what to make for dinner.
I found ways to challenge my brain—I sewed colorful patches to tie-dye t-shirts and sold them at craft fairs, worked as a mommy and me music teacher and co-created a gardening program at an elementary school and my daughter still saw me as, “just a mom.”
Until I started writing.
Now she sees me as a writer. I like that. Both my kids read my blog and tell me they’re proud of me. When my son asks me for book recommendations and takes my advice, I’m thrilled he’s finally finding joy in stories like I do. When my daughter texts me, “blog killed it,” her acceptance means more to me than any industry professional’s opinion. Sometimes, that’s all the success I need.
When I failed with my first book, I started again. But this second failure had me thinking about quitting every time I opened my laptop to write. I was suddenly painfully aware of two things:
- Achieving my dream of becoming a published author was the hardest thing I have ever attempted.
- If giving up means the next time my children ask, hey mom what are you working on these days and my answer is nothing—I would hate myself.
The consequence of quitting felt like hot lava in my chest. It’s hard to keep writing, but what quitting would say to my children, was terrifying. I envisioned them using my failures as permission to give up their dreams—and that, would be a more monumental failure than never publishing another word.
With “my work isn’t good enough,” singing just as loud in my head as, “I can’t be an example of failure for my kids,” I was stuck.
And then, with the bird chirp of an incoming text on my iPhone, my daughter, a college freshman, wrote to me about veering away from a pre-med track and changing her major to something easier like “creative writing.”
As I rolled my eyes, laughed, and wondered what it was about my creative writing process that looked easy to her, I texted back—you don’t need to decide the course of your life today-take some deep breaths-keep moving forward (and yes, she makes fun of the dashes I use for punctuation).
The universe was whispering the same advice to me.
The second half of 2022 had been a whirlwind of emotional, overwhelming change— obstacles to writing for sure. After submitting my manuscript to agents, I sent my second child to college, sold our house, and had a colon cancer scare. With surgery behind me, a report that the mass hadn’t spread, and my advice to my daughter hanging in the air, I didn’t want to waste my opportunity to keep writing. I refuse to show my children that “failing” is an excuse to quit.
So, I joined an annual online writing event designed to help writers begin new projects. I didn’t reach the goal of 50,000 words, but it was a step towards getting unstuck, my step away from quitting. One month later I enrolled in an online writing course and as I slowly work my way through the modules, I no longer think about quitting every day.
I will keep writing for me and for my children. My perseverance is more important than any success I might find—and more importantly, until I quit, I haven’t yet failed at all.
Sheryl Zedeck Katz is an attorney who spent most of her career working as a Human Resource Consultant in the banking industry. Counseling and managing people provided her with a unique insight into interpersonal relationships and she focuses her creative writing on the role familial relationships play during difficult times. She has contributed to grownandflown.com and literarymama.com and writes a blog highlighting thought-provoking lines from published literature called One Great Line
Category: On Writing
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