Do you know why I quit photography?

I started studying photography while teaching elementary school in Manhattan. I’d long been interested in photography, and since I was single (Erick and I had just started dating) in the Art Capital of the World!, I began taking photography classes at night.

My first love was the darkroom. I got such a high from the magic of the photo-making process: putting that little negative into the enlarger, bringing the image into focus, experimenting with just the right brightness and exposure time to make the best possible photograph, and then seeing the results emerge through the chemical baths. I could — and did — spend hours in the darkroom.

And I was pretty good. My first photography professor at NYU gave my printing skills high praise. So, after I took the major step of getting married, I took another major step: I quit teaching and enrolled in NYU’s Studio Art master’s program.

About halfway through getting my master’s degree, it became clear that I was a dinosaur. Digital photography was all the rage, and you had to be proficient in Photoshop if you wanted to be a marketable photographer. I had no interest in digital photography or Photoshop, which seemed more like computer science than art, but it was clear that film and darkrooms were going the way of the daguerrotype.

I completed my degree and freelanced for a year, but without joy. It’s hard enough to make it as a photographer, even if you love what you’re doing. Handing me a digital camera and forcing me to edit my images on a computer was the equivalent of making me write with my left hand. When we moved to California for Erick’s PhD program, I let photography quietly slip away.

I’m telling you this because I recently had a morning that gave me the same feeling as my first Photoshop class.

For the past couple of years, the thing that’s given me the most pleasure — after my family, of course (she said dutifully) — has been writing: writing for this blog, for On the Willows, and for The Addison Independent. I’m starting to feel like I can call myself a “writer” without apology. So I finally went to our local bookstore and bought myself a copy of the 2013 Writer’s Market, a massive reference guide to literary agents, publishers, and various publication outlets. (Don’t worry, I’m not getting any fancy ideas. But Stephen King, among others, says that all writers should own a copy). Our local library’s copy is either stolen or lost, so I’d been eying this book for months. Finally, with a bookstore gift certificate in hand and a baby arriving soon, I decided to throw caution to the wind.

Flipping through the first pages of Writer’s Market while Georgia snoozed in her stroller, I found a little essay titled, “Blogging Basics: Get the Most Our of Your Blog” by Robert Lee Brewer. Seconds into reading, I was horrified. Brewer’s suggestions included tips like:

-Use your name in your URL and as the title of your blog. (OOPS!)

-Find like-minded bloggers, comment on their blogs regularly, and link your blog to theirs. (Writing this blog is about all I can handle. I really appreciate it when other bloggers find me, like me, and follow me, but I’m horrible at returning the favor!)

-Use lists, bold main points, and headings — especially if your posts are longer than 300 words. (Triple OOPS! I’m making a bold list now, but I don’t usually employ lists or headings. And this is now word #590 of this post).

In other words, I’ve been writing this blog for two years, and I’VE BEEN DOING IT ALL WRONG!

Okay, but what does Robert Lee Brewer know, anyway?

So I got in the car, and on the drive home I listened to one of my favorite programs on VPR (our NPR affiliate): “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook. The day’s topic was social media, specifically (notice how I’m making a bold list here):

-Email is dead, going the way of the handwritten letter. (I still love the handwritten letter! When the Postal Service considered stopping Saturday delivery, it made me so sad: What would I have to hope for on Saturday afternoons?)

-Facebook is getting “musty” — it’s becoming so uncool that people’s PARENTS and GRANDPARENTS are on it; most teenagers use it only for study groups.

-The NEW new thing is chatting, specifically something called “Snapchat,” which deletes the content you send after it’s been viewed. (Erick and I don’t have Smartphones, and have no plans to get them. Our cellphones are the ancient kind where you have to push each key multiple times to get the letter you want, making even texting virtually impossible).

I felt like that same old darkroom dinosaur again. Here I am, blogging badly, and promoting it through outdated means like email and Facebook. 

I’m always late to the party.

