Giving Up is Not an Option

My cat, Mittens, is — how can I describe it? Let’s just say he’s not the brightest cat on the block. As a friend observed, “he’s one notch above a stuffed animal.” I argued for two notches, but my friend had a point. Poor guy. It’s not his fault that he was born with no street-smarts or even house-smarts, and that he sleeps 23–1/2 hours a day. He’s also terribly timid and runs away if he sees even an ant. The most dangerous thing he’d ever attacked was a Starbucks straw. So imagine my amazement and shock when Mittens recently caught a mouse in our living room! It goes to show, you never know what someone is capable of.

The truth is, “what someone is capable of” is not fixed or finite; it changes and shifts as we learn and grow. I’ve seen this truth play out (to one mouse’s misfortune) in many ways, in my own life, and in the lives of others. You think you know someone. You think you know what she is capable of — the limits of her talent, the depth of her insights, the scope of her parenting skills. And then, it turns out, you misjudged. The person you thought you knew so well has unsuspected depth, humor, even virtuosity.

And that person could be you.

When I was trying to break into publishing children’s books, a well-known agent wrote me a letter in response to several manuscripts I had sent.

“Your stories are intriguing,” she wrote. “But they all have cracks in the middle. The beginnings don’t go with the endings.”