Friday evening, while I was out of town and hanging out with writers, my youngest daughter began a torrent of texts requesting — no, demanding — money for a Halloween costume. Little Red Riding Hood. Everyone at dinner was amused at how this absorbed my attention. How the $$ kept adding up. A perfect costume (on sale!), then a cape, then shoes, then stockings. Etc.

The argument kept ramping up, too. “I didn’t ask for a dress for Homecoming.” “I  didn’t go to prom my junior year.” “I didn’t buy a costume last Halloween.” “I’ll clean my bedroom.” “I’ll clean the whole house!”

At some point, apparently too lily-livered to say “no,” or simply to hide my phone, I decided to go for it. I transferred the money from my account to Emma’s (damn smart phones, anyway). I had to put up with some mostly kind teasing, but I was able to eat my dinner and enjoy the conversations swirling around me, and the reading that followed dinner. For whatever reason, I felt entirely satisfied with my decision. Perhaps it is only that I have been held hostage by darker forces than this kid.

Today, feeling considerable resistance to diving into my work, I started thinking about how parenting and writing both conjure up resistance, and how resistance this morning in fact is rearing its ugly head — more persistent than any 17 year old wanting moolah — how it cajoles and whines, how it makes excuses for you and pulls you away from what you in your heart-of-hearts really, really want to do. You deserve to have some time off. You need to rest your brain. What harm can a game of computer solitaire do? The book will still be there when you’re ready. There will be time later. No one wants to read it anyway. How about lunch out? How about dropping everything and going to Bellingham for the weekend? Maybe you should buy the new Tana French novel. Maybe you should go back to bed. 

As Steven Pressfield says, “Resistance has no conscience. It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned.”

My daughter is small potatoes compared to that.

What I do when I’ve had a few days away and I face this awful not-wanting-to-work feeling, is list all the very very small moves I can make.

• Open my novel notebook and read a chapter.
• Write out a scene or just a few sentences and see what I might change or add.
• Describe a character that’s giving me trouble
• Write a scrap in that character’s voice.
• Walk out to my car and fetch my poetry notebook.
• Type up one poem. (5 minutes!)
• Write a blog post.
• Use any momentum I can build by doing this post to do one more thing. 

Sometimes I do give in to resistance. Sometimes I go back to bed. Sometimes a nap (or a healthy breakfast) is just the break I need. I think the key, though, is to be conscious. What am I doing? What am I doing now? 

I heard this advice at a teaching conference, about a million years ago (or so it seems). A guest speaker — I don’t remember who he was, but his specialty was teaching with technology — was telling us about some of the newest brain science. He said the best way to keep your brain moving as you age is to “Be a Rookie.” He suggested beginning some new project every year, and not just a “new” project, but something to learn. Every year.

I’ve been relearning. For instance, I’m taking piano lessons, again. At age eight or eleven (it seems I took them for several years, but that can’t be right), I never became comfortable with playing the piano. I am not that person who can sit down at the piano and play a song, or bang out a tune. I can’t play chopsticks! And I am filled with envy when other people do. I find that I’m intensely uncomfortable merely sitting down on the piano bench and facing the keyboard. I can’t remember the names of the notes. When I play, or try to, it sounds like a child’s tinkering. At my lesson I feel like such an idiot. How is it that it doesn’t come easier? The first thing, I’ve realized, that I have to learn, is how to sit with this discomfort until it abates. Just sit. Just keep tinkering at the keys.

Being back at the college this fall, teaching my one paltry section of English 101, has made me hyper aware of how other people learn, or don’t. It’s so easy — isn’t it? — to cobble together an English sentence. How is that my students can imagine that She was a lovely woman she had hair of reddish gold when she talked her voice… is one sentence and doesn’t need any punctuation? And these are students who placed in a college-level writing class, after all, not remedial students! After the first paper, I decided to spend some time on the issue, and I gave them an opportunity to resubmit a clean, corrected copy of their work. Three students took me up on the offer, none of whom had serious sentencing problems.

I feel as though I am having to learn how to teach again, how to mark papers, how to be kind in the face of mechanical error — it is another place that is not comfortable for me. By now — after twenty-five years of teaching — shouldn’t I know how to teach a group of freshman writers?

Having my seventeen-year-old daughter enrolled in Driver’s Ed. has been another source of enlightenment. The day we got her permit, I traded car seats with her on a back road and said, “Drive.” She jumped in, eagerly, and I gave her a very quick introduction to gas pedal and brake. She pushed down the gas, raced forward, swerved, stopped, raced forward again, and at the first turn very nearly ran us into the ditch. (“Brake! Brake!”)

I didn’t know how to teach her to drive, how to talk her through the mechanics of driving, even though I have been driving various sorts of vehicles since I was nine years old and my dad told me to climb into the tractor seat and move it ahead. (Luckily, Driver’s Ed. had an instructor who knew just how to accomplish this, and Emma is now driving.)

Similarly, I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was seven. And maybe that has something to do with my persistent astonishment, throughout my teaching career, at how some people don’t already know how to write. The student writers who love this stuff, who can already write — they’re a cinch to work with. But teaching skills that I take utterly for granted? This is a challenge for me, and something I get to learn, all over again. What a blessing!