Since I began posting these Wednesday Writes in the beginning of September, a fair number of them (including this one) have appeared not on Wednesday but on Thursday. There’s a reason for that. It (or rather they) are called children: my children, ages 4 and 7. I adore my kids, and yet it must be said that their arrival on the scene has not made the writing life, already hard, any easier. All the conditions that writing requires—total intellectual immersion, long hours of research and thinking and drafting, the sleep and mental downtime during which one’s brain weaves it all together—are rendered nearly impossible during what my husband and I call the ESC (Era of Small Children). As a result, the writer learns that these conditions, while highly desirable, actually aren’t strictly necessary—you can have an idea while ferrying children home from school; you can write a paragraph while waiting for the Saturday music class to be over. What’s more, you must, or else the writing will never get done. It is easier now, I’ll admit, having now had more than seven years to get used to this fragmented, stop-and-start life of the mind. When I remember the early days, I still feel a lurch in my stomach. My first son was about six months old when I attempted to get back into the writing groove. Each morning I would rip myself away (it felt like that) from our apartment in New York, away from its warmth and smells and sounds, wanting both to stay and to escape. Striding up Broadway, breathing in the crisp air, I would form an intention about my writing that day, about re-entering the identity I held before I became a mother. But then, sitting in the vaulted reading room of Columbia’s Butler Library, I would find my attention drawn irrepressibly to the baby in the apartment six blocks away: wondering how he was doing, ordering onesies online, counting the hours until I would return home. It amazes me now that I wrote anything at all in those years. I’m grateful all over again for a discovery I made when my older son entered preschool: School is a writer-parent’s best friend. When children are in school, they’re where they should be, learning things and making friends; meanwhile, writing can proceed without guilt or second-guessing. Nine AM to three PM is a decent writing day (though not enough, never enough). I’m usually still thinking furiously, still scribbling ideas at red lights, as I drive to pick them up. But if I’ve learned to live with a mental life that that’s broken into pieces, there are also moments now when my life feels remarkably whole: as when I open the gate to my younger son’s preschool and he comes running up to greet me, his face alight with our shared, and undivided, joy. Writer-parents, how do you manage your two roles? anniemurphypaul/2013/10/wednesday-write-44-writing-while-parenting/
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 12:55:40 +0000
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