Juggling Motherhood and Writing

One of the most frequent questions I'm asked at book signings or when I teach writing classes is this one: “When do you write?”
The aspiring writers who ask this questions are searching for a recipe to follow. They want me to say something like: “If you sit at your desk from six to nine every morning, you will become a writer.” Or maybe: “If you set a goal of writing just 500 words every day, you'll have a novel in a year! Easy as ABC!”
Even people who aren't aspiring writers ask me this question. Maybe it's because they struggle to imagine what writers actually do. They imagine us on safari or having affairs like the characters in novels, or maybe kicking back with a brandy at noon.
“It must be so exciting to be a writer!” people often tell me. “When do you write?”
Writing, alas, is not that exciting, seen from the outside, and there's no simple recipe for getting it done—especially if you're a mother. Because mothers get so little time to actually put words on paper, we often look like we're doing something else when we're writing. We're burning dinner because we're working out a plot line, or furtively jotting notes during a school concert, or suddenly walking the dog when the dog is tired and acting like a cement block at the end of the leash.
In my early years as a writer, I, too, was looking for the secret to success. I had already become a mother by the time I was seriously trying to publish, and I was juggling a paying job as a public relations consultant besides. I was so exhausted when my kids were little that I just wanted to lie down at the end of the day with a pillow over my face.
My question at book signings therefore had a slightly different flavor. Instead of asking writers when they wrote, I would ask, “How do you find enough time to write?” I couldn't imagine it, you see, because I already had more tasks than hours in a day.
Most male authors gave very prescriptive answers to this question. They had set hours for writing—even if they had regular jobs and kids. “I get up early and write for two hours before my job,” they might say, or, “When I come home from work, I go straight to my study and write until bed.”
As a mother, I couldn't crack this secret code. How could I write early in the morning, if I had to find gym clothes or pack lunches before school? How could I write at night, if the baby got up every hour with colic, or if I had to help with one of those dreadful fourth grade dioramas, the kind where you have to fashion little ears of corn out of Play-doh and ladders out of twigs?
Finally, a famous male mystery novelist shed some light on how many male authors were finding the time. I knew that he had small children as well, so when I heard him speak at our local library, I said, “How do you find time to write?”
“Oh, that's easy,” the famous novelist said. “I have a wife.”
I swear to you that this is true, but I won't divulge this man's name. His wife would surely kill him if she heard this, or leave him, if she hasn't already.
Finally, though, someone gave me a recipe that I could actually use: the now-deceased short story writer and political activist, Grace Paley. When I approached Ms. Paley at the Boston Public Library to ask how she got any writing done when she had small children at home, she grinned and said, “Day care.”
Day care! I mulled this over in my mind. I had day care for the hours I worked as a public relations consultant, of course, but did I dare pay for babysitting if I was just writing? How could I justify such a debutante expense?
I couldn't. There was no rational reason on earth that I could give to support the idea of spending solid cash on a babysitter. How could I, when my efforts at writing short stories, novels, and essays were being rejected, one after the other?
For a couple of years after that comment by Paley, I kept trying to fit writing around the edges of my life: while the kids watched videos or played in the yard, or after everyone was in bed, before I fell into a coma. I had a ritual, where I'd make a cup of tea and allow myself two squares of chocolate, essentially bribing myself to sit in front of the computer.
Finally I started running away from home, abandoning my family to go on occasional weekend writers' retreats—typically to Wellspring House in the Berkshires, but sometimes just holing up in a cheap hotel to write for ten hours a day. Not everyone's idea of fun, but for me it was bliss.
Going away for even a weekend was tough at first, because I felt so guilty. I'd abandoned my family! I was missing that Girl Scout camping trip, that track meet, that night of video and pizzas with my children!
Plus, once I was at the retreat, it was hard not to mother everyone around me. I'd feel compelled to do all of the dishes in the communal kitchen at first. Once I even moved a glass out of the way, so that another writer (a young guy) wouldn't knock it off the table with his elbow with his wild gestures.
