Writing about Cleaning...

It's a writing process blog!

People ask where ideas for stories come from. And honestly they come from everywhere. Sometimes people even send me their ideas, and if they capture my imagination I use those. Though often the writing prompt, or idea, they sent bears very tenuous resemblance to the story I write.

The story I posted this week started with the Coldplay couple. Brent and I both had the same thought, which was how terrible it would be for their spouses. It would be bad enough to find out your partner is cheating on you but to have the whole world meme it and joke about it? Ouch.

Then I wondered if they had children. Most likely they do. Which made me think about this television show that Brent and I have been watching where the wife cheated on the husband and then continued the relationship with the person she cheated with. There was a lot of family tension between him and her kids, as you could imagine.

Which made me think about a friend of mine I worked with a long time ago. She and her husband had gotten together when he was still married to his first wife. She talked about how hard it was on his kids. It took them about 10 years to finally accept her. Even though what happened had nothing to do with them. They felt like they were being disloyal to their mother if they were kind to her.

So I was thinking about cheating spouses and the fall out to their kids. Then what might happen if you found out one of your parents cheated on the other but you found out after one or both of them had died. How would you process that? What would it do with the memories you had of that parent? Their cheating had nothing to do with you, or with your relationship with them, but would you feel so differently about them, about being wrong about them, that you would have damage even though they were gone?

And then I wondered how someone might find out. Old love letters seemed a reasonable idea, but would someone keep old love letters from an affair? And then...

The story took shape.

And as I wrote it it went in a different direction than the original plan. I barely glanced at the affairs and the fall out and the feelings about her father. That last line of the story? Had no idea that's how I was going to wrap it up until I wrote it. I even twist myself sometimes.

But because I didn't deal with the original idea, what does it do to the relationship, I might end up writing another story, another crack at it, some other time. Because it's still an interesting idea to me. And maybe it won't be an affair. Maybe it will be something else. What happens if you find out something major about someone after they have died? How do you work past this new information that could have changed your relationship, but the relationship is over so now what?

And are relationships even done when some dies or do they continue to change? I know that a lot of people work through past relationships in therapy but does that actually change the relationship or just your understanding of it? I know that my view of my relationship with my own parents has changed over the years, but that's my thoughts about it, not the actual relationship. What happened, happened. How they felt about me they felt about me. How I dealt with them in the moment is set. It's just how I reflect on all of it now that has shifted, and continues to shift as I age. As I cull my own memories, keeping what's important and just letting go of the rest.

So that's how you ended up with a long ass short story about how to deal with all the stuff your parents leave behind when they die. Now with brain scans!