Diagraming Our Family

"If this moment were a sentence, I would be the..."

Welcome to another installment of The Bittersweet, where I share moments and memories from my search for a richer perspective on the bittersweet moments that make up modern life.

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My kids never learned sentence diagramming, but I remember enjoying the science of language and how everything had its place. This article from NPR about the fading art of diagramming sentences was super interesting, too. Image from English Grammar Revolution

Hello Friends,

I’d hoped to write about the rental we are living in and what it’s like to be in an in-between space, but the thoughts in my head need more time to marinate. Instead, I thought I’d share a little bittersweet moment with you.

I'm listening to the novel RED AT THE BONE by Jacqueline Woodson. And I came across the line, “If this moment were a sentence, I would be the period.” It got me thinking about my family as a sentence. What part does each of us play in this moment of our family’s narrative? 

My nuclear¹ family, as it stands now, is me, Nick, Owen, Peyton, Aiden, and Tatum. 

Nick is the noun, solid, sound, and the subject of the sentence. The person, place, or thing that everything happens to. I like to think of him as an oak tree. He has zero control of the storms or drought around him, but he stands nonetheless.

Owen is the adverb. I know, I know the adverb is the crutch of a timid writer. Stephen King says, “The road to hell is paved² with adverbs,” but he also says, “They’re like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique.” Owen is our one unique adverb describing how and to what degree we do what we do, often encouraging us slowly, thoughtfully, and humbly are the best ways to go. 

Peyton is the verb. 100% without a doubt, she is the action in our sentence. She is the shout, the laugh, and the cry. She is the dance, flip, and the weird face you make when trying to get your brother to laugh at inappropriate times, but you end up making yourself laugh instead. 

Aiden is, of course, our semicolon. One of my favorite and most misunderstood punctuation marks of them all. It is a coordinating function between two major ideas. Our family before cancer; our family after cancer.

Tatum is the adjective. She describes the bigness of our smiles, the temperature of our hearts, and the severity of our bittersweet life on this side of the semicolon. 

I am the article (the, a/an) and the conjunction (but/and). I link all the parts of our family sentence together. I turn the individual words of our lives into complete sentences. I make us make sense. 

In the Woodson quote, our protagonist is the period, and I wonder what our author was getting at there. In context, it felt like the character saw herself as the end of something. I don’t think our family has a period; every ending is the beginning of something else. 

Of course, this is just one sentence in the whole story. No doubt our roles will change, and we will each take a turn at the different parts of speech, but for now, this is where we are, and where we are feels pretty good.

This is where I am today. Thank you for listening.

Emily

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Next week, I’ll be back with Loss + Finding Home, my real-time flash memoir about the full gut and remodel of our home. If you missed it, you could catch up on the first two installments, U-Haul and “I Was Here.”

1. I originally wrote “little nuclear family, but then I typed out all those names and realized my family isn’t so little.

2. Interesting that King writes this in the passive voice since he hates the passive voice almost as much as he hates adverbs.