Once I got over the guilt, though, these retreats were amazing. It was absolutely liberating to just get up in the morning and go right back to the sentence or chapter I had been working on the day before, with nobody demanding that I make breakfast or tie shoes.
The downside was that sometimes it was more difficult to write when I got home. I'd face the same fractured work schedule and house chores as before, and I'd despair again because I wasn't making any progress as a writer. I needed more hours to myself if I was ever going to focus on ideas long enough to put words on paper.
My husband, luckily, was supportive. He urged me to essentially buy those hours. “If this is what you really want to do, then get extra day care,” he said. “We'll get by somehow.”
God bless him. I lined up extra day care hours. Guilt drove me to become assiduous about dividing my time: day care hours two days a week were for writing my own essays and fiction, and three days a week I would use day care for paid work.
Amazingly, it wasn't long after that when my previously unpaid writing efforts started to pay. I didn't sell any fiction, but I sold one essay to Ladies' Home Journal magazine, and then another. An editor from Parents magazine saw one of my essays and asked if I'd like to write an article for them. From there, I was able to use my clips to convince editors at many other magazines to buy my pitches for articles and essays.
It wasn't long before those day care hours where I was writing my “own” stuff were actually paying more than my per-hour PR work. I flip-flopped my schedule and started using day care three days a week to write and two days a week for public relations. I finally sold my first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, to Crown, and from there, I started taking on contracts as a ghost writer and book doctor.
Best of all, because I had those long, uninterrupted hours to think and write, I was less frustrated, and more able to enjoy the days when I wasn't writing. Even more surprisingly, I found that I was more creative on my “off” writing days. Thoughts bloomed at odd times, like when I was grocery shopping or yelling, “Good job, honey!” on the playground.
When I visualize why this happened, I see it like this: the whole top of my head opened up and let ideas flow out like water on the days I had day care, as I poured the words out and arranged them. On days I didn't have day care hours designated for writing, that well in my head was able to fill with new ideas from some secret area in my brain that I'd never been able to tap into before.
Okay. I need to work on that metaphor. But you get the idea. Now, when people ask, “When do you write?” I answer, “There's never a time that I'm not writing, even if it looks like I'm doing something else.”
And, if the person asking me the question is a young mother, I add, “You'll write best if you pay for day care. Run away from home sometimes, too. Your children will survive. They might even be proud of you.”

Can Any Woman Really Have It All?

Every so often, I read something that makes me take a deep breath and reconsider my life choices, like “Judging Women” in the latest New York Times Magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-wwln-t.html?ref=magazine.
In that piece, writer Lisa Belkin points out that, if Elena Kagan is confirmed by the Senate, there will be three women on the Supreme Court for the first time – and two will be single and childless.
Many people are ranting about this being a bad decision on the part of the Obama administration, their rationale being that we need a mother on the Supreme Court to truly represent our population. That's an interesting argument, but not the one that stopped me.
No, the bits and bobs that jumped out at me in this piece were the statistics gathered from author Sylvia Ann Hewlett, whose studies show that half of all high-achieving career women (those making at least $100,000) reach that age without having children.
Can a woman really have it all, as in marriage (or a lifelong partner), children, and a “high-achieving” career? That's what I've been thinking about today. You see, I have two college-age daughters, both of whom are driven academically, but also prone to falling in love. Oh, and they both adore kids.
What do I tell them about a woman's choices?
I came of age on the skirts of the women's liberation movement. My mother stayed home with us despite her college degree; in her day, a diploma was simply better bait for a better brand of husband. Nonetheless, my parents expected me to 1) get that college diploma, 2) marry, 3) have a career, and 4) give them grandchildren. All of which I've done, yet none of it turned out quite the way I thought it would.
I had already earned a master's degree and was working as a public relations director for a California school district when I met my first husband and got pregnant. It was a big job with big hours, yet I fully anticipated rushing back to the office after my 12-week maternity leave. I loved my job. I loved making money. Plus, what in the world would I do if I stayed home all day? Didn't babies sleep all of the time?
