ON GIVING THANKS FOR FAMILY & NOT BEING ABLE TO SPELL

by Melodie Johnson Howe

It is difficult being a writer, a wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother. I am always working on two levels: my accepted one as wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother and that other pesky side of me, the writer.

Thanksgiving and Christmas bring out these two roles in a very schizophrenic way for me. I can’t stop being a writer anymore that I can stop being a mother. But these two really collide on the holidays. While I’m observing where I have failed at raising my children and where I have succeeded, the writer in me is delighting at the conflicts, the ironies, even the pain of it all.

There is the turkey that our lovely professional daughter, Kathy, can never seem to cook until it is done. While the other equally lovely professional daughter, Erica, evilly rolls her eyes and reminds me she won the Home Economics award in junior high school. A small silver tray that has grown in her mind to the size of a serving platter. Our adult son, Geoff, who flies around the world filming golf shows, the Olympics, inaugurations, etc., is playing some kind of fishing game on his iPhone which he can also play as a harmonica. I assume not all at the same time. A football game is on the TV that only our one granddaughter is watching. She goes to the University of Chicago. Do they have a football team? The other granddaughter is nervously introducing her male friend to her mother who keeps opening the oven to check on the turkey that will end up raw as it does every year. I wonder if she’s trying to kill us.

I was told to bring the dogs. So we did. Not only did we have all the A-type personalities that make up our family bustling around, but we also had a lab named Luke; Zelda F., a standard poodle; Dr. Watson, a dog by committee; and two Chihuahuas named Chips and Pickles. The huge lab is afraid of the Chihuahuas. Zelda F. (our poodle) wants to eat them. Pickles or Chips (I was now getting them confused) fell into the pool and had to be rescued. He was quickly brought into the house with a towel wrapped around him looking like a survivor of a Tsunami.

Zelda F. will not leave Cickles and Phips—I mean Pickles and Chips alone. She gets put outside. Zelda transfers her aggressions (they’re really abandonment issues —we rescued her.) to the screen door which she is now banging loudly against the house.

We sit down at the table and begin to eat our almost cooked dinner and chat pretending not to hear the door being yanked off its hinges. Pips and Chickles are quivering in the arms of my granddaughter and her boyfriend. Luke the lab is drooling because he is nervous and his cowering at my feet under the table. Dr. Watson, not be outdone, has fallen asleep on both Erica’s and Mel’s laps. Mel is her fiancée and it’s his first Thanksgiving with the family. He is eating around the raw turkey. Suddenly we hear Zelda bouncing off the glass panes of the back door. Geoff, our son, gets up and lets her in. Chastened, she lies down between Bones and me and whimpers at the trembling Pimps and Chumps as they crawl up our granddaughter’s and her boyfriend’s arms to their shoulders. My ankles feel wet from Luke’s nervous slobbering. Dr. Watson, in true form, is now snoring like a drunken sailor.

I take in the chaos that is family and dogs and make mental notes so that later I can get this loving turmoil onto paper. Not because I’m a mother, but because this is what I do. So I eat, drink, and talk, while the writer in me is secretly observing, surrounded by ALL my two-legged and four-legged loved ones.

I cannot spell. I admit it. I also cannot type. I also cannot see my misspellings to correct them because I read what is in my head, not what is on the paper. For instance, when I was writing about the CIA food court, Burger King came out Bugger King. I love these kinds of mistakes because they have a humorous logic to them. JLW, thank God, has the editorial eye of a laser and turned bugger back into burger for me. Of course he let me know he did this with a wicked delight in my malaprops. If only spell-check would say to me, “you mean burger not bugger!”

There was a character in my novel The Mother Shadow whose name was Brian. I wrote Brain through out most of the book, never seeing my mistake. If you want to stop a scene dead just have a character run in and scream, “Brain! Brain!” Unless you’re writing SciFi. My editor at Viking said, “Melodie, it’s as if your novel was written by the most intelligent, creative woman then dictated to an illiterate secretary.” I thought this was a little harsh but I could see his point.

When I was teaching a writers workshop, and my students were dutifully taking notes on every word that fell out of my mouth, I used the word minutia. (It has just taken me ten minutes to look this damn word up.) One of the students asked me how to spell it. I replied that I didn’t have a clue. Their faces turned toward me as If I had committed one of the really bad deadly sins. A writer who can’t spell. I explained that yes, the tools of our trade are words, punctuation, and sentence structure, but if you want to learn that then take a class in grammar. I did not tell them that minutia and mimosa blend in my mind.

But my favorite mistake of all time happened when I wrote a play called “The Lady of the House.” It was the last thing I wrote on a typewriter.

The words “enters” and “exits” are used often in plays. I had no trouble with enters, but typing exits always came out extits. I love this misspelling and I think of it as a real word.

Extits is something most women can identify with especially those who have had implants. (Just so there is no doubt, your devoted writer is a natural woman.) Extits would also be a great way to describe a nasty ex wife, mistress etc. “Have you talked to my extits lately?”

Extits can also be a sad word for women. We can all remember what our bodies looked like in our twenties and we do mourn our extits.

You see, misspellings can have their own innate logic. And though I wish I were a better typist and speller, I have grown to admire my errors. Freud says there are no mistakes. When my creative mind is at work I tend to agree with him.