Writer's Block

The new piece in my prism

A year or two after I started working at The Maui News, a lady called and asked me to do a story about plans for a community-built playground in Haiku. I had some good reasons for turning her down. I had actually already written about the project a few weeks earlier. She was asking me to do a follow-up story, but I didn't see any real new information to report. And I had a lot of other interesting stories I was working on at the time, so I told her I was too busy.

Playground Lady wasn't satisfied, so after we hung up, she called one of my co-workers -- a woman who was older than me and had two children -- to see if she might be interested. "Ilima said she was too busy," Playground Lady complained. "If she had children, she would realize that playgrounds are much more important than all the other stuff she's writing about."

When I heard what she'd said, it really irritated me. I had always hated the attitude of aggrieved self-imporance and superiority some parents heaped on those of us who were child-free. These parents loved to talk about how people who don't have children "just don't understand." I also hated the implication that some day, when I had kids, I would see the light and suddenly think and behave exactly like them.

Fast-forward seven years. I was working in my cubicle a few weeks ago when a press release crossed my desk. I glanced at it, and felt a twinge of excitement. After what seemed like a lifetime of planning and construction, the super-duper "boundless" playground was actually ready to open, for real, in Kahului. I didn't even wait for my boss to ask me to write up the announcement -- I knew moms all over the island were going to want to know about this. And when I saw the photos come in from the grand opening, my first thought was that I couldn't wait to see my two-year-old climb into that merrie-go-round and go for a spin.

I had to ask myself if Ilima-the-Mom would indeed have seen a playground as more important than the other stories I was working on seven years ago. After thinking about it, I decided the answer probably was still no. One of the qualities that makes someone a good journalist is being interested, and seeing the importance in, many things -- not just the things that matter to you. One of the things I love most about my job is the opportunity it gives me to learn about subjects I would never encounter in my daily life (this week: sewage, foreclosures and Waihee). Just because I became a mom doesn't mean I stopped wondering about everything else.

But there's no doubt that each one of us sees the world through the prism of all our experiences. And as a journalist, there's no escaping the fact that that prism affects how we decide what to cover and how we write our stories. There's a lot of experiences that go into my prism: growing up on Oahu, caring for animals as a young girl, having parents who were heavily involved in Honolulu politics, spending a semester in France, getting a job after college interviewing paniolo, moving to Maui without knowing anyone, getting married and becoming a mother.

It's true, having a child changed me forever, and I know it changed how I approach my stories. But instead of making me think like all the other parents out there, I like to think it just made me a little more me.