Ha. Within two months of becoming a mother, I recognized two truths: 1) Because my husband was in sales and traveled three weeks out of four, there was no way both of us could be gone all day, every day, without going broke on day care; and 2) I couldn't bear the thought of leaving this 8-pound person in the hands of anyone else. At least not yet.
After discussing our dilemma for weeks, we made what seemed like a rational decision: My husband earned three times as much money as I did, so he would continue working. I'd stay home for a year, maybe two, then get another full-time job.
We both breathed a sigh of relief as we fell into the roles we knew so well from our childhoods, since both of us had come from families with stay-at-home moms and fathers who traveled for business. In the meantime, I started working as a freelance writer, thinking I'd try to get a job in publishing. As a writer or editor, I reasoned, I could have more control over my work hours than I'd ever had in public relations. That would be a more compatible schedule with mothering. I was adjusting my sights, but still career-bound.
Again, fate bitch-slapped me with an unexpected wake-up call. My husband was promoted and traveled even more just as I got pregnant with our second child. Now day care costs would be even more astronomical. We decided that I should keep working part-time until the kids were in kindergarten.
Fast forward eighteen years. Husband #1 and I are divorced (but still friends). I have, for the most part, continued to raise our children while he has traveled. He rose through the ranks of his company to become a Really Big Cheese. Meanwhile, I kept freelancing. I took more jobs as the kids got older, but I was still the one on call for snow days and sick days, school vacations and summer, juggling what needs to be juggled by mothers everywhere.
I put motherhood before my career. That was my choice. Little did I know that, just by having a baby, I was jeopardizing my career and putting myself at risk for poverty, as so many studies around the world show (http://www.weawomenatwork.org.uk/topic-June-08---motherhood-and-poverty-g.asp, http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/macarthur/papers/gender-gap-SociologicalPerspectives.pdf

I am not complaining. I consider myself one of the luckier divorced mothers: I am now remarried and my second husband and I are happy. I love being a writer. But, damned if I didn't do it all over again and have another child with Husband #2.
Between us, my second husband and I have five children – two of his, two of mine, one of ours. He has a steady job as a software engineer. I have continued working as a freelance writer rather than go into another demanding public relations job, simply so somebody is here to manage doctor's appointments, school schedules, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, whatever.
Husband #2 is a wonderful domestic partner when he's at home. He'd be a better stay-at-home parent than I would be in many ways. However, again the reality is that he makes more money than I do, and he has the health benefits. So, when somebody has to take a day off to meet the appliance repairman or take a kid to sports practices, it's me.
It's me, and it's most working mothers, who – even before we get to our desks every morning – have to wake kids and get them dressed, make breakfasts and lunches, throw in loads of laundry, bake for the PTO sale, fill in the permission slips for field trips, schedule haircuts and oil changes, figure out summer camp and day care and dinner. And, oh yeah, try to get to to our desks on time to meet deadlines. Maybe even while wearing matching socks.
Recently, as husband #1 and I were discussing college tuition expenses for our oldest child, he threw up his hands in frustration when he saw my tax returns and discovered how little money I made last year. “It was a tough year in publishing,” I told him.
“You could have been in sales like me,” he shot back.
He was right. I could have made more money if I'd seen less of our children. And I know he regrets having missed out on so much time with them.
On the other hand, I'm right, too: If I could just waltz out the door every morning and stay gone for eight-to-ten hour work days like the men in my life (and like the men in the lives of most other women I know), I could make a hell of a lot more money. I might have become president of my own PR firm or a New Yorker staff writer. Hell, I might even have become an astronaut or a Supreme Court judge. That would have been a fascinating, fulfilling life. But that wouldn't have been the right choice for me.
The way our society is currently structured, with so little parental leave and no subsidized child care, and very little support in the home by relatives, women can't have it all. Neither can men. All we can do is make our best choices, sacrifice what we must, and hope that we're doing the right thing for ourselves and for the people who depend on us.
That's the answer I'll give my daughters.

