Writing While Mother

I am writing this sitting at the dining room table. Just a few yards away my two oldest kids, aged seven and four, are watching a movie in the living room. Even though the volume is down relatively low, the superhero sound effects keep distracting me; even more distracting is my son, who keeps padding over to me every few minutes and requesting milk, or a snack, or to show me the kinetic sand that somehow ended up between his toes. The baby is asleep upstairs, but for how much longer?

Today is a snow day—the first of many to come, no doubt, here in icy, bitter northern Michigan. My daughter is in second grade full-time, and my son has half-day preschool. I planned to write this morning while my younger son napped before picking my older son up a little before noon, but instead everyone is home and I’m trying to be both mother and writer atonce.

And, as always seems to happen when I try to merge these two parts of my life, I’m failing at both.

Every interruption jerks my focus away from the page, and after each I have to drag my thoughts back to where they were, a process that feels rather like slogging through the knee-deep snow I can see outside. Irritation prickles, followed by a deluge of guilt—guilt for being irritated, guilt for wanting a room of my own (or at least a seat by myself at a coffee shop), guilt for the mindlessness of the film I’m letting my kids watch when I feel I should be reading to them, or building block forts, or chasing them through the high-piled snow.

The mental energy that goes into parenting somehow seems to leave little room for the mental energy I need to write. When my daughter was born, I stayed home with her and stopped writing entirely for months. From the time I was very young, writing was a compulsion I had to
obey, but when I became a mother my brain became a tired mush of postpartum hormones and the Itsy-Bitsy Spider, and the part that once swirled with stories grew stagnant.

A couple of times in those early days I tried to shut myself and my computer away upstairs for half an hour or so while my husband and daughter stayed downstairs; but even through the two floors between us I could hear her when she cried—my laboriously-gathered thoughts scattering, my milk letting down.

Finally, when she was six or seven months-old, I ventured, tentatively, back out into the world on my own. The fourth trimester had extended longer than I expected—she cried with near-constancy, her needs utterly overwhelming my own—but now, at last, I could feel myself
emerging from the cocoon of early motherhood, happy to find my self still existed outside of it. I started taking myself off to a coffee shop on Sundays, getting there when they opened and staying progressively later as the months passed, spending a small fortune that we didn’t have on coffee and pastries so as not to be a freeloader.

Sunday has been my day now for six-and-a-half years, through a major move from one part of the country to another (trading one cozy coffee shop for a new one) and the births of my two sons: restoring, necessary time that is also liberating. I am an adult among other adults, a person in my own right and not just Mama. I come home restored, the pressure of the stories in my head eased by their transference to the page.

Lately, though, I’ve needed extra time. My first book, The Clergyman’s Wife, created over a year of Sunday writing sprints, is out this year, and I’m finishing work on another. Suddenly, writing is no longer something I do only for myself, and lately—like today—I’ve found myself
trying to squeeze writing time into my daily routine when my older kids are at school and my youngest is asleep.

It’s not ideal, though—I need sustained chunks of time when I’m working on a story. My brain feels like it’s comprised of multiple layers, and the mothering layer needs to be sloughed off before I can really get into the rhythm of my work.

Although I suppose “sloughed off” isn’t quite right, really, for the part of me that identifies as Mama is never entirely gone, no matter how physically far from my children I am.

Mama shows up in my stories; even when they are not explicitly about motherhood, Mama thinks about her characters as they relate to their children, their parents, how one generation influences the next and the next and the next. Mama wondered what sort of father Pride and
Prejudice’s Mr. Collins would be; whether, and how much, the absurdly self-centered Lady Catherine de Bourgh might actually worry about her sickly daughter.

Mama is the part of me who lost five babies in the early months of pregnancy, and this has colored my stories, as well.
And, of course, Mama understands the impossible tension of trying to be fully present for my children and for my stories. My son came up to me again just now, put his head on my lap, clutched at my leg with both hands. The movie is almost over. The idea I was chasing vanished,
like a candle flame snuffed out.

“I want you,” he said. “I want you, too.” Absolute truth, and yet, at this exact moment between sentences, also
exactly the opposite.

But when I said it, he smiled.

Time to stop writing, just for now; time to let Mama take over again.

I tell myself—even
though, sometimes, it’s not entirely true—that the story will still be there tomorrow.

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