Notes From Labor of Love: Rhonda Havig

A Good Challenge

I love a good challenge. So when I had the opportunity to submit a piece for Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Anthology, I decided to step outside my comfort zone and write a creative nonfiction piece.

Trying to come up with something to write about was the first challenge. Mentally I heard crickets chirping.

For inspiration, I read work by other mama writers on Literary Mama. I was in awe of them and imposter syndrome kicked into full gear. I felt like I really didn’t have anything interesting to say from a mother’s perspective.

Knowing imposter syndrome is a big jerk that needs to be ignored, I regrouped and thought about what in my life could possibly be considered unique. Then I felt like a moron because not more than a year earlier, I had been through major surgery for pancreatic cancer. Only 20% of pancreatic cancer patients can even have the surgery, which puts me in a small crowd.

The next challenge was to relate it to motherhood. My teenage son was an absolute trooper through the whole thing and I am beyond proud of him for how well he handled seeing his mom go through a cancer with a crappy survival rate. But that felt too nebulous for this piece.

I thought through other possible topics like what a privilege it had been to watch him grow up and become an incredible young man or how badly I wanted to live long enough to see him graduate from high school. Still not right, though.

After digging through more memories and thoughts surrounding the pancreatic cancer situation, I finally found the moment to use as the starting point for a story. When I was in the ICU after surgery, I started to watch a livestream of my son’s jazz concert—right when they came to move me to the recovery floor.

Hooray! A starting point that potentially could be interesting to someone other than only me!

But now I had to write it.

I had no idea where to begin. So I just started from the beginning and told the story. And like any first draft, it was crap. I kept working on it and—with some feedback from my trusty writing group—got it to a place where I could submit it.

Amanda Jaros read it and offered to work with me to strengthen the piece for inclusion in the anthology. She pointed out what she saw as the crux of the story and encouraged me to dig in a bit more to some emotional stuff that frankly I had pushed out of my mind because it was still too fresh and too painful to think about.

More than a few tears fell on my keyboard reliving that night in the ICU, as well as the fear, anxiety, and other unpleasant emotions that come with the cancer territory. I feel like those tears paid off because not only did they make the piece stronger, working through the feelings made me stronger.

Creating this piece—titled “I’ll Be Okay”—was a challenge for me as a writer, a mother, and a cancer survivor. And I am so glad I took it on.

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Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology was released on January 26th, 2024. Edited by Amanda Jaros, this collaboration with Small Harbor Publishing celebrates Literary Mama‘s twenty years of publishing the best writing for and by mothers. We asked the contributors, all Literary Mama staffers from across the years, to share thoughts about their writing process, their inspiration, or their work in the book. We’ll share those musings here on the Literary Mama blog.

Read Rhonda’s essay by purchasing Labor of Love, now available on Amazon.