Two Grams

Dear Friends,

If you have been a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or some other type of gift-giver to a set of young children before, you know you have to make gifts equal among the recipients. My husband and I thought we knew what this meant until one Christmas several years ago.

For that particular Christmas, we went shopping for two of our young nephews with a pre-approved list from my sister and—Bingo!—we found gifts that were roughly the same cost and roughly the same size. We took them home, triumphant, and placed them wrapped under the tree, along with some stocking-stuffer-type gifts—also equal in cost, quantity, and size.

When the big day came, “Uncle Adam and Aunt Patty” watched with knowing grins as the boys finished unwrapping their stocking stuffers and began to unwrap their “big” gifts. However, our grins were soon replaced by alarm and disappointment.

The younger of the two nephews had noticed that his brother’s gift had multiple smaller components inside, which meant in his mind that his older brother received more gifts. The green-eyed monster of jealousy took over our younger nephew, and he was blind to the wonderful gift we chose for him. Let’s just say that was not my favorite Christmas ever.

I could have kicked myself over this rookie move, especially since I have been cautious about hurt feelings among family members from the time I was a child myself.

As is the case with a lot of families, my parents didn’t always see eye-to-eye with their mothers-in-law.¹ As an ultra-sensitive kid, I picked up on that tension and was careful to show equal amounts of love and care to all of them. I never wanted to be the cause of hurt feelings.

In fact, in high school, I practically panicked when a new English teacher—who was fresh from student teaching elsewhere and therefore had not yet earned a local reputation for strictness or leniency—gave our first writing assignment that year. We were to write a paper on the person in our family we most admired. I struggled with this assignment because lifting up one family member above all others would certainly break my unwritten rule about equal treatment.

After much consternation, I ended up taking what was a huge risk for a rule-follower like me. Instead of writing about one family member, I wrote a paper titled “A Perplexing Paper,” and detailed why each person in my immediate family was special to me and therefore could not be singled out as the most admired.

To my great relief, the teacher enjoyed my take (including the alliterative title) and did not deduct points for my deviation from the original assignment. Phew!

Although it’s been decades since that “perplexing” homework, similar feelings have been nagging at the back of my brain since I began putting pen to paper on my future novel.

As I write an entire book based on the life of one amazing Gram, it feels a bit disloyal not to acknowledge the other amazing grandmother I knew and loved.

My dad’s mom led an incredibly challenging life, and I was as close to her as I was to my other Gram—even closer in some ways. I’m sure she would be disappointed not to be the center of my creative writing.

Unfortunately for me, I do not know nearly as much detail about her life as I would like. While she was living, she and I worked together on researching and documenting her genealogy, and I heard lots of stories about her family members and ancestors. But I somehow didn’t get her story.

By the time I realized this and wanted to remedy it, it was sadly too late. Thankfully, she confided a lot in my dad while she was still alive and her memory was still sharp. And now, he is sharing her story with me. Maybe one day, she’ll be the subject of another book!

But for now, I am pushing ahead on the story that has been on my heart for decades.

I am happy to report two major updates about my book-writing progress since last time:

1. Last year, I purchased a one-year subscription to a self-paced, four-course bundle offered by book coach Susan DeFreitas. This coursework was an excellent investment. I needed the entire year to work through all of the material, which covered everything from story structure to theme. I decided to subscribe for another year, which will be helpful as I get closer to my revision phase of writing.2

2. The other important update is that I have a new critique and accountability partner! After meeting with a new(-ish) writer friend, Sherry Cormier, for coffee/tea on a regular basis this past year, we decided to begin sharing our work with each other for critique. While it is a huge step for any author to share such personal writing with anyone (especially very rough first drafts), it is a tremendous help to get those early impressions from a trusted fellow writer. I am thankful that Sherry and I can be “that person” for each other!

Accountability is so helpful to me to complete a project like this book. That’s partly why I write this newsletter and accepted another friend’s challenge to write these quarterly! (Thank you, Amy!)

Thank you so much for reading, hitting the little heart, commenting, emailing…. It fuels me to keep going down this long and sometimes-lonely road that is novel-writing!

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Until next time, enjoy this beautiful season of wonder and light!

Merry Christmas!
Patty

P.S. Have you read any good books lately? My favorite reads this quarter were the short story Signal Moon by Kate Quinn, A Very Bad Thing by J.T. Ellison (who I just found out has her own Substack), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is the last book in the series by J.K. Rowling.