When your second child is born, you and your partner will decide that it makes the most sense for you to be a stay-at-home parent for a little while. Not forever, just for a little while. And you are thrilled to have the luxury. And, you are afraid of losing the self that you have struggled to build—the self you are just starting to like. But now you are facing the prospect of being home with two children, and you decide that this is it. It is time to put that graduate degree in writing to its real, intended use. This is the time you will write that book. (Here the author will pause for laughter.)
Clearly, you do not have the hours you used to have. Time has stretched to the consistency and fluidity of phyllo dough, pulled and thrown and pulled and thrown. Time has compressed to the density and heft of a brick, the one half-hidden in the soil that your toddler trips on every time and you have still, still yet to move. But surely there will be some time. Right? Surely, with such a solid community behind you, you will find the hours.
Here, there is attempt after attempt after attempt. Here, there are half-written essays. Here, you finally scurry away once your partner is home from work only to be called downstairs seven minutes later because one of the children has developed a fever. Here, you are hiding in the dry bathtub behind the curtain, but you can hear your infant shrieking to nurse and you are leaking through your shirt anyway so you get out of the bathtub. Here, your partner says, I will take them to the park after work and you can write, but there is the laundry and the dishes and the floors that are streaked with oxidizing smears of banana. And when you hear them pull in the driveway, you are still holding a Swiffer instead of a pen. Here are the emails you’ve sent to your friends who are also writers, asking for edits that you still haven’t looked at. Here, the children fall asleep at the same time! Early enough that it is still light out! And you pull out your computer without leaving the bed and then wake up at 2:47 a.m. with a blank document, the light of the emptiness harsh in the surrounding darkness.
And you start to wonder—how did other people do it? You remember someone telling you that Dr. Maya Angelou woke up at 5:30 a.m. and was writing by 6:30 a.m. in a hotel room she kept specifically for that purpose, lying across the bed instead of sitting at the desk. You do not have a hotel in your town—you could not afford to keep a room there if you did. Your children are usually awake by 5:30 a.m. anyway. And besides, you’re not Maya Angelou.
Haruki Murakami has no children, you read on Google. He decided not to have any. His routine is, therefore, irrelevant.
You know that Toni Morrison, the esteemed and lauded, woke up at 4:00 a.m. to write before her children woke up and her 9-5 job started. And your alarm goes off at 4:00 a.m. and wakes up both your children, who scream for the next two hours. Nothing is written. Let us face facts: you are definitely no Toni Morrison.
You turn to the internet again. The internet tells you not to lose yourself in your new identity as a parent! The internet tells you that you must schedule short writing sessions for yourself! The internet tells you that if your partner is supportive, you will find time together! It’s the fifteen minutes when they’re in the tub, they say. It’s the thirty minutes when they’re having screen time, they say. It’s the forty-two minutes when they’re really engaged in an activity, they say.
You will realize, after a certain point, that you have spent thirty-seven minutes looking at the routines of other writers and you have, once again, written nothing. (Here, you will pause to cry, which will be interrupted by your infant needing to nurse.)
You say to your partner that you want to make more time to write and you want their support. And they lovingly point out that you do spend quite a bit of time writing (blogs for an insurance company). You say that doesn’t count—it’s not real writing. And they understand this but they say, but that’s the writing that’s paying you, and don’t we need to prioritize that right now? You know they are right but the weight of your MFA hood hanging in the same closet as your raincoat feels like the weight of a dying star and it is lodged squarely in the oval of your throat. And what they do not understand, and cannot, is that your mother has not written her book. And your grandmother did not write her book. And there is a line of mothers behind you that stretches back like an artery through time, and there are stories and recipes and embroidery and traditions and life and all of this is art, but there is still no book and here you are in the future, finally. And there is still no book.
And it all starts to sound condescending, doesn’t it? As if you’re not really trying, and why can’t your kids play independently, and why are you settling for mediocrity when your best work is still inside of you and you can free it if you just have the discipline.
There will be moments, of course. Sometimes, the planets will align and the Earth will tilt and both of your children will nap simultaneously and you will blatantly ignore the dishes and the laundry and the floors. And when they wake up, you will feel jubilant, superhuman, and like yourself because you have written something and it may or may not suck. But it is there, and you have done it, and maybe this is less impossible than you think. And perhaps it will happen again next month, or even tomorrow. When you are driving and they are both peaceful in the backseat, a single line will come to you, shimmering and stark in its only-ness. It will be such a good line that you will pull over immediately, under a black walnut tree that immediately pelts your car with its fruit. You will type this line frantically into your notes app before it leaves forever. There will be another line that comes to you in the shower and since you do not have a pen or your phone, you will repeat it out loud like a mantra as you wetly step over your children playing on the floor of the bathroom so that you remember it until you can make it real and write it down. And then, you’ll serendipitously have an hour and send out three submissions at once and one will be accepted! Something will be published with your name on it! This will sustain you for weeks.
The bricks of time, the phyllo dough sheets like tattered flags in the wind, they will pass. They do that. Your mother will look at your toddlers dreamily and tell you, “They’ll be in college soon.” You know she is right. And there is a life after this, and it will be empty of the things it is full of now. You’ll still want to write, then. Won’t you?
Isabel Mader is a poet and essayist, as well as a parent and teacher. She holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University; the hood hangs next to her raincoat. Her poems were most recently included in Clockhouse Literary Journal, Slipstream Magazine, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. Her latest essay can be found at Insider Magazine. She lives in the woods with her growing family.
