I wrote the post below as a guest post for the Manic Momies a couple weeks ago, but thought other mom writers might enjoy it to. – Meg
The story of my writing starts with a ubiquitous Mom Tool: a little brown paper lunch bag, the kind my sons took their sandwiches and Oreo cookies to school in whenever they’d left their plastic Power Rangers lunch boxes behind the day before. I’ve been raising children all the years I’ve been writing, as the Wednesday Sisters in my novel do. But the lunchbag that started my writing career wasn’t being filled with peanut butter and jelly (Chris’s favorite, but Nick says “yuck”). Rather, it was being emptied over a table at which sixteen aspiring writers gathered to learn the craft.
“Writers write,” the teacher, author Jennifer Allen, informed us. And she directed us to pick one of the interesting things that spilled from lunch bag to table, and write for five minutes – just five – about whatever it brought to mind.
Where were my children in this picture? The-child-who-was-to-be-Nick was with me in the form the telltale six-months-pregnant-tummy bulge. But Chris was at home with a sitter.
Bad mother! Yes: guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt. I was leaving my child with someone else to do something for myself?
But this was my Dream, to be a novelist. My Dream with a capital D. That one thing I’d wanted to do ever since I was ten, the thing I’d left the practice of law to do. Isn’t a dream worth a few hours of sitter-time on a Wednesday afternoon?
Of course, few dreams are reachable solely on two hours of class time each week. And with late-pregnancy non-sleep and new-baby no-sleep, getting up early to write wasn’t always an option. So I became a master of fitting writing time in whenever it presented itself. I began writing in many of the same places my fictional moms in The Wednesday Sisters do: at the steering wheel of my car in the preschool parking lot after drop-off any time Nick fell asleep in his car seat; nestling with my two sons – and my beloved laptop – while they watched Barnie or Sesame Street.
As my sons got just a little older, I had a secret weapon the Wednesday Sisters never did: Chuck E Cheese. It’s an impossibly loud place, it’s true, but my children could play happily (ecstatically!) in a place they could not leave without my little matching wrist band. And I could write, sometimes for hours at a stretch. It’s amazing how much high volume noise you can ignore if you really want to write.
I remember the guilty pleasure when my youngest started preschool: three hours of uninterrupted writing time three days a week! Yes, there were a million things to do (laundry, grocery shopping…), but by then, none of those was important to me as my writing. Let’s see, do I want to be known for my clean and lovely house, or for my clean and lovely prose?
I claimed the time for myself, declared it sacred, sat down to write the minute I got home from morning drop off and did not so much as answer the phone until pick-up time – although I did listen to the answering machine, just in case something had happened at school. And it turns out kids – or young ones, anyway – like doing all the things I think are drudge: folding laundry or sweeping floors or going to the grocery store. If it takes a little longer with their “help,” well, it’s quality time with my kids.
Did I still bring cupcakes to class on my sons’ birthdays, and even do the occasional field trips drive or costume sewing circle? Yes, of course. But I also developed a talent for saying “no” to most of those other “opportunities” moms (but, oddly, seldom dads – what’s with that?) feel compelled to give their precious few spare minutes to: heading the PTA, say, or organizing the end-of-year party. I learned to take the easy route, sending Oreos in when it was my son’s day for bringing cookies, providing the much-needed paper plates or cups for the party rather than the homemade snacks, donating cash instead of time when that was a choice. The fact that I wasn’t making money as a writer, I decided, shouldn’t make it any less important an avocation as practicing law had been, and I certainly would never have told a client I couldn’t be at a meeting because I had a hundred and thirty-two cookies to make for the Holiday Sing-Along.
Have I felt my fair share of guilt over the years? To be honest, I even got over feeling selfish for claiming time and the occasional babysitter dollars for myself. It’s nearly impossible to find time in a manic mommy life for our own dreams – whatever they may be – without doing so. Writers write. People who reach their dreams do so by reaching, and it takes time to reach. And even my own homemade-cookie-baking mom will tell you a happy mom is a better mom.
And, really, can you make a homemade cookie that is half as fun as twisting that Oreo open and licking the cream out first?