I’ve never been hip. Even — especially — during the decade when I might have reached my hip-ness apex, people who knew me will tell you that I was a NERD. So I don’t really care about keeping up with the latest gadgets and trends. What I do care about is being able to communicate; writing is a form of communication. I usually get frustrated with people who refuse to get email or cellphones because they fear new technology; I respect the many grandparents I know who embrace social media in all its forms. I always thought I’d be one of those grandparents.

But now, I don’t know. I’m starting to feel TIRED. Why can’t I just blog how I want, and send emails, and post to Facebook for the next decade, before I have to learn some new program?

I don’t have any answers; I just leave you with questions. Plus, this is word #988 of this post. What would Robert Lee Brewer say?

Dear Reader: I’m sorry; I’ve never before published two posts on this blog in one day. I know you’re busy and have a lot of things coming at you. Really, who has the time? But this was something I had to write, for ME more than anybody else, so I’m just going to take a deep breath and put it out there. Then I promise you won’t hear from me for a couple of days!

The Boston Marathon bombing happened yesterday. I learned the news, as I usually do, when I logged onto my computer after a day spent running the girls around to various activities and saw the headline on my Google news feed. Then I opened my email and found two VERY BAD NEWS emails waiting in my inbox. As usual, there seems to have been a lot of BAD NEWS all at once. Lately I’ve felt like I’m barraged daily by the reality of senseless badness. People place bombs where they’re sure to kill and injure other innocent people.  Cancer strikes beloved grandfathers and fathers of young children. People hurt babies. It feels like TOO MUCH.

Sigh.

That’s all I could come up with on Monday night: just a heavy, sad sigh.

I read everyone’s eloquent responses on Facebook: the prayers for Boston, the same old Fred Rogers quotes, the praise for those who ran towards the victims. All I could think was, Weren’t we JUST HERE? Yes, we were — back in December, after the Sandy Hook shootings. And I was living in Manhattan when 9/11 happened. And I was in school just down the street from the CIA — where my father worked — when, in 1993, two people were killed and three wounded when a man shot into their cars at a stoplight. Part of getting older, it seems, part of having lived three decades, is tragedy deja vu. First comes the stunning evidence of humanity’s capacity for darkness and destruction, followed by the stunning evidence of humanity’s capacity to cling to hope and sift through the rubble for meaning.

Sigh.

I’m SO TIRED of this cycle of tragedy and hope. Mind you, I don’t want my heart to stop breaking; I don’t want to get hard and bitter. But I’m worn out, fatigued. I don’t want to HAVE TO “look for the helpers” anymore. And when comedian Patton Oswalt writes in his viral Facebook post that “We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil,” I think, Gosh, I dunno about that.

I have a friend, a dear friend who loves children, who works with children, who is like MAGIC with children. And, the last time I discussed it with her, she had decided not to have kids because she didn’t want to subject any more children to this cruel world.

It’s a good point. It’s an honest point. I’ve written before that children are about HOPE — that word again — because we believe that our children just might get things right. But that’s a little selfish, isn’t it? My children give me hope, and I give them…senseless tragedy. We’re not telling our girls about the Boston bombings, but that same day they asked — begged — to check out the movie Bambi from the library. I was concerned about this; parts of Bambi are scary and sad — and not in a pretend-magic way, but in a real-life way. So I decided that the best thing I could do was to prepare them. “Okay,” I said, “But remember that Bambi’s mother gets killed by a hunter, and there’s a forest fire at the end.”

And that was just a movie; pretty soon, I’m going to have to do the same thing for them with LIFE. How can I prepare them for the cruel realities of life and still give them hope, when I’m so tired and the hits just keep on coming?

