Hitting That Work/Life Balance Beam Nose-First: Books, Children, and Time (Patreon)

Everything I’m about to say in this essay is pretty much borne out by the month of October in my world, in which many things went corkscrewed, but most noticeably in this space, things went radio silent.

Call it a proof: of concept, of theorem, of life, which is only 35% a joke.

Don’t mind me. I’m just tired. So tectonically tired.

On New Year’s Day, I will have been publishing for 20 years.

For 15 of those years, interview questions that revolved around process were generally some form of: Do you write every day? What’s your writing space look like? What inspires you?

Then, five years ago, I had a baby. And I still get asked those questions, but now they have a friend, who is much less fun, the kind of friend you have to lie to, for, and about because they’re just so fucking crazy there’s no other way to deal with it and the truth just sucks too much. That friend is: How do you balance your writing with being a parent?

I usually do lie. You can tell by the nervous little laugh threatening to turn into a laughter-to-tears gif of Pedro Pascal at any moment. Oh, well, you know, one day at a time, I try to let go of the little things, do most of my work doing school hours, and my kid is getting older so it’s not as bad as it used to be…

Well, I’m here to tell you the actual answer, which is YOU JUST FUCKING DON’T EVER AND EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE ALL THE TIME, LITERALLY IT’S ALL ON FIRE RIGHT NOW, AS WE’RE TALKING, THAT’S WHY I HAVE A ZOOM BACKGROUND ON FOR THIS INTERVIEW YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON BEHIND THAT ALGORITHMICLY BREEZY BEACH IT’S A WHOLE HIERONYMUS BOSCH SITUATION IN MY HOUSE, BIRDHEADS EATING BUTTS AND PLAYING TESTICLE-FLUTES IN A PILE OF SCAFFOLDING AND UNFINISHED WORK AND IT NEVER STOPS EVEN FOR A SECOND.

AND THEN THE LAVA COMES.

And yeah, yeah, I know. I signed up to be a parent, I did it on purpose. With premeditation, determination, clear eyes, full hearts, the whole basket of Very Grown-Up, Responsible, Not Repeating Generational Trauma, Both Self-and-World-Aware Elder Millennial Careful Consideration. It’s not like no one told me being a working parent is hard and exhausting.

Believe me, I heard several earfuls on the subject when I was pregnant. Not even small inferior useless human ears, either. Flemish Giant bunny ears. Fennec fox ears. Elephant ears. Freaking panotti ears. Not before I was pregnant, mind you. Before, it was all have a baaaaaby, it’ll be fun, you’ll regret if you don’t, it’s the most fulfilling thing you can do with your life and yeah it’s a lot of work but you’d be so good at it and in the end it’s all worth it for one smile children are the future treat them well and let them lead the way show you all the beauty they possess insiiiiiiide…

As soon as my belly was too big to pretend I just had a bonkers lunch, jump cut to the guy in the antique Vine. What’s the only thing worse than a rapist? A child.

Sometimes I felt like people took a strange sort of gloating pleasure in telling me how awful birth was going to be, and how much getting my body ripped open and my guts removed to sit on a fetching little accent table and then shoved back in like deeply-upsetting Snakes-in-a-Can was NOTHING compared to what was to come raising a child. Some, even one other author, casually informed me I wouldn’t be writing much ever again, which JESUS CHRIST THERE IS A WHOLE-ASS BEING GNAWING ON MY PANCREAS RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I HAVE NOT SACRIFICED ENOUGH TACOS TO HIS LORDSHIP TODAY DO WE HAVE TO DO THIS? It actually got so bad I begged someone to tell me having one single child wasn’t actually the end of my life and also the secret easter egg level of Dante’s Inferno and you know fucking what, Hank Green was the only person who took a minute out of a pretty busy bloody life to tell me it was actually pretty okay most of the time.

And it is.

The child part. Like, the child themself. I love my child. For the most part, they’re pretty great. Most days, it’s not even about the kid. It IS fulfilling and fun, especially now that they’re five, which I did really and truly think would be an age where things weren’t so hard and everything evened out to something where a civilized balance was possible and I can already hear other parents AND THEIR EXHAUSTED GHOSTS laughing in the ether HA HA HA SHOOSH. But before I say anything else I just want to say that yeah, actually, occasionally days of work IS worth it for one smile.

