Put a Lid on It

One way to meet a deadline....

Writing is hard, especially when there’s more than one voice in your head yelling obscenities at you. When I was a teaching assistant trying to finish my dissertation* and finalize my divorce, I was also single mother of two: one teen living with me in an apartment and the other adolescent living two miles away with my ex-husband in the home I’d abandoned.

On my first-year composition syllabus, I assigned Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, brilliant advice about writing and life. My students and I both needed her wisdom. She recommends silencing your disparaging relatives by dropping them one at a time into a mental jar. Aunt Sarah. Uncle Harvey. They can scream all day at you, and you see their tiny bodies in that imagined quart jar, but now you don’t have to listen. Screw on the lid and get back to work. [keep scrolling…story continues]

* * *

While my daughter was at school, I decided to turn Lamott’s thought experiment into reality using one of our many empty Ball one-quart jars, the kind used for home canning. I was not one of those moms who preserved peaches or canned kumquats, but I upcycled these versatile, transparent storage containers for everything from loose-leaf tea and dried beans to miscellaneous buttons.

I removed the metal lid and set the jar on my desk next to a pile of scrap paper. Cutting the paper into strips, I thought about all the voices in my head. Not the voices of relatives—all of them were supportive—but my own negative thoughts broadcasting at full volume on random-order repeat. On each strip of paper, I wrote thoughts like these in permanent marker:

“You’ll never finish this dissertation. Why don’t you quit now?”

“You can’t even afford laundry detergent. You should get a real job and stop chasing this dream.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are? A writer? Ha!”

“And even if you do complete it, you’ll never get a tenure-track job.”

At least two dozen strips of paper spelled out my doubts, self-criticisms, objections, and fears—voices in my head that I needed to silence if I were ever to meet my self-imposed deadline: the already-scheduled March dissertation defense (and one of my out-of-state professors, from UC Davis had already bought his plane ticket).

I read each negative statement aloud before dropping it into the mouth of the jar. The final scrap probably said, “You’re a white girl! Who let you into this conversation?”

Then I screwed on the lid and left the silent jar in our living room. I put away the scissors, tossed the scraps, and returned my daughter’s colored markers to their box. Next, I dusted my desk, stacked my reference books, collected my scattered note cards and printed rough drafts, and lit a candle…. Procrastinating? Perhaps. But for me it was a ritual—cleaning my physical space after clearing my mental space.

And I wrote. Page by page revealed literary evidence for my argument that Native American women writers construct identity out of reclaimed spaces and resistant material. Their work reveals a being-ness that derives “from allegiances, associations, and relationships with respect to gender, community, land, history, and culture,”* I argued; these writers are “agents of their own and their people’s futures.”

Knowing my daughter had a student council meeting after school, I worked beyond my self-imposed time limit with occasional glances at the jar. I stopped when I felt my brain beginning to take its own break and blew out the candle.

I left the apartment and walked across the street to our neighborhood park tucked beneath the interstate. The perimeter path was a bit muddy from recent wet snows. As I walked, rubbed my gloved hands together for warmth as I listened to my own contented sighs.

* * *

Meanwhile, my daughter had come home from school, smelled the furniture polish and the candle’s faint aroma, and dropped her books on the table. Never one to miss a new detail, she saw the jar.

Through the glass, she read a few words. “My mother has gone crazy,” she thought, turning the jar in her hands to expose more words. “Absolutely crazy!” Her belief in me, my project, and my abilities was stronger than most of my relatives, but—she told me later—this jar of curses, of negative self-talk, worried her.

When I came home from the park, she held up the jar. “Mom! What is this? Are you okay?”

She laughed with me when I explained the material metaphor and gave me a big hug. “You got this,” she said.

Indeed. I got it.

As I write about women’s identity, I am acutely aware of my daughter’s developing sense of self. This work, then, is my offering, my hope that she will construct her own identity from the bits and pieces—both whole and fragmented—that she has been given, and from assorted other materials she will unearth along the way.* (Preface, xvi)

*“The Original in Ourselves”: Native American Women Writers and the Construction of Indian Women’s Identity (University of New Mexico, 2001)