Robin Layne's Blog: From the Red, Read Robin - Posts Tagged "childhood"

I’m not sure there was one moment in my life when I realized I would be a writer. I think it was close to a destiny I always knew. Stories were important to me from the beginning. I loved the picture books my mother read to me. In kindergarten, our class made a book of pictures by each pupil; accompanying the drawings were short piece of writing we had dictated to the teacher. I acted out fairytales for family members and friends, like “The Three Bears” and “Cinderella.”

In first and second grade, we wrote stories and illustrated them on big-ruled sheets of paper. Our teachers gave us really creative prompts, and I think I got into more detail than the other kids, careful to include a logical beginning. In second grade I stayed in recesses to make my first picture book.

I was teased a lot by my schoolmates, and it cut me deeply. My family was unsympathetic to my complaints about it. I told myself that when I grew up I would be a famous artist and writer. Then those who had hated me would read about me in the newspapers and be sorry. I would show them I was better than a misfit crybaby, and better than all of them.

In third grade, I used to go visit my second grade teacher. I told her I was going to be an author. She pinched my cheeks and said, “Write children’s books.”

Sorry, Mrs. Palermo. My interests are broader, and I don’t pander to your expectations. I write what inspiration leads me to, not what one set age group dictates.

When I was still a child, it would take me hours to get to sleep, so I would make up novels in my head. Now I find that I can’t carry whole scenes in my memory for long without writing them down.

Although I still do a little art for my own pleasure, most of my art is to help me picture the characters in my stories or to design possible covers for the books. The “famous artist” part of my ambition has pretty much fallen by the wayside, leaving me more time to write. I’m driven to imagine, get it into words, and share it with others. Fame is slow to come by and not a need anymore. I’m famous to God. But I would like to produce published books. And I want to make a living on my writing!

I get the impression that most people think writing like mine is play and that I should spend my time doing more “important” things. Writing is enjoyable for me, but it also requires a lot of time and effort. Most of the markets out there pay nothing, and another large percentage pay a only a handful of dollars, I suppose for the purpose of saying you’re “paid.” Some writers make their living writing articles, but the really creative stuff doesn’t provide a living except to the rare superstar author. What are our values?

I write because I love stories. I write because the Lord I love is the Word. God made me in His image. And He is the Creator. So I am a creator, too.

(Sorry if a bit of this is the same as my author information. I wrote this entry to a Writer's Digest website prompt while in my writers' salon group. The information was all new to my friends there.)

I went to Wordstock yesterday; I couldn’t make it Saturday because we had auditions for our next Well Arts performance (which will be in the first two weekends of November). Sorry to miss one day of my favorite book fair, I didn’t have time to visit every booth. But what a wonderful and useful time I had! It was the most productive Wordstock ever for me.

Much of the event inspired me. I wrote notes to myself in the margins of my spiral-bound pad. One of those notes was a provocative concept to mull over. Observe me mulling.

In the panel Writing for Children and Teens, authors Jane Smiley and Melanie Thorne both mentioned “achieving a certain age and staying there forever.” This seemed like a new and unusual idea. I asked the panelists to expand on this thought. The moderator interpreted my question to mean what inner age each of them were inside, but I was more interested in what the idea meant in the first place. The women said it refers to the moment you become “a real person, a real human being” (Jane), “the core you.” Jane said it was the summer she topped 6 feet tall. Her ADD had left her out of touch, she said, until the day she woke up and saw “the world looked different from up here.”

I’m unaware of such an epiphany in my life—at least, so far. I feel I always knew I was unique and real and individual. So much so, in fact, that I used to fantasize that there was a TV show called “Robin” that was all about me—my creativity and intelligence, my struggles to get along with other kids, and my need to be understood. I thought I was great. My parents said I was an old little soul, so I thought I was wiser than most people, including them. Maybe I was. The struggle of not being understood or accepted was painful, but I believed that, just as if they saw my imaginary TV show, people would one day know how great I really was because I would be a famous artist and writer when I grew up. Then my peers would be sorry they had teased me when we were little.

Did most people miss out on that feeling of greatness and individuality? I never understood the desire for kids to be carbon copies of each other and to ostracize anyone who in any way didn’t fit the cookie cutter that I think none really fit inwardly anyway. I never understood adults with the same childish attitude, either. It still strikes me as the epitome of immaturity. I recall some spiel about a movie or something about a team of heroes bent on “protecting the ordinary from the extraordinary.” How imbecilic! I thought. Why protect them from us? We are all extraordinary in our own ways. We were each made in the image of God—a different facet of his very nature. What could be more extraordinary than that?