It’s everything else that just goes off like a bomb and never stops exploding and there’s nothing you can do to stop it because even though you’re trained in demolitions and defusing THE BLUE WIRE IS ALREADY IN ASHES AND THE RED WIRE IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE DISTRICT SCHOOL CALENDAR.

Oh sorry, did I mention that in the state of Maine, every Wednesday, for all grades, forever, is a half day?

I can hardly imagine a more flexible job than mine. I can do things, generally, with some large exceptions when I’m working for actual IP-holding companies, on my own time. And I am constantly just this side of drowning. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to do this anymore. There is no job on the face of this undending primal scream of a planet that says hey yeah you don’t need to come in on Wednesdays ever, that’s super fine and totally cool.

There’s a reason I tried to make Wednesdays social media days: there simply isn’t enough time to do significant deep-brain work. But even that hasn’t really worked out because honestly a bare couple of hours isn’t really even enough time to write one of these essays, which you can see brilliantly illustrated by the fact that this essay should have been up days ago.

And that doesn’t get into the constant school closures. Holidays, in-service days, snow days, my-kid-sneezed-one-time-so-come-get-him days, parent-teacher conferences, so HA HA PARENTS IT’S A WEEK OF HALF DAYS BTW WE DIDN’T SEND HOME A DISTRICT CALENDAR THIS YEAR BECAUSE IT’S ON THE WEBSITE. WHAT’S THAT? THE ISLAND SCHOOL IS THE ONLY ONE DOING THIS SO IT’S NOT ON THE DISTRICT WEBSITE? WHY IS THAT A PROBLEM? WE EMAILED EVERYONE SUNDAY NIGHT AT 11PM, JOB DONE!

And yes, that happened just about two weeks ago now. And, you know, the terrifying mass shooting a couple of weeks before that so all area schools shut down until they found the shooter. And hey don’t worry this time last year we were all out for a week straight because of a Covid outbreak which is also happening right now but as a species we’ve just decided fuck it so just cross your fingers and don’t think about it. And before that when Covid put us all out for far longer than a week.

It never ends. And living on an island means there’s virtually no afterschool program post-covid and anyone willing to babysit is already being paid top dollar with a huge waitlist because everyone else is just as desperate, and obviously the average person in the city is intimidated by a ferry and won’t take a 20 minute public transit vehicle across the bay.

And yes, school is school and not childcare, as we heard so often and so smugly during the pandemic. But we all have to work now and the system as it stands just has no answers beyond HA HA GET A WIFE LOSER SHE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DOING ALL THAT FOR YOU SILLY BILLY THAT’S WHY NOTHING OFFICIAL IS OPEN OUTSIDE OF 9-5 WHEN NO ONE CAN USE IT BECAUSE THEY’RE WORKING!

And if you are the wife-shaped entity? Well, Boxer, just work harder. Chop-fucking-chop.

The vast majority of human history, across cultures, opted to simply crush half the species into domestic and reproductive labor with no exit or recourse, and I’d bet you the least toxic slice of the pie chart as to why all this tradwife crap has started floating to the surface of the internet and/or political parties lately is that nobody knows what the fuck else to do because each and every possibility to navigate work and home is much, much harder to imagine and execute than just stick a housewife on the parts of life you don’t want to deal with and call it a day.

So you’re just…stuck. Always. I’m just stuck. Always. Trying to convince myself that treading water is the same thing as swimming.

And I only have one child.

And the idea I always have every day, that surely yes I will work after the child is in bed and it’ll all even out eventually, rarely survives contact with actual reality.