Why Women Need Book Clubs

As a working mother, I have to pursue my literary pleasures with tunnel-vision passion and 007 stealth. I sneak reading time in the bathtub, at lunch, and before bed. I read books in line at the grocery store, and yes, even to sports practices, looking up between chapters to holler, “Good job, honey!” at my kids.
When we moved to a new town a few years ago, our youngest child was in third grade and I was invited to join a book club named “Mothers of Third Graders.” B-O-R-I-N-G, I thought. Why go to a book club, when I can stay home and read?
“You might learn something,” my husband pointed out. “You are, after all, a writer.”
Hmph. The only people who like crowds less than readers are writers, but he had a point. Maybe it was time to see what other people were reading. “I'll go,” I muttered, “but I won't promise to like it.”
I didn't, at first. This was a big, noisy book club made up of women whose children have known each other from the womb. I felt like an outcast. Plus, these women read best-selling commercial fiction like Twilight and anything by Jodi Picoult. What was there to discuss?
Plenty, it turned out – and a lot of the conversation was intense and intimate in surprising ways. We writers work in solitude, usually with nothing more than a dog to consult about plot twists, descriptions and character development. Joining a book group has taught me how writers can reach readers better – or leave them out in the cold. This particular group talked about the characters as if the characters, too, lived in our neighborhood: “Why did she marry him?” “If I had a kid like that, I'd put him in boarding school,” etc. They talked about plot, setting, and the occasional emotional resolution, but hardly ever about the thing writers ponder most: the sentences. Readers just want a good story, duh.
After we discuss the book – which might take five minutes or two hours – our conversations morph into an open forum about families, schools, work, sex, the economy, religion, politics, and every other topic that you can imagine included in the fabric of daily discourse. Even if these women hate a book, it's a springboard for discussion.
When my own book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter: A Memoir, was published recently, I decided to contact book groups. I left my phone number at libraries, put the word out to friends, and added something to my web site so that book groups would know that I was available. I didn't expect much response. Again, I was surprised: book groups did contact me. I met with over a dozen last year, and discovered that being an author at a book group is like being an anthropologist, an American Idol contestant, and a lottery winner all rolled into one.
As a book club anthropologist, I observe each group's unique character and habitat. There are wino book groups and sober book groups. I see alpha moms and women too shy to speak until after the wine is poured. There are book groups with millionaires and groups where the women haven't attended college. Some have themes, like cooking foods from the book. Others have a strict classroom atmosphere, with members adhering only to discussion questions put out by the publisher.
Being an author at a book group discussion is also like being on American Idol: You never know whether the judges are going to praise your performance or say, like Randy, “That was pitchy, dawg. I just didn't get it.”
“It seems like a long way to drive,” my husband said the other night, as I headed off to a book group ninety miles from home. “Is it worth it?”
It is. Wherever I go, and whatever people think of my book, I learn about women's lives. Perhaps because my book is a memoir about a father who raises gerbils, women are amazingly open about their own eccentric parents, troubled childhoods, obsessive husbands or clever mothers. I always come away astounded and humbled by their stories.
In the end, meeting with people who have actually read your book is mostly like winning the lottery: I have never felt so lucky. These are hard times for writers and readers, with magazines folding, book publishers often springing only for name brand authors, and independent book stores dwindling. Authors spend hours each day writing, without knowing if anything we put on the page will ever be read. Book groups allow us to learn what moved our readers (or didn't). They inspire us, giving us hope that writing is a craft worth pursuing.
And, as a woman visiting women's book groups, it helps me feel part of a sisterhood, an extended network of women who work, think, parent, love, grieve, dream, believe, cry and laugh as they journey through their unique lives, support one other, and bring books to life.

The Secret Life of Working Moms

When Laura, one of my marketing clients, called me from her cell phone last Friday, I looked out of my window and smiled. The weather was perfect: blue sky, sunshine, just enough breeze. “Where are you?” I asked. “Playground?”
“Sandbox,” Laura admitted with a laugh. “Think it'll wreck my laptop?”
“It'll survive. Just don't let Owen build a castle over it,” I said.
