Inspiration

I often get my writing inspiration from sadness. This sounds horrible, but let me explain. We are all inflicted with some type of sadness at least a million times a day. So when I write, I want to write about the get-down-and-dirty-real type of living. I want to connect people with one another, I want them to relate. Community is what saves us. I want my words to save.
Anne Lamott, in her book about writing, Bird by Bird, said to not be afraid to save people.

One of the women in my writer's group asked where I got the inspiration for the story I wrote in my last post. It wasn't hard because that situation actually happened to my nephew. Of course, much of it is fiction. He was in preschool, there was no newborn baby and stuff like that. However, here is the nonfiction part that I failed to mention:

My sister called me while I was in Borders doing some Christmas shopping. I was in the video section looking for something that I can't remember. Maybe an old movie for a friend or that Carmen Electra how-to-striptease video that my husband wants me to get. Who knows. Anyway, my sister told me over the phone about how her son couldn't go outside because another boy took his boots "by accident." She was telling me the story a day after the fact, so she was laughing a little through her tears. Her husband was in the background saying, "Oh, he'll get over it."

However the whole thing struck me. I listened and told my sister how sad it was and what a good boy he was to be forgiving...but after we hung up, I sat down on one of those little stools between the video shelves and sobbed. I cried so hard that the names of the videos on the shelves ran together into one big, teary blur. I remember wiping my nose and eyes with my gloves because I had no tissue. Go figure, I wasn't expecting to enter Borders for some gifts and get a good cry instead. I left empty handed because I knew my sadness would affect my gift choices. For example, if I was there for my husband he would have gotten a book on how we are killing our planet. No Carmen Electra for him that year.

At this time, I was childless. I remember thinking that I did not have the emotional stability to raise a child, that I would not be able to handle situations such as these. I knew that if I became a mother, my heart would crack a little every day and become so fragile that if it was touched in just the wrong way, it would shatter and I would spend the rest of my life trying to piece it back together while trying to figure out what the purpose of a heart even is before we have children.

Now that I am a mother, I look back on that thinking and realize that I was 100%, without a doubt, exactly right.