By Maybe you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month- November), and now there’s MaMoMeMo (May is Motherhood Memoir Month)? Write with me-
You don’t have to be a mother-everyone has a motherhood story; it’s where you begin.
Why write about how you began? And the woman behind your beginning? Or the changes and challenges you’ve seen since becoming a parent (even a man can write about the changes motherhood brings). Writing is a great way to explore who you’ve become while also looking more deeply into your relationships. It’s also a way of recording stories, re-remembering and rethinking the stories that linger in our minds, exploring their meaning or effects on us. It is even a way of re-writing our stories, transforming them into better stories, ones that we now understand the meaning behind. In White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves From Memory, John Kotre depicts memoir as a “life-affirming myth that gives the self strength as it looks to the future and interprets the past.” Myth, in its truest form, is a traditional story used to explain our beginnings- how we got here.
I love revisiting stories written by my younger self. I have three diaries written when I was 15-16 years old. Reading back through them allows me to revisit my 16-year-old self, and see glimpses of the woman I became in the thoughts and impressions I recorded as a young girl in the 70s.
If you’ve ever tried to write a novel in a month (NaNoWriMo) you know what a challenge it is- somewhere around 1700 words per day will get you to 50K words in a month. If you miss a day, the daily goal rises. It is a somewhat daunting task, but doable.
MaMoMeMo is a bit more laid back. You set your goal- would you like to write everyday, or three days a week? Would you like to write 300, 500 or 1500 words per day? You decide. Then post your goal if you’d like; declaring your
goal publicly has a way of helping us live up to it. We can do this together, encouraging each other along the way. I’d also love to see short excerpts- what was the best sentence you wrote today? I’ll post a prompt to get you going if you need it, along with some of my writing each day. We can hold each other accountable to write motherhood during this month in which we also celebrate mothers (but if you need to do some mother trashing, no worries- not all motherhood tales are good. And yet, it’s the writing that helps us sort the good, the bad, and all the in between. It’s complicated, right?) Writing is healing. I hope you’ll join me.
Visit the MaMoMeMo website for more.