Laura and I chatted about a brochure I was writing for her while Owen, her toddler, played in the background. We then arranged a follow-up conference for the next week. “Can we talk late Wednesday afternoon?” I proposed. “That'll give me time to get Aidan home from school and settled with his snack.”
“Perfect,” she said.
Perfect: That's what we working mothers strive to be, especially when we finagle flexible work schedules that allow us to keep food on the table without missing out on being at home to watch our kids grow up. Some days we nearly achieve that goal.
Of course, it's a rough transition to the secret world of working moms. In the final months of my first pregnancy, I gave notice at my public relations job and told my coworkers that I had decided to consult from home after the baby was born. This news caused my secretary, an older woman known to type faster than anyone else in our building despite daggers for nails, shake one scary finger at me in warning. “You're making a big mistake,” she said. “You'll never get any work done without daycare.”
I smiled and nodded the way I always do whenever someone gives me unsolicited advice. And then I proceeded blindly and blissfully into the Bermuda Triangle of working motherhood.
Now, as any parent of a newborn knows, babies sleep a lot. But they also wake up a lot, especially at night, when you're trying to restore the damage done to your brain cells by those pesky post-pregnancy hormones. And, whether sleeping or awake, babies are their own personal disaster areas, peeing and pooping and spitting up, mostly when there's nothing but your shirt to use as a mop.
Between tending Blaise, my son, and doing Himalayan piles of laundry, the actual physical labor involved in early parenthood turned out to be more taxing than any other job I'd ever had. That included the summer job I once had on a factory assembly line, pulling plastic paintbrush handles out of a hot mold machine every three minutes. That was mind-numbing work, hot and hard on my back, but I got regular coffee breaks. With the baby, I was clocking in a good eighteen hours a day as a personal valet to someone who didn't even have the wits to say thank you.
What's more, any time I wasn't actually performing a physical service for my new lord and master, I was worrying that I wasn't nourishing Blaise's intellectual development. My mother once caught me hanging those stark black-and-white pictures all around the edges of my son's crib and asked me what the hell I was doing.
“I'm trying to stimulate my baby's brain,” I said. “You don't want your grandson growing up stupid, do you?”
Mom sighed and turned away. “I try to keep in mind that intelligence is largely an inherited trait, though sometimes I wonder about you. I hope you won't screw him up by scaring him out of his little mind with all of those weird things you do,” she said.
By the time my firstborn was six weeks old, I had a steady stream of clients, including the PR firm I'd been working for full-time. It was great to discover that they couldn't live without me. I took every job that came my way. Too late, I discovered that babies can be perfectly content one minute, but will wail like somebody's sticking them with invisible pins the next. That's how they keep their mothers on task.
My husband traveled often for his sales job, so he couldn't offer much parenting help. I had to devise a system of my own. Gradually I discovered that working at home required getting up before the bluebirds and sitting at my computer in a bathrobe, pouring coffee over my head. When the baby woke, I'd feed him and then put him in his infant seat on the bathroom floor, so that I could shower while playing peekaboo around the shower curtain. I'd play with my baby for a bit, and then I'd plunk him into a jumpy swing in the doorway of my office while I called clients, thumbed through research, or wrote reports at top speed. Never mind that the swing was recommended for babies six months and older, or that my own infant dangled like a puppet: he was happy and this tactic worked darn well.
Women clients, I discovered, would overhear the baby in the background and keep right on talking to me on the phone, assuming I had things under control. Men were more problematic. They'd hear the baby and assume something needed tending.
“He's not choking,” I'd reassure them. “He's chortling. He's hanging in his swing in my office,”
“Oh,” they'd say, unconvinced. “Shouldn't you be doing something with him?”
“I am doing something,” I told them. “I'm helping to keep a roof over his head.”
At times, I'd have to do research at the local library. This was a pleasant outing for the first eight months, because I could carry Blaise in a backpack. When he got antsy, I'd lay him on a blanket on the library floor. This worked well, until one day when I was so engrossed in reading that I was startled when a woman tapped me on the shoulder.
“Yes?” I asked, barely taking my eyes off the screen.
“I think you lost something,” she said.
