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I have been thinking about my maternal grandmother. Arada Lusk (1895-1983) was a tiny woman with a huge presence in my childhood. I grew up in the house my mother was born in, and my grandparents lived next door, in a house built by their sons and sons-in-laws. The winter after my grandfather died, when I was 17, I often slept at my grandmother’s house to keep her company. I woke each morning to the sound of Elk Creek rushing by (only a few feet from the lower level), and found her sitting in her chair in the living room, reading her Bible and praying. Or dozing in her chair. She set out Corn Pops and half-n-half for me on the gray formica kitchen table. I caught the school bus with my cousins.

I view my own contemplative practices each morning in the same light as my Grandmother’s Bible and prayer. Joseph Campbell said, more or less, that a person who doesn’t have an hour each morning before television or radio or newspaper or social interactions, can’t have much of an inner life.

I read a little; I write in my journal. What do you do to stay in touch with your inner life?

When I first became a mom, my friend Karen gave me Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Good Enough Parent. The concept originated, I believe, with D. W. Winnicott. The heart of the theory is that trying too hard as a parent just mucks things up for the child. Better to be “good enough” and let the child take credit for some of her development.

I embraced the concept of the good-enough parent. Where I have difficulty letting go, is with my writing. But is my desire to make a text perfect, really just a a tactic to keep from ever having to let it go?

Sixty-seven drafts of a poem will eventually see me through to completion. The same sort of obsessive revising with the novel…this is not going so well.

One of my on-going goals (articulated for myself in the last few months) is to be the parent my daughters need at 20, 20, and 14 as they move toward independence. To stop babying them. Along the same lines, I need to very clearly set a goal to let go of my novel.