Writing despite having children (or any big responsibility!)

Is the real problem not a lack of time, but the amount of effort being responsible takes?

Dear readers,

How are you in this short week leading up to Thanksgiving? I’m a little anxious, because I have a lot of writing to do in the next six weeks, and yet family demands are going to be high, with all the various holidays and visits that they bring. And then a pipe burst at the kids’ school and they got sent home today at 1 p.m. with no school tomorrow, exactly when I was counting on carving out a few hours of work these last two days. Responsibility — of any kind! — can be painful when you are trying to get into the messy space of making work.

I was going to write about something different this week—Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”—but today happened right after a writer I know who’s pregnant wrote me to ask for advice on sustaining a writing practice once the baby is born. I told her what I always tell new mothers: Remember that raising a child is a marathon and not a sprint, and that at each stage your job is to let that umbilical cord grow longer and less real, while staying alert to the moments when your child needs to feel you tug them back close with it. (The journalist Jodi Kantor told me a version of that last part when my first son was born.)

But I haven’t stopped thinking about the mother-to-be’s question, because I knew I had missed something important. Which is: Even though I’m on sabbatical, and making progress on my book, it can feel like I’m getting nothing done. Between parenting two small boys and the bureaucracy of 21st-century life, I sometimes have only an hour or two left to write. And what I’ve realized is this: In addition to less time being a challenge, the real difficulty is the amount of effort it now takes to manage and maintain our lives.

My work goes well, I realized, in direct proportion to the amount of depleting effort I have to put into maintaining my daily life, and in particular to being responsible to other people—or to our belongings. When I have to spend too much time thinking about things like getting the roof repaired, making a dentist appointment, cooking dinner, filling out waivers for ninja theme parks, I find it hard to work.

Of course, having children is a stand-in for any number of other hefty responsibilities that people may also be navigating: perhaps you are engaged in caretaking elderly parents, or tending to your own chronically ill body; or you have a demanding job you need to keep.

Everyone needs to play—and hide—in the leaves sometimes.

I am not sure why it took me so long to understand that “effort”—rather than mere busy-ness—depletes me, but I realized it in a funny way. I had walking pneumonia last week and for a blissful five nights, I didn’t put the kids to bed; my partner did. (Usually my partner cleans up from dinner and gets the next day’s lunch ready while I help the kids get set to go to bed/fall asleep.) I was so sick that I got to just lie in bed and read or watch TV while he did everything. I had so much more time than usual, which was wonderful; I felt whole vistas of possibility open before me. But I also expended so much less effort, since bedtime means cajoling the kids to put on pajamas, reminding them to brush their teeth, getting water, one last snack, reading a book to them, begging them to stop jumping on the bed (why do children get an insane burst of mitochondrial energy right before bed? I wish I could siphon it and sell it), talking in the dark, reminding them to close their eyes, etc, etc until at last they sleep. (Our children are terrible sleepers, and yes, we’ve tried everything. But even if all you have to do is turn off the light and close the door, I imagine there must be some other effortful area of your day.)

After not doing bedtime for four days, although I was coughing and my lungs burned, I felt I had gone to a spa. Some part of my brain that had not worked for years got to stretch out and loosen up. I came out of that week with renewed energy for tackling some knotty sections in my book.

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The whole thing reminded me how generic a lot of advice about time management is, and how vague we tend to be about the demands of balancing writing and parenting. Miranda July’s All Fours is wonderfully specific about this. She captures (as few writers have; Karl Ove Knausgaard is one) the challenge of transitioning out of the “mom” brain to the “artist” brain and back; she really gets the way that effort is involved in letting go of—or taking up—different kinds of effort. Effort begets effort. Changing forms of effort, which requires changing your orientation to others and to the world of what sociologist-philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “busy pretense,” is itself incredibly effortful! Raising small kids, you focus on keeping them safe, avoiding the outlier accident or problem; as a writer, you want to allow for chaos. In All Fours, as I recall, the narrator makes her kids’ lunches in advance so she doesn’t always have to inhabit her “organized” brain every morning. Reading this, I remembered when a playwright friend of mine said that Mondays are a wash for her—they are the day she spends moving from “mother” brain back to “making” brain; mostly she just reads the news, as a kind of portal to move through from one self to the other.

To me, this transition from one kind of effort to another is the hardest part of trying to write as a mom—harder even than the time management, which is, after all, manageable. For me, the most challenging part of parenting and writing is having the will to always manage my time, rather than to allow myself to spend it profligately, impulsively, lazily, lavishly.

To write well, I need to find room for my mind to be lavish and delighted and slow and a little ineffectual in ways that end up leading to breakthroughs. Doing that is how I wrote my last book; it was not without a cost. I think I’ve been pretending the next book doesn’t have to take the cost, but I suspect it does. To make room to make art involves casting little spells (as it were) and engaging in small acts of domestic or social refusal.

Does this seem true to you? What do your acts of refusal—and making room—look like?

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Before going: I spent some time reminding myself how I wrote my last book, and I thought I’d share a handful of highly specific (maybe eccentric or frivolous) habits I developed while writing The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness when my kids were newborn to five-years-old. The truth is, I really don’t remember writing a lot of that book, because the kids were so small and I was so spent. But here are three things I did in order to get my book written:

• Carve out one to two hours of writing time—and come up with Pavlovian cue to help with the transition between “selves.” We had very limited childcare in the pandemic, mostly via my mother-in-law, whom we were in a pod with, and who took the kids during the week from 9am to 12pm. I sat down and and started as soon as they left, but I almost had to hypnotize myself to switch gears. For me, the Pavlovian or hypnotic cue was—no joke—the jingle that was the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. I would listen to the previous day’s show as I settled into work, and somehow it expedited my passage through the portal.

• Accepting being the “good-enough” mother/parent/cook/friend. I let go of a lot of things—getting my hair cut, organizing my finances, you name it. (Consequently, I now spent a lot of sabbatical catching up on those things!)

• Engage in a small act of refusal. In my case, I swore off cooking dinner until my book was done. My partner can’t cook, so you can imagine how horrible and disgusting this was for us. Well, just for me; the kids loved it. They ate chicken nuggets and frozen sweet potato fries twice a day for eighteen months. Instead of cooking dinner I would go edit what I had written that day, or do some research to set me up to be productively at my desk first thing the next morning. Some of you probably really like cooking and writing. And so for you the refusal might be something else?

Whatever the case, it’s important to acknowledge and name the reality that it takes both time and effort to transition from one part of yourself to the other—and to allow for it to be soft and playful rather than fraught. When things go wrong, it’s because I want this process to be or feel seamless instead of sticky and slow. Oh, and after my last book was done, the three-year-old did accuse me of my “loving your book than more us.” But at pre-school, he was talking about it proudly in a unit they did about books. So, you win some, you lose some.

What’s worked for you in your quest to balance responsibility with making things? I would love to hear more…

P.S. Thanks to those of you who have paid to subscribe! Paid subscriptions help me keep writing this newsletter. Up next: analyzing a Joan Didion essay and her use of the “palimpsest voice.”