I don’t know if Patton Oswalt is right that humanity isn’t inherently evil; that’s a HUGE moral and spiritual claim to make. But here’s what I THINK I know: I think that humanity knows that we’re not supposed to be evil. I can’t say that my kids were all born evil, but they were certainly all born selfish — they’d cry and scream until they got what they wanted or needed, and as they grow they keep crying and screaming, with punches and kicks and pulled hair bestowed on their loved ones for emphasis. They do what they know is wrong, what they’ve been TOLD not to do — and that starts to look a lot like a capacity for evil.

But with each of my children, when they were still babies, there was a moment when I’d pick them up and they’d pat me on the back. I don’t think they really knew what they were doing, but they were mimicking what I’d been doing to comfort them; they were reaching out to connect with another person in a compassionate way. And just this week, for the very first time, my oldest child apologized to me after a nasty battle completely unprompted and on her own. Which is really the same as the back pat: recognition that we’re not meant to be evil, that we’re meant to TRY to do the hard work of reaching out in love. These moments may give me selfish hope, but they also give me unselfish hope — that my girls’ lives will be enriched and enrich the world as they struggle to NOT be evil, and as they see others doing the same.

Hope is hard work. Here’s what I know about hard work: two-thirds of my children were born without an epidural (this was not really for reasons of principle, unless by “principle” you mean “fear of having a needle stuck in my spine”). But in both of those labors, I reached a point where I was about to give up. This hurts TOO MUCH; I can’t do this anymore! Bring in the epidural! Make me numb! And BOTH TIMES (you’d think I’d learn), at the very moment when the anesthesiologist was walking through the door, the nurse would check me and say, “Oh, you’re ready to push!” Minutes later, my baby would be born.

So I think it’s usually when we reach the point of greatest fatigue, when we’re sure we can’t keep going, when it’s all TOO MUCH, when we just want to be numb — it’s then that hope can carry us forward one more breath, and beautiful things can be born. It’s okay if hope comes with a heavy, sad sigh — or when we’re crawling on bloodied knees — or even with a scream of rage. It’s okay to be tired, just so long as we don’t go numb.

There are many ways of organizing family life. I know about these methods from the handful of parenting books I’ve read, the few parenting seminars I’ve attended, and the homes of organized friends I’ve visited.

As for me, my house is like an archaeological site for organization; everywhere you look are remnants of our past organizational attempts. I like to think of it as the Pompeii of Planning.

There’s the “Morning Routine” and “Evening Routine” checklists hanging in the girls’ bedroom, which no longer bear any resemblance to the reality of our mornings and evenings. (Our mornings sound a little something like this: “If I have to ask you one more time to get dressed, you’re going to school naked! Okay, everyone, to the bathroom!!”)

There’s the magnetic “Chore Chart” on the refrigerator. As of February 20, when I finally erased it from sheer embarrassment, the date written on this chart in dry-erase marker was December 24. It’s been months since I’ve remembered to give Fiona the allowance she’s supposed to receive for her weekly tasks, and I’m only fortunate that this allowance seems as unimportant to her as it is to me. As for household chores, it’s gotten to the point where I wait until things become totally unbearable, then I set the timer for 5 minutes and shout, “Okay, 5 minutes to pick up! Anything still on the floor gets donated!”

And then there are the various organizational computer programs and filing systems that Erick and I have abandoned, like the “His & Hers To-Do List” currently buried underneath my camera, DVDs of the first two seasons of “Downton Abbey,” and three passport applications. Also the “Family Goals” spreadsheet that we haven’t updated since Georgia was born — two years ago.

In other words, I’m too disorganized to maintain any organizational system. But there is ONE thing I wanted to try, suggested a couple of years ago by ultra-organized friends: drafting a mission statement.

As someone who worked five years in the nonprofit sector, mission statements don’t scare me as much as charts or lists. They’re usually brief, no longer than a couple sentences. It may be a stretch to consider a mission statement an organizational tool, but I do; mission statements serve as focal points for businesses, families, or individuals. Everything that organization, family, or person does refers back to the mission statement.

So last month I decided to draft a mission statement. I felt this was important because life comes flying at me so fast these days — there are so many tugs on my time — that it’s sometimes hard to remember who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing, and what I want to teach my kids.