I looked down at the blanket on the floor beneath the computer. No baby. The woman pointed. I jumped up and saw with horror that my son had learned to crawl, and that he was headed, butt high in the air, for the elevator.
After that, playgrounds were my biggest salvation, especially when I had a second child just sixteen months after the first. My daughter Taylor was fussy, the sort of child who cried for no reason and was always thrusting her fists in the air like some miniature antiwar demonstrator. She was only content if I kept her in motion. I did a spread sheet calculating the costs of commuting, buying clothes for work, going out for lunch, and paying a babysitter, and decided that paying for two days of family day care outside the home was optimal; anything more than that, and I'd barely break even. So I dropped the kids off with a sitter for two days but kept them home while I worked for the other three.
On the days I worked at home while my children were there, I still got up at 5 a.m., so that I could clock in two hours before they woke up. And then, when everyone was up and fed, off to the playground we'd go, no matter what the weather. I once wrote an entire brochure in longhand while pushing a swing.
Nap time was sacred: I scheduled most conference calls and interviews for those precious quiet hours. Then the kids would get up and out we'd go again. The one thing I always skimped on was housework. I once had to iron a dress for a meeting, and when I took the ironing board out of the cupboard, Taylor had to ask me what it was.
Things got a little easier once my children started preschool. I had more solitary work hours, provided that I was diligent about not doing housework, gardening, laundry, cooking, or any other domestic chore while my kids were out of the house. (Though I confess: I sometimes did fold laundry or unload the dishwasher while chatting with clients on the phone, taking care not to pant with the effort of lifting baskets or clank the dishes.)
Despite the novelty of school hours, during some wintry weeks I still put in more hours at our local McDonald's than most of their employees, simply because it has an indoor playground. Here's one dirty secret nobody ever tells working parents: school is not day care. Just as you get used to having your babies out of the house and stop weeping every time you pick up their little socks, you realize that the nurse will send your kids home with sore throats or fevers or even the merest sniff. There are snow days and teacher workshop days and once, I swear to God, almost an entire week of rain days off from school, just because the river happened to overflow and blocked off a few measly roads.
I now have three children and continue to juggle my time, despite the fact that the youngest is in elementary school. I still get up early and stay up late to meet deadlines. I still work on weekends. On snow days, I've even been known to skip a wholesome outing to a science museum, where Aidan, my youngest son, can learn about gravity and whales. Instead, we head for one of those germ factories, an indoor playground with arcades that gear your kid up to play the slots in Vegas: they are that addictive. Everything in those places, even the food, seems to be made of brightly colored plastic, like you're living in a TV show – but, hey, working parents like me can plug in their laptops and work in an empty birthday room.
The flip side of juggling work and kids in the same space is that I also can take breaks. When my kids want to spend the afternoon outside, I can often go with them. When I have a child who's home sick, I can climb into bed with him and read him stories. If I have to work, I can set the kids up at my desk with their own notebooks or computer while I work alongside them. Watching me meet deadlines, my children understand about work. And, because of them, I appreciate the value of play.
Mothers have always worked – in fields, on farms, in factories, at home. No matter where we work, most of us take joy in having jobs that we value and children who enrich our lives. I'm one of the lucky ones, in that I can spend some days working at home, straddling the divide between job and family that confronts most of us.
Recently, a client called me during an early release day from school. He was discussing a marketing brochure that he wanted me to write when I had to stop him mid-sentence. “Sorry. Please hold that thought,” I said. “I have to tend to something here.”
I was in a rock climbing gym and Aidan was taking a lesson. For the last hour, my kid had been swinging around like a human yo-yo while I worked on a laptop I'd set up on a corner table loaded down with ropes and harnesses. Now he was waving at me. I stopped talking to wave back and blow him a kiss.
“Okay,” I said, once Aidan was belaying back down. “I can probably do the brochure by early next week.”
“Really? That fast?” my client asked.
“Sure. Have I ever let you down?” We said goodbye. I hung up as my son came running towards me, grinning, to make sure I'd seen him climb to the top.