Girl, interrupted

How to write when you have kids

Half term approaches, and I’m already limping slightly, having been at a speaking event in London last weekend, and this weekend I’m heading off to the amazing Filia conference. So this week seems a good time to get down some quick thoughts about how to get writing done when you have a young family, or you have to fit any kind of creative process around sandwich making, screen time supervision, sock sorting, play date organising, taxi driving, hoovering, worrying, and all the other many jobs that go with parenthood.

As the famous quote goes, ‘the pram in the hallway is the enemy of good art’. When I first became a mum, I felt that it wasn’t just the enemy of good art, but indeed of getting literally anything done at all. I didn’t know how to do all the usual tasks of everyday life with a baby in tow. When I showered, she lay on the floor and screamed. When I vacuumed, I had to do it with her in the crook of my left arm. When she napped, people told me I should sleep too, but instead, I often did that day’s washing up, very quietly, so as not to wake her. Almost every day while she was asleep I tried to wash up that day’s dishes. Usually, she would wake up long before I had finished.

It took me a long time to realise this, but what slowly dawned on me as I had one baby, then another, and then another, was that I wasn’t going to be able to give all my focus to a project, possibly ever again, whether that project was the washing up or my career. For a long time I think I was waiting for ‘everything to go back to normal’. But it still hasn’t, and I’m 14 years in. Never again will I have the luxury of uninterrupted time to completely focus on a task, from start, all the way through, to finish. Even one day when my kids have left home I probably won’t have that same empty space in my diary and in my mind as I did in my child free twenties. I’ll still be thinking of them; they’ll still be interrupting me somehow. “Making a decision to have a child is to decide to forever have your heart go walking around outside your body”, as Elizabeth Stone put it.

So - how do you get stuff done?

Well, the first step is the same one they make you do in rehab. You have to admit you’re powerless. You have to accept your powerlessness. That has to be the first step. Accept that you’ve completely lost control over life as you knew it. Everything is fucked. Accept it. And then start to rebuild in a new way.

So - now you have to do things in chunks. You wash two plates and a saucepan. The baby wakes up. You have to go back later and do the cutlery. Accept it and realise that, bit by bit, dish by dish, it will still eventually be finished. Maybe even apply a bit of Thich Nhat Hanh’s washing up advice, and treat it as an exercise in zen (although I like to picture him losing his grip and smashing up his entire kitchen if the postman came and woke the baby up after he’d just spent two hours getting it to sleep).

With writing, as with dishes, you need to accept that this is going to be an activity of pick up, and put down. You will not get it all done in one sitting. And each interruption you need to reluctantly reframe as a gift because it means you will be able to let all your thoughts gently simmer while you make those fish finger sandwiches for everyone, and then, when you go back, you can totally nail that paragraph you were struggling with. Sometimes the knowledge that you only have a short space of time to do your ‘thing’ can really make you put your foot on the gas, too.

Having said that, you need to find some stretches of time. If your kids are not at school, it might be the evening or the early morning or the middle of the night. Find the time, carve it out, and make yourself show up for it.

Make notes. On your phone. On the back of envelopes. Or in a lovely notebook. It doesn’t matter where. Have something always to hand where you can scribble your thoughts, or even dictate them to a voice recorder if you are stuck under a small human.

Get curious about your frustration - write because of it, not in spite of it. This experience of motherhood is making you three dimensional in areas where you were once extremely flat. Let it all be grist for the mill, and use it. Don’t try to be unchanged by it all, or pretend you are still the same person.

Chip away at that project like the tunnel in the Shawshank Redemption. Dish by dish, handful of grit by handful of grit, have hope: it will eventually be finished.

I’ll see you next week, when I hope to have a new podcast episode for you, kids allowing! If not, then maybe there’ll be some extra material the week after. Fits and starts…inconsistency is the new consistency…chip, chip, chip. xxx

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