Writing a mission statement proved to be more difficult than I’d expected, though. There’s a reason why the staff of every nonprofit spends hours agonizing over each word in their mission statement: trying to boil down your reason for existence to a couple of sentences ain’t easy.

Then, a matter of days after typing the preceding paragraphs, I had a epiphany while folding the girls’ laundry and listening to an episode of “This American Life.”

If you’re unfamiliar with the weekly NPR program “This American Life,” I strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with it here. The episode in question was titled, “Self-Improvement Kick” and aired on January 4, 2013. I was listening to it in late February because, owing to my aforementioned disorganization and lack of willpower, my “This American Life” listening follows the same pattern as my New Yorker reading: I’m usually months behind (Yet I have no problem checking Facebook multiple times a day. Go figure).

Act 1 of this episode was about Daryl Watson, a talented young New York City playwright who, in 2009, decided to quit his job, sell everything he owned, and walk across the country as “Peace Pilgrim,” trusting in God (and others) to provide for his physical needs.

Here’s Daryl, explaining why he did what he did: I wanted my mission statement. You know how every business has a mission statement? You know what I mean? That’s what I wanted. Like, you are Daryl Watson, you were born on this day, this is your purpose, this is how you’re going to do it.

That got my attention.

Daryl lasts three days as “Peace Pilgrim.” On a Maryland highway late one night, he sees a billboard that reads: “IT’S OKAY TO MAKE MISTAKES, AS LONG AS THEY’RE NEW ONES.”

Daryl realizes that he’s made a mistake, abandons his pilgrimage, and calls his mother (that’s when I started bawling). Here’s how Elna Baker, who narrates the segment, summarizes his epiphany: He’d been on this journey, most of it alone and suffering, and trying to figure out the meaning of life. He’d been obsessing over his dreams a year before that. And three days in the cold made him realize he was doing this to himself. He was making himself suffer.  And he could stop. Which landed him in the same messy place so many of us are in, not having any answers. So we just ignore the questions and get on with our lives.

My own epiphany had to do with those last two sentences, which made sense to me and bugged me at the same time. It occurred to me that, perhaps, drafting a mission statement was an attempt to impose an artificial sense of organization, an abrupt “answer,” on a life that’s irredeemably messy and confusing. After all, most of us already live according to some broad mission statement, whether or not we’re aware of it, like: “Do no harm,” or “Love God and your neighbors,” or “Make lots of money,” or “Stay young and beautiful.” But just as most organizational systems end up under a desktop pile, it’s usually impossible to live out these missions consistently. (And people who do claim to have found All The Answers, to have a consistent mission, often aren’t much fun to be around: they tend to be narrow, judgmental, condescending, and sometimes dangerous).

The solution of “ignore the questions and get on with our lives” bothers me, though. It sounds an awful lot like becoming the Kevin Spacey-type character who buys a big house in the suburbs, barbeques on weekends, has two nice kids and an attractive wife, works a meaningless job, and buys new “toys” to try and fend off a sense of creeping panic.

I’d like to think that a better solution may be: ACCEPT the questions and get on with life. Accepting that life is messy, disorganized, full of unanswered questions, and impossible to box into a mission statement seems healthier than denial. Getting on with life is key, too; in my experience it’s the best way to find partial answers. I can make pilgrimages and meditate and draft mission statements all I want, but the little rays of light that illuminate my unanswered questions usually flicker while I’m folding laundry, washing dishes, or changing diapers.

Daryl Watson isn’t sure if the billboard he saw on his pilgrimage was real. But its message, “IT’S OKAY TO MAKE MISTAKES, AS LONG AS THEY’RE NEW ONES,” is a pretty good rule for life. So if I had to, here is the best mission statement I could draft — for myself, my family, even this blog:

OUR MISSION IS TO MAKE NEW MISTAKES EVERY DAY.