Writing with small children
Notes from the sickhouse
Today, for my mentor column, I am writing about writing when you have small children. But much of this will apply to other life circumstances, like writing a novel with a demanding day job, or a chronic health issue, or an ailing parent, or any other condition that is inflexible, unpredictable, and, at face value, more important than whether or not your book gets done. Today I’m asking: how do you prioritize a novel against the thing that will always win?
I’m thinking about this because I kind of have a method figured out, and I kind of ignored that method this week, and it left me wondering if there’s any right answer here.
So here’s the (sob) story.
Our daughter started daycare on January 2nd, and let me tell you, it has been a winter. She’s had pneumonia. Four ear infections. Endless colds. I had Covid; she didn’t, unless she managed to sneak it by us (and she is sneaky). And earlier this week, we were on to the latest unknown germ that’s had us seeing two docs, trying two antibiotics, and coughing all night. (“I have a toff,” as she says.) At two in the morning on Monday her fever was 104.3 and I ended up dragging a mattress into her room to sleep on the floor. The question of whether she was going to daycare in the morning was answered: she wasn’t. So there was the second question: was I going to meet my daily word count goal for the day?
My usual strategy is to muscle through as much writing as possible during her nap. Sometimes this results in success; sometimes in despair, because she wakes up early or I can’t get the words to come fast enough. Always, there is the discomfort of the unknown, because I don’t know which outcome I’ll have. But always, some words get added to the draft.
This time, laying on the floor at 2 AM, I decided to scrap the writing goal completely, and I stuck to my decision as the day went. No “write as much as you can”; I didn’t make myself write at all. All morning, I knew she was my only priority that day. During her nap, I had my standing teletherapy appointment. I made myself lunch. I opened my manuscript but didn’t feel like engaging with it, so I didn’t. I was tired, and a little fried from being so “on” with my daughter all morning, and I really didn’t feel like being “on” for my novel, too. (I’m working on a first draft, which tends to feel like legit emotional work to me.) Then my daughter woke up and we went on with our day. That night, I went to bed and my writing goal went unmet.
And I felt fine. Good, even. Maybe, I thought as I fell asleep on Monday night, I am a genius.
On Wednesday, when she was home sick again, I was a strung-out mess by the time her nap came. I was desperate for time to do something selfish to offset the selflessness of mothering. I’d barely moved the novel forward that week, and I didn’t know if she was going to nap at all because her “toff” was keeping her up. I tried freewriting to get into my fiction writing, and I wrote in my journal, “I feel like I don’t exist.” (Do you see why I write dramas?) I cried. Maybe, I thought, I should have made myself get some words down on Monday.
Who was right: Monday or Wednesday Caitlin?
I thought it would be fun to text a few friends who are (1) writing novels and (2) raising small children. I told them the general topic for this piece and asked for their knee-jerk reaction.
Melissa Adelman, mother of two and working on her sophomore novel like me (in addition to another job), replied right away. I’d texted in the middle of what most would consider business hours…meanwhile, she was in the middle of a game of trivial pursuit.1 Super Tuesday is a holiday where she lives, and it had bombed her workday. Add it to the list of the writing parent’s trials and tribulations: unexpected school closures.
PT contributor Caitlin Mullen, also a mother of two and also working on her second novel, replied that she was leaving for daycare pickup but promised to get back to me, because “Oh yes I have thoughts.”
She came through later, with a response “drafted in my Notes app after bedtime in a dark bedroom while I waited for my four-year-old to fall asleep.” That app is “essential to my process,” she said, “on hard stretches when I feel my creative self subsumed by childcare duties and laundry and airfrying chicken nuggets.” Writing down her thoughts, even the “scrambled” ones, is “the one way I’m able to touch the work.”
I and other friends have this in common with Caitlin: having children has not made us less ambitious for ourselves. “If anything,” Caitlin said, “I feel more pressure to produce good work that will find its way into the world when we’re apart.” This reminds me of a story another writer friend, Beck Dorey-Stein, told me about encountering a woman who remarked on Beck’s determination to finish another novel after she had her son. The woman said something along the lines of “when I had my kids, all my ambition disappeared.” Beck responded with a line that sounded ripped from the backstory of a Bond villain: “I have more ambition than ever, just no ability to execute.”
What I don’t have in common with Caitlin is her second child, nor her (necessary) calm about the situation. “Having a second child especially required that I be more patient with the process and with the work,” she said. “That I offer myself the kind of grace I never could muster in my 20s.” (Having Zoomed and texted with Caitlin, I know this grace comes easier some days than others.)
PT contributor Jen Waite has a child I wouldn’t qualify as “small” anymore, but she is mighty, and she was a newborn while Jen wrote her first book, A Beautiful Terrible Thing. Jen writes suspense novels now, but her first was a memoir that reads like a thriller. Jen said the newborn days are a blur now, but she remembers writing while her daughter was sleeping, usually at naptime. She wanted to write at night too, but it was hit or miss because she was exhausted. What spurred her on was her inspiration: so much of the content of the memoir was fresh, even still unfolding, and so she was desperate to “get it all out whenever I could.” She remembers inspiration striking and having to run to the computer or notes on her phone while she was occupied with her baby. “Whereas now,” Jen said, “I’ll use any excuse not to write because I’m in a writing slump phase.”
