Writers Write

One Size Does Not Fit All

 June 1, 2021

When my adorable niece Lauren was in high school, she used to walk into a room and announce, “I have news!” The news was always something like the fact that during lunch, Katie had changed tables to sit with Johnny, and Sally had moved to sit at the table with the popular girls. That wasn’t necessarily big news to me because I was long past high school. (When I say long past, I’m not revealing my age, but let’s just say I may or may not have dated the Biblical Moses during my own high school years, and he may or may not have ghosted me when he left Egypt). The shift in cafeteria seating was not a priority in my life, but this type of information was a big deal to Lauren.

In that vein, I have news! I don’t know if this news will have any meaning to any of you, but it does to me. On June 27, 2017, at 7:30 p.m., via Zoom, I will be speaking to a group of friends and writers about the U.S. Supreme Court case of McGirt, a case which caused (and is still causing) an upheaval in criminal law in relation to Native American land.

Here is the link, if you are interested in attending this free event from the comfort of your home:

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84587791093?pwd=bDlRWHh2UmVWdnEzZ3ZCQjZwM3FHdz09

If for any reason you need the extended information for phone attendance, you can e-mail me at Cuethelight@cox.net so that I can forward you the longer e-mail with those links. Feel free to send the link to any of your friends who may be interested.

I will be presenting the true story of all sorts of effects stemming from the landmark McGirt case from a legal standpoint. My plan is to get through a lot of information in a short amount of time so there can be room left for questions. This is all about giving you information.

Yet in life, people often provide us with  “information” which may or not be true. Sometimes, this can lead to serious self-doubt. At least, that’s what happened to me.

Before I gave birth to my first child of my own, a daughter, I attended baby classes with my then husband. (I don’t want to name him, but hint: It wasn’t Moses).  The instructor told all of us women who were present that as new moms, we would recognize all the different types of cries of our babies. We would know which cry meant our baby was hungry, which cry meant our baby was sleepy, which cry meant our baby needed to be cuddled, which cry meant our baby needed a diaper change, ad nauseum. I don’t  know why this didn’t apply to the men, too, but we women were suddenly supposed to have a great sense of “cry detection” after giving birth.

Some of you who are moms may have experienced cry detection, but I did not. The instructor was wrong, at least in my case. All of my baby’s cries sounded alike to me, and I could no more distinguish the different types of crying then I could know for a fact what some other person was thinking.

At that time, did I recognize that the instructor’s assurances about cry detection might not be true for all new moms? No. Instead, I interpreted my lack of cry detection to mean that I must be a failure as a mom. My baby could not talk, but she sure could cry.

I was at a loss. I had this adorable infant to care for, yet I didn’t know what she was saying with her cries. All I could think was what is wrong with me, that I am unable to decipher my daughter’s crying? Where’s my cry detector?

The instructor had caused me to stumble in my mental state as to my ability to mother my own child. Romans 14:13 states, we must “decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.”  I want to make clear that I do not believe in any way that the instructor purposely caused me (or any other mom) such a stumbling block. Perhaps, she had been an excellent cry detector with her own children. Thus, through inadvertence, she then believed this to be a self-evident truth with all moms. I was living proof that it wasn’t.

The same chapter in Romans also says “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.” If I only knew what I learned later, I could have avoided the guilt I suffered by being convinced in my own mind that every mother would be able to decipher her child’s cries and translate that to the appropriate action.

After all, I had never given birth to a child before. The instructor was a mother of two children, and she had been hired to teach the class. She obviously had to be right, yes? No, wrong.

The point of going to the classes was to learn all I could prior to the blessed event. I absorbed, mentally catalogued, and eventually attempted to apply everything  the instructor told us. Because some of the advice she gave was excellent, I believed I was supposed to also be a cry detector.

To make matters worse, my daughter had colic. There were people who told me that the colic was coming from an upset stomach. Some people even said my child must be allergic to the milk I produced. Great, not only could I not recognize what her cries meant, but apparently, I was incapable of feeding her. That wasn’t true, but it also was not fun to hear.

