I can't believe that already three months had elapsed since my mom's passing. Thank God for this blog! As I had explained in the past, it had and continues to serve as a way for me to cope with my grief, as some kind of distraction, the writing, that is. There's an actual term for this whole process - *sublimation* - as coined by Freud, where basically, one diverts the more natural self/other-destructive inclination and takes all the negative emotions within ones' self and channels it into something constructive and worthwhile. In my case, instead of, I don't know, plotting some evil but to my credit, intricate, heist or at the very least, losing all inhibitions and dancing on top of tables (!) (that was a joke) I wrote and wrote and by the same token, my brother took up playing the guitar again (and songwriting!) and played and played. And while we both personally derived comfort from these activities, by far, the best thing ever that came as direct result from this, were the priceless smiles we got out of mom - my mom - who by profession was a nurse, and had worked as one her entire life because as she would so self-deprecatingly say, "that's all I knew how to do." She was obviously quite pleased to see that at thirty-eight and thirty-three years (young!) respectively, my brother and I, her two able-bodied children out of three, seemed to have found our true (?) callings, our vocations, as we took turns entertaining (and amusing!) her on her hospital bed with the products of our sublimation - with my brother strumming away and serenading my mom with his original compositions and me reading out loud to her, maybe mincing some of my bolder words, some of my second-rate prose! She loved it, so much so that, once, obviously influenced by her cocktail of painkillers, she (proudly) introduced me to one of the staff as a writer! But I didn't dare burst her bubble then and there, I mean, how could I cast another pall over her already pitiable condition? It was only later and well out of her earshot, that I explained to the nurse (who seemed quite impressed!) what my mom had meant, and in what capacity I actually wrote or write (lol) namely, authoring this silly *personal* blog. Needless to say, with my mom being completely computer illiterate, my explanation of what a weblog was went right over her pretty head, but it didn't matter, though, to her I was a writer, "point final" and my mom's maternal loyalty & devotion to us kids
made me both smile and bleed inside...
What constitutes *writerhood* anyways? Try Googling it up and your screen will be inundated with inordinate amounts of info. The opinions vary & differ and are subjective, of course - some argue it involves having published a certain amount of material, others assert that it simply means loving to write and having the ability to string words together into coherent sentences. I won't even try to offer up my two-cents' worth - no, I can't count myself among the company of the literary elite, well, not yet! But I will venture a guess: that writerhood is somewhere happily in between where someone meets those two conditions. To whose opinion I will readily subscribe, though, are of those who recognize as fact, that, all writers - aspiring or established, fledgling or seasoned - contend with self-doubt every now and then if not all the time and that writer's block is a real and not just an imagined insidious affliction marked by a drought and interruption in the flow of creative juices! But probably the cutest fact of them all - in my opinion, at least and my personal favorite - is that each writer has her/his own unique and distinctive "voice" - how true!
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