Go Amuse Yourself Quietly

    My mother was not a typical 1950s woman...you know what I mean, the Barbara Billingsley (Beaver Cleaver's Mom) type who did God knows what all day long wearing a dress, heels, and pearls. Instead, my Mom spent her afternoons teaching piano lessons in our living room, and her evenings (and later mornings, after my brother and I were in school) teaching literature classes at the local college. She also spent a good portion of my childhood earning two advanced degrees and being more or less the entire secretarial staff for my grandmother's real estate and insurance business. (I should add that my grandmother was also not the typical 1950s woman).
    Thus this phrase ("go amuse yourself quietly") was frequently uttered in our home. And if the truth be known, my brother and I were pretty good at it...amusing ourselves quietly, I mean...unless you count the experiments we tried with the chemistry set he got for Christmas one year, or the bike horns my father gave us which sounded more or less like wounded geese as we raced our bikes up and down the street in front of the house.
    I don't mean to imply that my childhood was one long series of being chased out of the room so my mother could fulfill her professional goals...in fact, I often wonder how she was able to find the energy to also leave me with memories of vast amounts of quality time we spent as a family.
    But I also have to admit that somewhere in the early 1970s, I found myself also directing my own children to "go amuse themselves quietly," all the while having the distinct feeling I had heard this expression somewhere before. Being that it was the more permissive 70s, though, added to this directive was the promise that "if you play by yourself quietly for a little bit, then Mommy will play with you after."
    "Quietly," however was the operative term. Between my son's Star Wars battles and the unruly "students" in my daughter's doll-populated "school" (one I was quite convinced could be accredited by the state of Connecticut), this was not really the prevailing atmosphere that followed my decree. But mostly the concept worked fairly well, especially with the added invention of color TV.
     Because I had my children young, I spent a good portion of their early years in part time pursuit of my college degree and then continuing on to get my Master's. I also worked evenings as a newspaper reporter, and once the kids were in school, started my teaching career and became involved in local politics. Must be genetic. In my case, however, I was (and still am) far too easily distracted not to have ended up wandering down the hall to play with the so-called quietly amused kids, instead of doing my own work.
   So here we are again...being asked by a higher authority to go and amuse ourselves quietly, with the promise that if we'll be able to make all the noise we want later on. As writers, of course, why not just think to ourselves, let's make all the noise we want right now...but in a creative way. Since we can't go to those proverbial "day jobs" everyone says not to quit, or use the first moment of writer's block as an excuse to go to the mall, or pretend that going out to dinner with a bunch of friends could be considered "research," why not settle back on your comfy couch (or wherever you like to write) with your trusty laptop and do exactly that...write.
     Then write, and write some more, and write some more...cheerfully jumping back and forth between unrelated documents as if you could care less if they ever see the light of day on some editor's desk, or if your friends ever read what you've created, or if that pompous bookstore owner ever considers your work worth her front window display. Because who cares? You're making yourself happy in the way you always have (by writing) when lots of other people have never actually been able to do that...that is, go and amuse themselves quietly.