Because it’s a funny little thing about bringing up baby. A lot of the same skills that go into writing a book are the same skills that go into raising a child. You make plans based on all the good and bad things that happened to you mixed with your hopes for the future and every story you’ve ever loved and also the ones you hated and secret dreams of possibility and a healthy dose of hey why not I’m in charge around here let’s get weird. You dream up wild scenarios for this or that, painstaking craft a name, choose which bits of backstory are and aren’t appropriate for the age group and sub-genre you’re currently working in, you spend every moment delivering excruciating exposition and trying to make it fun, doing infinite crafts and art and holidays and intertextual artefacts that reveal the broader culture, you tell stories and stories within stories and stories within stories within stories, you use elaborate, whimsical metaphors to make the very real big enormous heavy things of life easier to bear, you include songs and poems to flesh out the experience, you instruct when you can, entertain when you can’t, try to do both most of the time, experiment wildly because hey, it’s a new world and the old ways won’t fly anymore, keep the protagonist alive as long as possible but make sure they get enough obstacles and challenges and thwartings to ultimately arc toward a decent and interesting person, you lay painstaking groundwork for surprises and special setpieces, you break the fourth wall when you have to, hide behind the veil of authority you barely believe you’re qualified to touch when you don’t. Keep your ego out of it. Let the story grow on its own, organically, try not to worry about whether it’s going to be a success or not. Just try to enjoy the journey. Edit when you get it wrong. Edit when you get it right. Hope it’s memorable enough. Clever enough. Good enough.

It’s all worldbuilding.

Creating a character.

Raising a child is writing the origin story for a hero or a companion or a villain far down the line, and you may or may not live long enough and/or see clearly enough to find out which.

All those days of work for a smile…I did it for years for strangers before I did it for the scion of my house. Months of planning, preparing, making everything as pretty and surprising and delightful as possible, hinting at what’s to come without giving it away, all so that in two years someone, somewhere, might have a moment of happiness I won’t see. And that’s okay.

But it means I’m fucking exhausted by bedtime, and the specific parts that are fucking exhausted are the exact same parts that I need to make literature. The precise cricuits that are burned out, and there’s no real replacement for that energy.

I’ve come to believe that on any given day in my life, I have to pick two of: child, work (within which: pick one out of creative work or social media/publicity), housework, life logistics/admin, partner, self. Those two can get most of what they need to thrive for the day, and the rest will always languish. If there’s a day I get to just choose one, then that one can get fully everything it needs, but there is no day yet dawned where all six get their sunshine and water and tender care. There’s no me yet dawned that has enough for all that. And there’s not enough time, ever.

It hardly needs to be said that self is always the thing that gets nothing, no oxygen, no days, no focus. Because it’s the easiest one to jettison, and the one that will result in the fewest people yelling if you kick it down the road a few days or decades or forever. But the self is the part that has to do all the others, and if it gets nothing, it has nothing to give. So it uses up everything it needs to keep going, just like a body without food will use up fat, then muscle, then bone. I don’t understand how we’re all supposed to do this and honestly, if you want to clutch a pearl about why people aren’t having kids like they used to, clutch that one first.

And yeah, I can write bits and pieces here and there. I work at home. There are entertainment options here. But to really write the good stuff is to go out into the primeval dark wood of human imagination, lose yourself completely, and bring something back to benefit your tribe. It’s impossible to do that while the pulsing, powerful, loving, worrying tether that binds your heart to your child’s heart is always, always pulling you back out of the shadows.

That’s no child’s fault and certainly not mine. I am needed, and it’s right that I’m needed. To really do the good parenting is to go out into the primeval dark wood of human psychology, deny your own self completely, and bring someone back to benefit your tribe. Most of us remember a parent working and unable to be with us when we wanted them, and even when we grow up and utterly understand that, all the way down to the powerhouses of our cells, the sting is still a sting. And I’m still a millennial, one of the great mass of worriers always so awkwardly, desperately trying to patch up and reverse the parenting we experienced, so I see that little sting and I can’t bear it and I try to make up for it, and when I see tiny eyes finally close on the pillow I am hollowed out and scraped down to nothing.

And that nothing has the theme song to Octonauts stuck in its head.

I thought by age five I would be able to explain a need to work to my child. And I can, but at five they can look right back at me and just say with their own human thinking sentient unbearably sad mouth: “Mama you always say that.” And I feel like a screaming asshole from a Harry Chapin song.

