An Editor in a Family of Writers

The family that my husband and I created is a family of writers… and I’m an editor. You can imagine the implications of that. 

My daughter, who is 33, is an undergraduate Phi Beta Kappa who has a PhD in Literacy Education. She has to write academic, peer-reviewed articles based on her research; she loves to write personal reflections based on her life. It’s therapeutic for her. Her most recent foray into the “world of the pen” is blogging at "Twin Life- Having it All." Ironic that in the 21st century, the “world of the pen” has nothing to do with handwriting. 

  But her blog explores the challenges of being a full-time working mom (one who is on a tenure track at a major university, with all that that implies), the mother of two year old twins (who are the proverbial apples of their four grandparents’ eyes, but at the same time, two year old twins), and the wife of a man who doesn’t quite get these challenges (which is not at all atypical). So my daughter writes, and she writes well. She has credited me with being her first teacher of composition, although I suspect she now feels I wasn’t particularly adept at that job. Remember, I’m an editor. I don’t write. 

 But my son does. You have to understand my son. He has a degree in computer science and engineering, and he is a self-professed nerd, geek, dork (can’t remember which word he uses) because at age 28, he still loves video games, and, in fact, left his out-of-college plum job with GE (which he landed at the beginning of his senior year in a year when jobs for college grads weren’t easy to come by) to move to California to work for Blizzard. Imagine getting a phone call from your then 25 year old son who says, “Mom, I’m leaving GE to move to California to work for Blizzard.” Blizzard??? I immediately went on-line to find out what Blizzard was and discovered that one of its senior executives had recently been chosen one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Somewhat assuaged by that fact (at least someone at the company was legit), I opened Newsweek and discovered an article about a billion dollar a year company named Blizzard Entertainment. And it’s profit sharing. 

While I still wasn’t delighted with my son’s moving across the country, I understood that while his left-brained self was fine working at GE, his right-brained self needed more than making washing machines in a Fortune 500 company. So off he went with my blessing. When he was in high school, I provided the same “composition instruction” to my son that I had to may daughter, the “adequate-enough-to-get-a-‘4’-on-the-AP-test” instruction, but not really great teaching, and he suffered it and assimilated the structured concepts. But at the same time, he developed an “off-the-wall-why-can’t-I-be-creative-enough-to-think-of-that” style of writing that is hysterical. He’s a natural. He calls his blog “living on the tangent,” and in it, as a writer, as in life, he does. 

 Living on the tangent… that’s been a metaphor in our family for as long as my husband and I have been married. I don’t remember when that term actually came into being, but our kids both understood it and felt it growing up. In fact, my daughter has always wanted to write a book about it. But my husband is certainly the source of it. A tangent is a line that touches a curve. The earth is a curve where society mills; our family is the line. I tell people that sometimes over the last 37 years, I have felt as if I’ve been the person holding the line on the curve—and that’s not necessarily a good thing. The rest of my family have run up and down that line their whole lives. Oh, they function well enough in the masses, but their true selves actually interact at the tangential point as little as possible. 

  But I digress… my husband-- tangent runner, hero to both our children, Renaissance man-- holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He manages an organization of more than 225 people, in a difficult environment with uncommon success. On the side, he is a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, an auto repair person; he reads, he sings, he writes. And he writes incredibly well. He says I’ve helped him with writing, and perhaps I have—with his structured, prepared compositions. But his spontaneous, unplanned pieces are genuine and natural, and ostensibly effortless. He doesn’t write as often as I wish he would—he simply doesn’t have the time. But he is a writer in his soul. And his pieces reflect that. 

  So there you have it… I am an editor in a family of writers. I wish I could be a writer. I have lots of stuff I would like to say. And I try my best, but… I’ve done a lot of self-analysis over the years, so I recognize my strengths; I recognize my weaknesses. I am an editor in a family of writers.