I’ve been thinking a lot about how much time I read and absorb the life advice from other writers. It’s soft addiction. Articles about the challenge of motherhood and writing smell like dessert, and I devour each one as if I’ll find myself in someone else’s once kept now open secrets.
Who you choose to build a family with and how they view your writing life is kind of a big deal. So often it’s the children – how many to have, whether serious writers have children (whaaat) – who are blamed as the prime distractors to women writers. Here’s the thing though: a billion things distract or consume a writer’s time. But another adult in the household is capable of helping create and sustain a productive and balanced writing life. Right now, in most heterosexual relationships with stereotypical gendered traits, the partners, spouses, or lovers of women writers can help (he drove the kids to soccer, he made dinner one night) but its still the woman who does the majority of the child lifting. As long as that is the model, balance will not and cannot be struck.
If I could tell young writers anything it would be to cultivate as close to a sustainable writing life as early as possible so you can choose a partner well and the expectations are clear from the start. She or he doesn’t have to completely understand the demands of writing, but gets the jist that for as long as you’re in a committed relationship with writing, the primary human relationship won’t look like other relationships that are used as a barometer for success, happiness, or even peaceful.
Nick sometimes struggles with my struggle to be fully and absolutely present to him on weekends, our sacred hours together. My fingers begin itching for a pen or a keyboard, my mind starts forming rebuttals and imaginary characters (depending on what I’m working on), and my eyes widen or narrow in reaction to my thoughts, as if I’m having a conversation all by myself. Which, actually, is the painful truth for partners of writers.
Who you choose to parent with, how you set up that situation is one of the most underrated areas in the debate of women writers and finding balance. Nick gladly picks up most of the domestic duties when he is home because he knows that I need to focus on writing when I can. He disappears with Isaiah for hours at a time so I have a quiet office in the house and only interrupts to see how I’m doing, to rub my back, look over my shoulder and make a short quip about turning out a bestseller so we can retire. (My usual reply is a laugh, “With the content I’m interested in? Hardly going to make us rich.”) But more than that and what usually carries me is that he gets it. He sometimes doesn’t like it but he gets it. He gets that writers often wonder away to love a character instead of a human being next to you. He gets that I spend a majority of my time doing unpaid work and picks up the slack, watches our budget, and takes on more because of the understood covenant between mother writer and her work. He gets it and the balance, the ever so fragile balance, is sustained when your partner understands the psychological, emotional, and financial sacrifices that need to be made in the name of creative work.
The community, village, partner, and family we create is just as critical to the food we put in our bodies, the amount of sleep we try to get, and the oxygen we take in for creative work. Emotional support is amazing, but the practical resourceful help that partners give – without tricks or guilt trips – cannot be overstated in the mother writer role.
The balance of parenting, for those in partnered relationships and nuclear families, has to be shared. It must be shared. I’m not convinced that balance can be struck without actualizing that in your family. And I simply refuse to normalize a state of imbalance; it is not an option for me. What turns that refusal into a lived reality is a partner who refuses gendered imbalance as well.