You Don’t Have To Do This: Thoughts on Motherhood and Writing

The plan one Friday afternoon this summer, was to head to the pool for a couple of hours, and then go home because I had scheduled a phone call with a colleague to plan out a project we’d been brainstorming together for a while. We wanted to get some ideas down on paper.

A few of my friends were there, and the minute I sat down and got to talking and laughing, I thought to myself, “You don’t have to take that phone call. Reschedule. The project probably won’t work out, anyway.”

This is my fear regarding making a living writing. It likes to dress up in a designer Aren’t You Having So Much Fun & Isn’t  Writing Dumb dress. I can find any excuse not to write because I am terrified of failing. I don’t want to fail.

I haven’t stopped pursuing writing yet, though. In fact, writing has been the vocation I’ve stuck with the longest. If you look at my track record, I stay in teaching jobs no longer than 2 and 1/2 years and then I’m gone. Writing is the only job I’ve done that’s lasted.

The same is true for motherhood.

These two vocations, jobs, past times, ways of being, that make up who I am, have no guarantees that if I do everything right, or if I just love the thing enough, all will be well. The rules change. Taking a chance is inevitable. Failure is part of the game. So is constantly trying because I love it and not because I’m guaranteed success. This is hard for me to reconcile.

The time came for me to go home, and both Hadley and Harper were understandably not interested in leaving.

“They’re fine,” my friends said. “We’ll keep an eye on them.”

I wasn’t worried about Hadley, who has of late been spending most of her time at the pool with her summertime crew of friends. But Harper is different. She is not meek, but she is shy and she is sensitive, and maybe because I am too, and I know the effort it takes to not be these things, I worry about her. On this day, she didn’t have anyone to play with, and as I walked over to the diving boards where she was, I expected her to come home with me, but she said she wanted to stay.

“You do?” I asked, squatting down towards where she was in the water, strangely hoping she’d change her mind and come home with me because worrying about my writing career alongside worrying about my youngest daughter making friends is too much for me to bear. If I could protect Harper from the pain of rejection, then maybe I’d have enough strength to face my own.

“Mommy, I’ll be fine,” Harper told me and she said it bravely, like staying was something she both wanted to try and was afraid of trying but knew it was the only way forward.

I walked home, fighting the urge to turn around and take the afternoon off. My colleague, also a mother and a writer, would have understood. After all, we didn’t have to do this. We’re the ones who came up with the idea. We’re the ones who set the deadline. Nobody but us cares if we pursued it.

Any sort of writing is difficult. I am not suggesting those without children have it any easier, but since the urgency to write came the moment Hadley was born, I am writing from the perspective of a writer who is also a mother.

The truth is, we don’t have to do this, but for some of us, the truth is also a lie. For some of us, we have no choice and so following are a couple of thoughts on making our way.

You have to say “no” to say “yes.” 

To your family. To your children. To your friends. To the dishes in the sink and the cobwebs in the house. To the PTO. To the (gasp!) church. This is not true all of the time, but if you’ve made plans to write, it usually means you are saying no to someone or something else. And the fact is, nobody cares if you write, but people do care if you don’t show up to things, and it is, quite frankly, nasty to have a sink full of dishes and spiders happily residing in all corners of your home.

So say yes little by little. Say yes to the early morning, or to 25 minutes in the evening before you turn on”Big Little Lies.” Keep Post-It notes and a Sharpie by the sink and jot down ideas while you scrub the dishes. Tell the church you won’t teach Sunday School or bake cookies, but you’d be happy  to write devotionals.

Never compromise. If you’re at your kid’s baseball game, be at the game. If you say you’re going to keep time at the swim meet, slather on some sunscreen, and line your toes as close to the water as you can get because you might not be writing but by giving yourself completely to the moment while your kids and your friends’ kids are giving everything they have just to see what could happen, I promise you’ll find a story.

The same goes for writing. When you say you’re going to write, write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t get on a group chat and talk about how you don’t know how to write. You will not find your beginning in a load of laundry (though you might find a metaphor). The point is, if you said no so you can say yes, then mean it.

Childcare is wonderful and expensive. 

I’m not about to say that my writing career took off once we got a babysitter. (Is that a thing, for a writing career to take off?) However, it did allow me time and space to write longer pieces and dig deeper into topics. But babysitters are expensive, and there are other ways to fit in time to write. Swap childcare with a friend, for example. My friend and fellow writing Lindsay spends Saturday mornings writing while her husband takes care of their daughter. I know another writer who leaves to go to a coffeeshop on Sunday mornings, and then meets her family at church. I used to hold off on writing until Jesse got home from work in the evening because when Hadley and Harper were babies, the morning was an unpredictable time to get work done.

If these ideas don’t work, think Sesame Street. Mamas, you don’t need to watch Sesame Street with your children. You know your letters and numbers. Nobody’s trying to bond with you during this time. They want to bond with Big Bird and Grover. Let them. Get out your notebook, set up a blog, start writing. That’s 45 minutes of writing time.

Also, babysitters and long amounts of time are not going to make you a writer. I know nobody who was interested in running a marathon and just signed up and gave it a shot the next day. Whatever habits and doubts you have in your 20-25 minutes of writing, will follow you to your 2-3 hours of writing. You are still going to want to go to Target. You will still struggle to lay down words. However, if you are able to write in small amounts of time, and to sit with doubt and frustration, then you will get used to those feelings and you won’t be so paralyzed when they show up during longer writing sessions.

Because they will always show up no matter how long you do this. They will tap dance all over your heart to the tune of, “You Don’t Have To Do This.”

You don’t have to do this, but you can. Like Harper, you can stay in the water, figure out what there is to do with yourself in the deep end now that you’re strong enough and not afraid anymore. You can not only walk to the edge of the diving board, but these days, maybe you’ll bounce a time or two before you soar – toes pointed, hands in blades – into the air; the memory of proclaiming you’d never leave the shallow end, never put your head under water laughable now that you know what it is you can do.