A writing prompt & essay: How words change meaning over time
A prompt to kickstart your creativity.
This week, I’m sharing a writing prompt that came to me as I was jumping on the trampoline with my son the other day. I hope you’ll find it helpful, especially if you’re in a writing rut and in need of inspiration.
Prompt: Pick a word that holds significance in your life. What did this word used to mean to you, and what does it mean now? How has the definition changed, and in what ways has it remained the same? You can answer these questions literally or use them as inspiration for a poem, personal essay, book passage, etc. I did the latter and wrote a related essay for this week’s post. My word was jump.
My kids are always wanting the fully present me to show up and read Harry Potter, play tickle monster, or jump on the trampoline.
“Mommy, come jump with us!” my 7-year-old son Tucker and 9-year-old daughter Madelyn say in quick succession, sometimes multiple times a day. “Stop working!”
“Just a second!” I’ll respond as I scramble to write one last email or tidy up one last corner of the house, knowing my work is never done.
“Ok, it’s been a second!” Tucker says, ever the timekeeper.
A few minutes later, I’ll join them.
Unlike my husband, whose trampoline jumps are so high they launch our kids into the air with squeals of thrill and delight, I tend to jump in small spurts. I keep my arms stiffly by my side, as though suddenly unsure of what to do with them. I jump with an awareness that others may be watching me from all the other backyards that touch ours. Exposed from up high, I crave the privacy below. After five or ten minutes, I typically retreat to solid ground.
For me, jumping isn’t a physical challenge so much as an emotional one that forces me to face what sometimes feels like a divided self: the child I once was and the mother I’ve become. I lost my own mother when I was just 11 years old, after she died of metastatic breast cancer. One year later, I developed anorexia nervosa and was hospitalized. As I fell deeper into my disorder, I grew increasingly obsessive about a particular form of exercise: jumping.
I moved about my days as though I had an imaginary jump rope tied to my body. I would get up in the middle of meals and jump, lowering myself to the ground, touching my knees to my chin, and launching into the air as high as my little body would take me. I meticulously practiced and perfected my form, always in competition with myself. The higher the jump, I told myself, the more calories burned. If my heels didn’t touch my butt, the jump didn’t count.
My jumps elicited stares and whispers, making me feel exposed to judgement. I jumped in the aisles of the grocery store, in the hallways of middle school, in the empty house that I came home to every day after my mother passed away. At 3:30 p.m., I would turn on the TV and jump to the entire opening song of my favorite childhood show, Arthur. “And I said hey! What a wonderful kind of day! If we could learn to laugh and play. . . .” I jumped to the beat of the lyrics with increasing force — higher, faster, harder.
Just one year prior, I had been jumping on the hot pink Pogo stick my mother bought me. But jumping was no longer child’s play; it was a warped re-creation of an earlier time, a destructive form of exercise that made my body cry out for help.
All these years later, jumping is now a different kind of exercise — in learning how to playfully engage in an activity that was once a cruel compulsion. Whenever I jump on the trampoline with my kids, I conjure up memories of the carefree pogo-sticking child I once was, and the ill child I became. These younger selves no longer define me, but they’re still part of me. And sometimes the sick child calls out to me more, perhaps because I wish I could go back in time and hold her tight.
As a mother, a spouse, a daughter, a friend, a writer, and a professor, I think a lot about the great irony of identity: how our divided selves make us whole. And as a woman in eating disorder recovery, I find myself seeking moments of integration, when the adult in me can reconnect with the carefree child in me.
I encountered one of these moments last week, on my 40th birthday. Confronted with the reality that I’m now outliving my mom, who died when she was 40, I considered how to begin this next phase of life that she never got to experience.
Tucker helped me out. “Mommy, come jump with me!” he begged on my birthday.“Pleeeease?”
“Ok, let’s go!” I said, following him into our backyard and onto the trampoline without delay.
I started jumping as high and as freely as I could. I stretched my arms and legs out wide, like a star in the sky. I took up space, soaked up joy. I paid no mind to the height of the fence or the shape of my body as it bounced up and down. I thought of my younger self jumping in pain, and my present-day self jumping with the promise that I’ll honor that little girl and how she made me who I am today.
I’m not sure if we can ever be fully present when the past so distinctly shapes our lives. But in that moment, by my son’s side, I was my full self.
I’d love to hear from you! What word comes to mind when you think about this prompt?
Last week, I did some podcast and broadcast interviews about my forthcoming book, SLIP. You can see my appearance on KY3-TV here, and listen to my “Take Care of Your Body” podcast here.