telling the whole story

by mraynes

over the summer mr. mraynes stayed at home with the children so that i could go to the office everyday and work on my thesis. this was brilliant and so, so appreciated but it has certainly made this week much more difficult.

i had forgotten just how hard it is, how you don’t even have 2 minutes of uninterrupted time to write a coherent sentence. mr. mraynes went back to work on monday and once again i took up the reigns of stay-at-home parent. it will really be for this week only, monster and valkyrie start full-time school next week and lionheart is relatively easy. but this week has been hard.

take, for example, my post from yesterday. it took me 3 hours to write it because i was constantly interrupted by endless demands, requests to spell random words, a litany of questions and several sibling fights. as a result the post had several grammatical errors or places where words were left out. but most problematic was the way i portrayed mr. mraynes.

he got home from work yesterday and was incredibly complimentary about the post and then casually mentioned that i had misrepresented our conversation and his viewpoint. in all actuality, mr. mraynes does understand why feminists get upset about the rape prevention tips and he believes strongly that men should be told not to rape and then held accountable for it. i was shocked that i could have done this but when i went back and read the post mr. mraynes was right, i had made it seem like he just doesn’t get it.

and this is why writing about other people is so complex. you can think you’re doing them justice but the words don’t match your intention. i actually fall into this trap with mr. mraynes quite a bit. he is a favorite subject of mine because i think he is fantastic but i often forget that my audience doesn’t know this. that they don’t have years of history in which to understand where he is coming from. when i write about mr. mraynes i often only tell half of the story.

the wonderful thing about having a blog is it gives you a space to practice writing. so i am sure that i will keep practicing and practicing on how to do justice to my subjects, particularly mr. mraynes.

until i get it right, this post is just to say: mr. mraynes is the best!