Writing Conference Prompts: Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities

One of the speakers told us to write down our primary roles and the rights and responsibilties of each role. 

Role: Writer

Rights: to take time, to express, to receive encouragement from my close readers

Responsibilities: to make time, to be brave and diligent, to write it, to read and fill the well

Role: Wife

Rights: support, touch, romance, passion, security and safety, adoration

Responsibilities: support, cleaning/chores, planning, fidelity, openness, words of affirmation, touch, company, gentleness and patience

Role: Teacher

Rights: a measure of authority, recognition of my knowledge, pay

Responsibilities: helping others fear writing less, building vocabularies, explaining grammar, holding students to high standards, grading work, answering E-mails

Role: Mother

Rights: Seeing Oliver’s smile, snuggling occasionally, seeing what love made, memories

Responsibilities: patience, attention, cheerfulness, managing interruptions, cooperation with others, appointments, admin work, support

Role: Reader

Rights: indulging my imagination, experiencing, feeling

Responsibilities: staying curious, putting in the time, studying, reading widely and daily and deeply

Celebrate the Art of Being You.

Those words caught my attention in a Pottery Barn Teen catalog. Celebrate is a beautiful word. Though I don't drink, I like the image of starry champagne flutes on a silver tray.

I guess it's easy for our true selves to sink below the surface of our roles. So much of life requires carefully-constructed personae. That's a lot of work, and it often means little energy and time are left for being oneself. So when we do manage it, if only for an afternoon scribble or work on a sewing project, that is something worth celebrating.

One must do what one loves. If I'm not reading or not writing, something is wrong or will be. I think it's a cycle: the more I skip reading, the worse I feel. And the worse I feel, the less likely I am to write.

Sometimes, Josh will tell me I'm a great wife and mother. Then, he'll say that he wants me to work on being Becky. When he sees me reading or writing, he often says how much he likes to see me doing Becky things. He makes me feel proud (never guilty) about taking care of my truest self, which, I suppose, is what he fell in love with in the first place.