Even before I started reading the Bible and learned I was made in the image of God, I knew I was extraordinary. But I didn’t know everybody else was. They were mostly so bent on being ordinary that I couldn’t see past that plain disguise. So I was stuck up, and that didn’t help me make friends, either. What do you do when all your drawings are much more realistic and expressive than the other kids’ your age? When they either hate you out of envy or hate themselves because they can’t draw as well as you do? How about when you just have to finish writing out the idea you just had rather than go on an excursion with acquaintances? That didn’t win me friends, either. At some point I had to learn that people are more important than books. But still, there is a balance . . . and at a place like Wordstock, I’m surrounded by nerdy booklovers like myself—good people, good books, and talking about books and people—what a winning combination!

But still—if there is a moment I missed, or several of them, in which I became the core me and then stayed there to this day, I ask the Lord to reveal that to me. It seems to me I must keep growing up in some ways while staying a child in others . . . childlike rather than childish, I’ve heard it said.

When I was a child, I thought that my golden year was age 5. That was before I realized how disliked I was destined to be, and I spent a great deal of my time hamming it up to family and friends of family. I think of my inner child as being forever five.

It’s interesting that although it was only the women who defined the concept, all four panelists had an answer about their inner age (Tad Hills had to think about it a bit). Having a younger real or inner age must make it easier to write about a character who is that age. But if you are stuck at that age forever, how do you write about that character growing up? Maybe I won’t know unless and until I find out my “real” age. Or do I already know it? Is it five? If so, maybe I am an old little soul, even if it’s not in the sense that my parents thought.

I can’t resist adding a reference to “becoming real” in one of my favorite stories, The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams. I repeat its message as well as I can remember it. Becoming real, says the wise old Skin Horse, isn’t how you are made. It’s something that happens when you are loved for a very long time. You may get loved into a shabby condition, but when you are real this doesn’t matter.

I know that I have been loved for a very long time. We all have been, but knowing it, really experiencing it so that it’s not just a fact but the core of who you are deep inside, is key to being real. Most of the toys in the story get it all wrong. They think they are real if they have clockwork making them move and make sounds, but those toys stop working, the child loses interest in them, and they are abandoned. Toys that break easily have a hard time being loved, because love hurts sometimes. It’s a deep message. Though it’s a children’s book, I didn’t learn about it until I was at least a teen, maybe older.

When I was little, I had no idea of how deeply I was loved or who loved me. In Sunday school, we sang about it but I didn’t experience it, so “Jesus Loves Me” meant worse than nothing to me. I thought it was a stupid song. Jesus wasn’t real to me, so how could he love me? I hated singing nonsense songs and learning boring stories about strangers hearing strange voices and doing strange things. Wow, what a change came over me once the Bible told me what church somehow could not. At some point “Jesus Loves Me” became my favorite song. But I never drowned in that ocean of love until I was 24. Maybe that’s my real age. The age that my Savior romantically wooed me, healed my broken heart from all those bad past relationships by replacing it with the union of our hearts. He got me alone, isolated from others, and sensitized to spiritual realities. In a vivid mental vision, I saw him climb in my window, walk up to me, and climb into my body. From the inside of me, he showed me what he feels for me and others, acted out the works of his Father’s obedient Son, and communicated his intimate thoughts with me. And he showed me then and over the years what perfect love is.

Maybe I’m not 24, though. Because I’m always growing in that love. Maybe it’s my mind catching up with my heart. Or both catching up with my spirit. Maybe my real age is always what I am becoming. Maybe I’m the age Jesus was when he finished his work; maybe his age is all I ever need to be. Or I should count from the day in my childhood when I first asked him into my heart, because I’m told my spirit became alive that day. But I never recorded the day or year, nor the November day in 1984 when he walked into me, or the day (was it the same one?) in which he first called me his wife. Sad not to have an anniversary, but my life was in a really mixed-up state back then. Drowning in love can be very messy, but I don’t regret a second of it.

I got confused later, and set aside the intimacy Jesus brought me. Eventually I got it straightened out, and then I really wanted to have an anniversary date. I wanted a ceremony to solidify the ethereal bond, and he showed through some other beloved people that he wanted to as well. So on the 20th of November, 1999, I dressed in a wedding gown and, accompanied by three friends and my one daughter, celebrated with music, shared the story of our romance, and let the Lord who is within me place a ring on my left hand. Freed even more deeply from wounds and sins that haunted me, I stomped on the communion goblet we had drank from.

So now I see there are multiple ways I could define my real age. I cannot settle on any one of them. Which is fitting. I never was good with numbers.