Mine to Keep

I have been sending out a particular essay to lots of publications – literary, parenting, online magazines, etc. It’s one I’m very proud of. I wrote it after thirteen years of reading to my children every night. It speaks of my childhood, my parents, my motherhood, my children, my grief over my father. Each day, my children and I kept our reading ritual going. After they left for college, it was important to me to keep something from those years alive. We lived it together. I decided to write about it and what it meant, not only to me, but hopefully to my children.

It was accepted by a well-known parenting site. To say I was excited is tempering it. My daughter, home for the summer before starting grad school, and I were spending the day together, talking about everything under the sun. When I received the email, I was speechless. I immediately texted my husband. He knows how much I wanted this. He is, however, all business. He sent a congratulatory text. But when I got home, he told me to ask what the terms and conditions of publishing with them would be. I knew he was right. He always is. He’s annoying like that.

I received the response: I would have to give up the rights to my essay.

Perpetually.

Forever.

When I told him, he said it was my decision.

I listen to my husband about nearly everything. This time “it’s your decision” was not helpful. I replied to the parenting site asking them to revise the contract. I had a glimmer of hope that they could see my point of view. Their response was “we have neither the time nor the resources to amend the contract for individual authors.” I understood. It didn’t help.

I needed someone who knew this “world” to tell me what to do. And I ran into one.

I was in Boston for 24 hours, Kate Spencer was there for 48. She is the author of several books, including The Dead Mom’s Club, and she has what I don’t: a readership, a name, and a career built on the very thing I was trying to break into. Usually, I will walk by someone and think “Hmm, I think that was So and So.” This time I didn’t. I said hi.

Kate and I aren’t close – but we are connected through her parents. My husband worked for her father, Jim, many years ago. Her mother, Martha, was one of my dearest friends. When my husband worked for Jim, we would go to dinner with them quite often. They threw us an engagement party, came to our wedding, and they were among the first people we told that we were pregnant with our first child. Once over dinner I confessed to Jim and Martha all my fears about being pregnant and not paying enough attention to my unborn child. I hadn’t even told my husband. Jim looked at me, took my hand and said in all his Jim wisdom, “you are going to have so much more to feel guilty about over the next 18 years. Not reading to your unborn child should NOT be one of them.”

Years later, I could use a little of that wisdom again.

I emailed Kate the next day and asked her what she would do about publishing the piece. She replied, “Never give up your rights/intellectual property.”

With much disappointment, I turned down the offer.

My husband was right, again. Annoying.

Something about “intellectual property” got me. This is work that I created – and it all comes from my heart, my children, my life.

Why should someone else get that? Forever.

Martha died of pancreatic cancer a few years after that dinner, hence The Dead Mom’s Club. But I still have her.

Martha and I talked occasionally when she was sick but mostly relied on emails. I kept all of them, and looking back, they’re a journal of my son’s first year. She wanted to know everything – and I told her; height, weight, what was he eating, was he laughing, crawling, getting along with his older sister; all the exciting milestones of babyhood. One of the things I wrote to her was “You’ve been a cheerleader, a friend, and a sister to me when I needed it most. Good friends are so rare and to be able to trust someone as I do you is such a treat for me.”

There is a picture of Martha with my newborn daughter, somewhere. Martha never got to hold her own grandchildren.

I went looking for the picture of Martha with my daughter. Most of our stuff is in boxes in storage. The first box I found was labeled “photo albums” and the first photo album I pulled out was the one that had the picture.

There she was. Martha and my newborn baby.

Some things are worth keeping.