It’s hard as hell. The answer to how I balance my career and my child is I consistently fucking fail to and there is no balance. Since I gave birth my publishing schedule has slowed to a barely-upright three-legged race and it’s impossible not to just feel like garbage about that. I have very little advice for others concerning how to do art while also doing parenthood. Historically, artists usually have had wives so that they don’t have to do this dance or no children or wife at all, because only men were allowed to be professional artists and only men were allowed to exist independently of a family or family-like unit. So there’s not even much precedent to look back on, and those there are seem like superheroes whose feats cannot be repeated by us mere mortals.

I would love to have a rousing conclusion to this. And if I have a revelation and figure out how to do it suddenly, I promise to let you know. All I keep trying to do, and also failing at that, is talk myself into not excoriating my own dumb soul every single day and just buckling under the weight of how much I think I should be able to handle this with a smile like a scented candle in a hydraulic press.

Every day is a part of a story. Not even a whole chapter. Just a page or two, a scene, a sequence. You’ll never know which ones you or the people in your life will even remember in twenty years—and talk to your parents, it’s not even that often that all of you remember the same days with the same emphasis and importance. Some of the most important moments of my childhood my parents have no memory of, and vice versa. A person is a crystallization of moments in the past barreling toward the future, flashbacks and foreshadowing, choices whose consequences were sometimes clear and sometimes unimaginable, interactions not just with parents and peers but with their parents and peers and the ways they try to eradicate or re-create the bad and the good of them, and their parents and peers, and theirs, too, all the way back to the dawn of agriculture and further still, every person in a very real way still sorting out thousands-year-old pains of horses and babies dying and snows coming early and tornados and marauders and pandemics and invasions and never, ever enough time for everything, all echoing down through all of our movements and motions and words and instincts every day while we make the next damage and the new solace that thousands of years from now still will make its little stings on beings who never knew us.

And every story is an assemblage of days. A page or two today, a scene tomorrow, a sequence on the weekend, a chapter next week. You’ll never know which words or characters or twists, which choices to put everything else in the fire to work today or not, which half-heard song lyrics make it in, which chance encounters will open up the whole tale in your head you or the people reading that story will even remember in twenty years—and if you have readers and you talk to them, it’s not even that often that all of you remember the same pieces of the book with the same emphasis and importance, and they’ll never know the tiny cuts and wounds of the choices you made on the days you wrote either one of them. Some of the most famous things I’ve ever written moments I have no real memory of crafting, and some of the least famous ones I recall every agonizing second of their making. A book is a crystallization of moments in the past barreling toward the future, who the writer was then and who the reader is now, who they were both on the way to becoming when they met at the crossroads. Flashbacks and foreshadowing. Motifs and themes. Choices whose consequences, both for the characters and for the course of the lives on both sides of the cover, were sometimes clear and sometimes unimaginable. Interactions not just with influences and experience, but with other writers’ influences and experiences and the ways they tried to confront or avoid the bad and the good of them in their own books, and their influences and peers, and theirs, all the way back to the dawn of storytelling and further still, every tale in a very real way still sorting out thousands-year-old pain of suns turning black and creatures in the forests and unexplained phenomena that became religions and religions that became explained phenomena and music around bonfires and voices echoing out across tectonic plates telling the things they knew and saw and heard and hoped and never, ever enough time for everything, all echoing down through all of our scribblings and choosings and words and ideas every day while we make the next influence and the new experience that thousands of years from now still will peek out from behind the stories of beings who never knew us.

You can’t balance it. It’s so much. It’s so heavy. The tilt and the wobble never subside for more than a second in either direction. And whether or not you keep it all upright and not crashing down in a billion shards through any one hour, one way or another, the child will one day no longer be a child and the book will one day no longer be due. And the rest will soften into the watercolors of memory and you just have to hope that the medium is forgiving enough that you can’t tell the difference between the difficult brushstrokes and the easy ones, and it all looks, more or less, like you were doing a pretty good job the whole time and nothign was ever so hard as it seemed on that day when you had nothing left to give and had to use your tears for paint.