“Writing is the only way to talk without being interrupted.”
―Jules Renard
Lies Jules, all lies.
When I found out I was pregnant with my daughter I was partway through my MFA at Northwestern. For some odd reason I never once worried about how I was going to keep writing when I became a mother. Frankly I looked forward to it. And for the first several months it was easy, because my husband was home working as a contract attorney and we switched off baby duty. But then we moved and I started my thesis and everything started moving a lot slower.
I had idealized being a writing mom. I thought it would look something like this:
Which in all fairness, is pretty much what it looks like (though I can only dream about being Tina Fey, which I do, often). However, I never connected this picture with an actual inability to write. Or more accurately, with a lack of time or attention for writing. And if I thought it was difficult with one, I really learned my lesson when number two came along last spring.
This post, like almost all my posts, is coming out after the kids are finally in bed for the evening. Usually after 9pm is safe, though there’s the occasional 10:30/11pm wake up. This is the only uninterrupted writing time that exists in a house with young children. I tried to write during nap time, but as I have previously discussed, babies and toddlers have a sixth sense about work attempting to be done nearby. I think they grow out of this after five years when naps are replaced by kindergarten and the real work can officially resume.
I’ve been lucky with my son, though he’s only ten months old at the time of this writing, he is relatively independent. I can sometimes write a couple paragraphs or do a little editing while he plays by himself. My daughter would have none of that. She was on me like a spider monkey 24/7. But one day I blinked and now she’s in preschool. Though I struggle to get more than an hour or two in every couple days right now, it will be all too soon when my second baby is walking out the door in the mornings, his lunchbox clutched in his soft, stubby hand. And I’ll have a very empty house for a few hours with no one but my characters to keep me company.
So a lot of people ask me how I’m able to work with two small kids at home. The answer is sometimes I’m not. But I carve out little pockets of time and I have a supportive partner who believes in my writing and picks up the slack when I really need it. And I break out the computer after 9pm.
________
*This is a boldface lie.
Writing is Hard 
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