Fortunately, I found out from an educated doctor that true colic is simply unexplained crying. That’s right – even doctors do not know why some babies cry more than others. The advice that I would be a cry detector, as well as the advice that colic was the result of an upset stomach or a breast-milk allergy, simply was not true.

One piece of advice I received from the pediatrician about the constant crying was to give my child a pacifier so she would stop crying. I tried, but my daughter would spit the pacifier out of her mouth in order to continue crying. The pediatrician also suggested I could help my baby find her own thumb so she could learn to self-soothe. Again, this didn’t work. If I placed her thumb in her mouth, my child yanked it back out in anger, then she would continue to sob in a way that broke my heart.

Another suggestion by the pediatrician was that I fasten my child into her car seat and drive around until she fell asleep. Nope, that didn’t work, either.

My daughter seemed to hate containment of any kind. Strapped into a car seat? She screamed. She never fell asleep in the car, so I was just driving around with a wailing banshee in the back seat. Of course, I always had my baby in her car seat when we were going some place, so I had to listen to those screeching cries any time I drove the car.

I was incredibly stressed by my inability to solve the problem of the constant crying. Everyone was quick to give me advice, but none of that advice was working. Again, I thought the failure must be on my part. I couldn’t do anything right as a mom! Why did I lack the supposedly innate ability to be a cry detector?

As I eventually developed a bigger world view, I realized that there truly is no “one size fits all (OSFA)” advice. OSFA might just be the biggest oxymoron in existence for any situation.

For example, how does OSFA for clothing even work? A muumuu that fits me would cause a petite person to be swallowed in material. The only time I saw several different people fit into an identical piece of clothing (at different times, of course) was in the movie Sisters of the Traveling Pants (from the books by Ann Brashares). Ironically, in that movie, all of the girls were in their mothers’ wombs during a prenatal class that their mothers had shared.

Ask a teacher if OSFA in education, where children can have problems like dyslexia, autism, behavioral disorders, or even genius (or other things that might affect learning that I don’t even know about) can work. These are so much not OSFA situations that special classes are created in order to educate these children who have such conditions.

We once had a board member where I work ask why we couldn’t write briefs for our clients faster than we were already doing. He said, “Can’t you just set up something where you can press F7 to create a brief for burglary?” The answer was (and still is and always will be), “No, we can’t.” Each burglary (or any other crime) has its own set of circumstances that are unique. OSFA is not a workable solution. We had to study the uniqueness of each case in order to provide effective assistance of counsel.

We are given advice all the time as writers by well-intentioned people. I even write about writing,  and I can assure you that I am not only well-intentioned, but I am also giving advice. What we have to do as individuals, however, is measure whether whatever information we receive applies to our particular style of writing.

Most likely, we have all heard: Write what you know; show, don’t tell; use an outline; know where your story is going before you start; rely on the Oxford comma; do not use contractions, etc. This advice is not OSFA.

I was watching a movie once where I kept being shown plenty of stuff, but the story was hard to follow and jumped around a lot between the past and the present. To make matters worse, several characters looked alike. In my confusion, I kept thinking, “I wish someone in this movie would just tell me what is going on.” So, for me, OSFA does not even work for that oft-quoted advice of show, don’t tell. Some of you may even call me a writer heretic for even daring to say this, but I’m scrappy, so I can handle that.

No doubt, there is some excellent advice about writing that may benefit all of us at times. Still, our job is to weigh any advice we are given against what we are wanting to achieve with what we have written.  There really is no OSFA for writing advice.

Keep an open mind, which is always a good way of thinking. Taking what other people say as a hard and fast truth about what we have written (or may write in the future) is not. Do not torture yourself by thinking you are a bad writer just because you don’t fit the mold of what someone else is advising. Do not let the fact that you may not have an outline or may not know where a story is going when you start writing cause you any loss of self-esteem.

One of the best aspects of being a writer is that you are in total control of what happens. Your writing is your baby, and you are the parent. Do not let anyone else’s advice cause you to lose confidence in your ability to write in your own way.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore advice you receive about your writing. I’m only suggesting that you weigh such advice with the realization that the final word is yours, so to speak. As a writer, never box yourself into a corner.

And you can decide for yourself whether that penultimate sentence (or any other sentence I have written) is good or bad advice.