Toys lie scattered every which way on the living room rug-- from train sets and circus sets to piles of picture books and bright bouncing yellow balls-- from wooden kitchen fruit and mini pots and pans to stuffed sea otters and teddy bears. We have it all here in what was once the living room. And do you know what's funny? This is actually pretty clean!
Then there are the two loads of laundry sitting unfolded right next to me on the couch and the dishes stacked in the kitchen sink, plus the piles of newspapers and magazines on the dining room table and boxes of Halloween decorations not yet unpacked in the hallway.
And what am I doing now that it is almost midnight with all of this surrounding me? What any good mother/writer would do... Light my "Harvest" Yankee Candle (my favorite scent of theirs, and I am not a candle person by any means), eat biscotti, and write in my blog.
Thus is the life of a true mother of a toddler/writer. I must burn the midnight oil every night in order to pursue my other life, that of a full-time children's writer. Household chores must go undone from time to time (more times than not, to be really honest) and things fall by the waste side. I am horrible at responding to email and sometimes phone messages (though the phone not as much) unless it is an absolute emergency, impossible at keeping the kitchen clean for more than two days a week (once when our housekeeper comes, the other because miracles do happen), and sporadic at best at folding laundry (Thank God for my husband!) My hair is always messy and needs a haircut badly, I never get my nails done because the polish chips the exact same day which drives me bonkers, and my clothes match only on a good day.
I am NOT a multitasker. Now that I have a two and a half-year-old son and another on the way, I can only concentrate on three things-- taking care of my son, spending time with my husband, and my writing. Pretty much everything else falls away for certain periods of time if I am writing a lot. When I'm really lucky, I get a little time for "myself" that has nothing to do with any of these things (like getting a pedicure, since the polish lasts longer, or going to a bookstore, or taking my French conversation class once a week.)
Close friends should know that the truest way to know if I am not writing a lot is if you hear from me a lot. If I am up to date on phone calls and emails, then I am PROCRASTINATING and not writing or working on writing-related items during the precious little time that I have (revisions, critiquing other manuscripts for writing buddies, writing cover letters, reading PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY or THE HORN BOOK, updating the blog, etc). That's not good.
I love emailing and keeping in touch with my friends, but my mind can only remember so much. This time right now is what I get to either write novels set in other times or other worlds (which takes over your brain, too, and is hard to turn off sometimes) and basically do my "work" that others get to do during the day. My daytime is devoted to my son, and I give my entire self to him (except for the Tues./Thurs. preschool hours from 9-12:45pm, which are now devoted to lots and lots of doctor visits for the new baby).
I think full-time working mothers understand this dilemma. They work all day, then come home and spend time with their children and family, and it's hard to do other things besides that. My day is swapped with spending all day with my son and then getting to spend time with my husband and then getting to do my work. And it is work. It may be a passion, but it is NOT a hobby. I don't even consider it my own personal time. It is my writing time, my work time. Something that I must do or else I don't feel complete.
It's so hard for others to understand, I think. Writing and motherhood do not blend together well. They're definitely more like oil and vinegar than Nestle's chocolate milk. With chocolate milk, the Nestle powder gets mixed into the milk when you stir it with a spoon, producing a brand new, creamy concoction that is completely blended together. With oil and vinegar, once they are shaken together, a nice, fragrant vinagrette forms, but the two ingredients never stay blended together for long. It takes constant shaking, constant work, to keep the vinagrette from separating.
That's how I feel about writing and motherhood. It takes constant work to keep everything together, but no matter what happens, the separation still occurs.
Piles of photographs without homes sit inside boxes in my living room (not yet completely unpacked since our move here last summer). Baby books and journals lean against one another on a bookshelf, half-written in. And even more books sit not exactly even on my son's bookshelf in his room. Yes, I have chosen to finish writing chapters over putting together elaborate scrapbooks, filling in what my son ate when he was one year and three months old or how potty training is going, and keeping his bookshelf perfectly straight, but I make sure to sing and dance with him everyday, go apple picking and bake apple cake with him, and play trains on the floor with him until my knees are raw. We read, read, and read some more, admire the changing leaves, and find pictures in the clouds. I hope that when he is an adult he will forgive me for not having elaborate scrapbooks about him or for not writing down what his favorite food was when he was two.
Sometimes I visit other famous children's writers' blogs and read that they have two kids under five or something similar and I wonder, "How do they do it?" They are prolific and successful and their hair is combed and their clothes match! But then I hear the words of Donna Jo Napoli, an extremely successful children's writer and a professor of linguistics to boot. She has four or five children (I don't remember exactly), grown now, and has spoken at numerous conferences about her life as a writer. When asked how she wrote when the kids were younger, she replied that she did manage to write and raise a family, but she did it BADLY! She said that the family could "literally" eat off the kitchen floor (if you know what I mean) and that she had every person in the household be responsible for dinner one night a week, even the youngest four-year-old, who made everyone eat a bowl of fruit and cereal.
Her talk makes me feel like I really can pull this writing and motherhood thing off, even if I am doing it BADLY. I can hardly wait until my son is four-years-old and can cook me a bowl of fruit and cereal for dinner!
Now, if only I could teach him to respond to emails, too. Now that would be something.
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