(Here is where I thought, yikes, is it possible I’m having so much emotional turmoil today because of the novel, not the sick child? And then the sick child coughed on the monitor again and I thought, nah, bit o’ both.)
So here is my advice from those writing from the sickhouse or otherwise struggling, synthesized from our collective experiences (and even more conversations I’ve had with writing parents not captured here).
Remember that you deserve to have a life and identity outside of your child. Taking care of yourself is a necessary part of taking care of a child. Ask for help, ask for time, find support.
That’s it! Problem solved! Your novel just wrote itself and your toddler just put herself to bed!
Just kidding. We all “know” this first one is true, but the difficulties persist. (It is not lost on me that all of the people who sprung to mind to text about this topic were mothers, specifically. This is not to say that writing dads have it easy; just that gender roles and mother-child bonds are definitely in play.)
So here’s the rest of the advice.
You need writing friends. All kinds: those who also live in small-child land; those who’ve survived having small children; those who don’t have kids at all, because they will teach you that everyone has things that get in the way of writing. As they say on Sesame Street: we’re different; we’re the same. Everyone’s going through life. You’re not alone!
To my text prompt of writing with small children: go, one friend simply responded “lol.” Then she clarified: “I am drowning but I love you.” I told her I was feeling a bit drowny myself, and that I loved her, too. Sometimes, being seen is the best you can get, and it’s better than feeling like your pain is invisible.
Remember that all of the cliches about novels that ring true for you are still true when you’ve got a small child. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing is a gift, not a punishment. Novels are, at once, not at all important and highly important. Etcetera.
Take it one day at a time. As my dad loves to say, things don’t always go according to plan. This is okay. It’s part of life, and definitely part of life with a small child. Think of each day as a new one; don’t try to make up yesterday’s deficit. (Unless you’re truly having a baller day–then fine, go for it.) If your goal is a thousand words a day, and you lose Monday and Tuesday to a sick kid, it’s easier to sit down Wednesday and write a thousand words than it is to sit down Wednesday strung out that you have to come up with three thousand.
That said, don’t be afraid to make goals for yourself. You can always adjust the goal if it turns out to be unrealistic. (A daily word count goal could get lowered or lengthened over the week; a time-spent-writing goal could get shortened; a specific goal could become something like “just move the book forward.”)
And then keep some kind of record of your progress to put things in perspective. Even if you have lots of bad writing days in a month, if you keep taking each day as a new one, you’ll have accomplished something by the end of that month. I find it really helpful to have that.
Remember that life is seasonal. So are colds. There may be a day, or week, or month, or even longer, where the only writing you do is in your Notes app. (I’m partial to Voice Notes, where I can yammer on without even trying to form a coherent sentence. But be warned: once your child can speak, if she is like mine, she will be in the background of your voice note saying “Mama, don’t talk.”)
Take it from my friends who used to have small children and now have medium-to-big children: The worst days will become blurry. You’ll miss the best days acutely. (You might even miss the days you used to cry over.) And the book will get done if you keep pecking and plodding. (I am telling this to you, but also myself.)
Even those of us still in the sickhouse with the tiny children know this. As Caitlin Mullen said, “the paradox is there are more interruptions to my life, but also that my kids make my world so much richer and weirder and funnier, all of which feels good for my writing life.”
Any advice or gripes? What’s the “small child” of your writing life?
Please enjoy that her kids were hiding the cards from her view as they read her the questions because they suspected she was cheating. It can be hard to accept how much our mothers know.
Loved this and I sympathize deeply, especially with the chronic sleep deprivation that makes it very very hard to be creative. My two cents: 1) Once your kids are grown it often happens you turn next, very quickly, to tending parents and/or in-laws, especially if they are dealing with terminal diseases, dementia, or even if you just need to move them in and out of houses, nursing homes etc. I am astonished how much of the last decade has focused around that, for both my husband and me. I know some of our readers can relate! And 2) I credit my young children with teaching me how to not waste time and to embrace imperfectionism. It was essential, when a kid was napping, to get some writing done quickly (something I'm not as good about now) and I would often enter writing contests with personal essays I'd basically written in one day, because one day was all I had. My desperation drove me to work more efficiently and with less self-consciousness than I do now. So, thank those babies! They are little Pomodoro timers in cute little onesies!
Man this topic is close to my heart. My kid just turned 7 and the novel I was working on when he had just turned one recently went out on sub. I think back on the YEARS of writing around mothering. The nap writing, the notes app writing, the pandemic writing wherein we lost daycare and he dropped his naps AT THE SAME TIME. It does all become a blur, and it doesn’t quite matter how you show up for your writing as long as you do. I often feel frustrated that I’m not faster, that my writing life feels so slow moving some days (years lol), but it’s all forward motion even if it looks different than it did before motherhood.
Thanks so much for this post! I especially love that you included Caitlin Mullen’s take. I took a class with her a little over a year ago and loved her mindset about creativity and writing!