Blurring the Lines Between Motherhood and Writing
What happens when I stop trying to separate them?
I read a beautiful post by
recently, The House That Held Me While I Broke, and it stuck with me. He writes about the house he lived in before, during, and after a divorce, and the shape of his grief in relation to his home. He writes:Life doesn’t pause while you heal. You don’t get to press pause on living while you sort out your grief in some isolated healing chamber. You have to do both simultaneously.
Though I’m not grieving a marriage, it felt like a revelation in the context of my writing life. I’ll explain.
Every Sunday, I look at the week ahead, blocking off time in my planner for writing. It looks a little different every week, depending on drop-offs, pickups, appointments, school events, etc., but I carve out the time. Some weeks feel successful, like when I charge through a chapter or two of edits; others feel like I can barely muster a page or two. Some days the hours are chunked well, providing enough time to find a good flow; others are cut into inefficient snippets of time. Most mornings I rise before my children to squeeze in an hour of work. By the time I’ve hit snooze several times and made my coffee, sometimes it’s only half an hour. I tell myself it’s always better than zero. Just keep showing up.
But October. Oh, October. It has blown away any semblance of routine or productive writing sessions. There are Halloween parties and school events and soccer tournaments for my youngest, who has also gotten really into surfing recently. When he begged to take an after-school surf class, I seriously questioned if our schedule could handle one more thing. Also, college applications for my oldest, which feels a lot about holding space for the process. It’s less hands-on than heart-on, it seems, as I watch my kid plow through essays and keep his plates in the air. Oh, and did I mention a driving test for my second-born (he passed)? I am nearly breathless with the pace of this month. Has it been like this in years past? Probably, but this year it feels newly chaotic.
Of course, this spills over into my writing life, and the last week or two have not been my most productive. I finally finished a chapter that took me over a week to edit, which felt like a small victory until I began the next one and realized it would be about the same. Maybe if I holed up in a cabin in the woods, I could crank out this third draft.
But that is not my life, and until now, I’ve thought of myself as having two separate jobs: mother and writer, and I haven’t allowed much overlap. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find it difficult to write in the close company of my family—not because of them, though. It’s me. If my children are in close proximity, my brain activates mom mode. I am attuned to their sounds, movements, mentally attending to needs before they are voiced, and as much as I try to detach and immerse myself in my fictional world, it feels like a mental tug-of-war. My kids are old enough that they are plenty self-sufficient, mind you, so I admit distraction is not the only factor at play; it may not even be the biggest. The other is that I simply want to be present when I’m with them.
After reading The House That Held Me While I Broke, I thought about these two roles I’ve claimed: mother and writer. Are they truly separate? After all, writing helps me process life. Without the chaos of family life, what would my writing even look like? And without writing, would I notice and reflect on my experiences of motherhood and life as I do now? Maybe? I don’t know the answers.
I only know that my roles are far more intertwined than I’ve realized. My writing and experiences of parenthood don’t just coexist—they fuel each other. They’re messy, and also magical. Instead of wishing we had fewer events on our calendar, less chaos and more tidy blocks of writing time, what might it feel like to embrace the mess?
As
writes:And something shifted. Not all at once. But in the accumulated weight of a hundred small choices to be present, not when I was ready, not when I was healed, but right now, in this imperfect moment, with all the mess still present.
Admittedly, part of my rigid thinking has stemmed from feeling I need to guard and prioritize my writing time. When I first started writing, it slipped away too easily as I built my writing practice, so I built a wall between my two roles. Mom or writer mode at any given minute, but never both. Now, years later, my writing is an established entity in our house. Perhaps it’s time for a softer boundary.
As I write this, I’m overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Not a sliver of blue from atop a hill, nor from a fancy hotel terrace. I’m sitting on a park bench, and this is my view.
I am writing here not because I had three hours of writing time blocked off and took it outside.
Nope. My youngest is in the ocean down there, because we said yes to surfing and one more thing. Instead of dropping him and going home to make dinner or run errands, just in time to turn around for pickup, I stayed and wrote to you. For ninety minutes, I’ve been typing away, wrapped in the sound of the surf, which is punctuated by the cheers from below when someone catches a wave. I’ve taken a few breaks to glimpse my little surfer chasing his own dream.
There he goes!
Writing a book and/or parenting will never be easy. Throw them together and I’ve got a real mess on my hands—one that, some days, feels insurmountable. It’s okay. It’s better than okay; it’s glorious. I am a mother and writer both, and my only job is to keep showing up.
A final word from
:You don’t wait to be alive. You live, and the living transforms everything else.
If you’d like to read the full post, go here: The House That Held Me While I Broke
Wishing you a beautiful weekend, readers! As always, thanks for being here.❤️
Love love love. The hardest thing. Relearning, and relearning.
What a beautiful spot to write - how I wish we had the Pacific on our our doorstep too!