By Jamie Asaye FitzGerald
Your identity as a writer doesn’t disappear once the responsibility of children come into your life. In fact, your identity as a writer may take on a more obvious shape, form and demand, and may give you the strength you need to deal with the challenges of being a parent.
There will be days filled with the joy and plenitude of childrearing, and days when you might feel like being a parent is, to put it bluntly, one of the nine circles of hell. As hard as it is to find the time to write, your refuge can be the page. Even if you can only write for fifteen minutes each day or fifteen minutes each week, that writing could be your lifeline—that writing could save you.
When you have a baby, you really have to take baby steps. For a baby, those first steps are huge. For a parent-writer, those baby steps to keep the writing life alive are equally huge. Give yourself credit for even the smallest effort.
To preserve your writer self, you will have to fight against forces that might not consider, value or acknowledge that part of you. These forces may be closer to you than you realize. They may even be your own loved ones. If you have a partner, you may have to contend with working things out with that person. They might be 100% supportive or 98% supportive or not supportive enough. The reality is that you will need their support and understanding.
If they’ve committed to being with you, they’ve committed to being with an artist—and an artist has needs. Getting your partner on board with you will make things much easier. Sometimes they just need to be reminded who you are and what you need.
Fighting for a writing life also means asserting it as a priority in small, achievable ways. Any parent knows that if you wait until the end of the day, after other responsibilities are taken care of, you will have very little left to offer the page—let alone the energy to brush your own teeth. If possible, write first, before you do the thousand things required of you each week, even if that means you write for just five or fifteen minutes.
I’ve found my best sustaining resources have been scheduled group activities. The literary submission parties held by Women-Who-Submit have been great ways for me to block out time to devote to my writing life and get work out into the world. I can tell my partner on this day and time, I will be away. It’s a scheduled event—it’s legit, concrete, with a beginning and an end.
On top of having time blocked out in advance, the meetings transform preparing submissions, a difficult and painstaking task for the uber self-critical writer, into a positive and uplifting experience when done in community. As Pat Schneider, in her book Writing Alone and With Others, counsels: “Find and keep in contact with other writer/artists who can provide you with an intimate community of support, give you honest critical response, strengthen you, and encourage your work.”
From time to time, I also participate in a writing accountability group called The Grind. Participants write something every day for a month and email it to an assigned group. For a time-pressed parent, this arrangement works for me. There is no comment, no critiquing, just the doing of the writing. The Grind got me in the habit of approaching writing as I do brushing my teeth—it’s just something one does every day. Forming the habit was the achievement. I found myself jonesing to write each morning like jonesing for that first cup of coffee.
I don’t always write every day, but now I know I can, and I know that jotting down any thought I may have at any moment could turn into something down the road. As a parent, you’re being pulled in many directions at once. It can be hard to concentrate. You won’t remember that pithy thought later. Record it on your phone. Jot it on a receipt. Throw it in your purse. You’ll stumble across it when you fish out a tissue for your snot-nosed kid, and it may become a poem, story or book!
Writing while momming is playing the long game. Everyone tells you your kids will grow up so fast. As writers, it often seems like that’s not the case. But it does help to put things in perspective when you can accept the limitations of your present circumstances while remembering that it won’t always be this way. Things change. Children grow up.
There is no reason why you should throw in the writing towel just because you have children to take care of, but you will need to accept the limitations placed upon you if you want to be an effective parent AND remain connected to your writing self. You have to feed your writer self and care for it to avoid despair and bitterness.
Moreover, your attentiveness to yourself as an artist is setting an example for your children, and especially for young girls, that in addition to being a mother, you are also your own person, with your own hopes and dreams, needs and desires. Following through on those needs, dreams, and desires is not selfish or taking time away from your kids. It’s good parenting.
Jamie Asaye FitzGerald is a Los Angeles-based poet from Hawaii. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Works & Days, Poetry Daily, Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University and a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she received an Academy of American Poets College Prize and the Edward Moses Poetry Prize. She is also the mother of two young daughters and enjoys playing piano in the evenings as they run in circles around the couch.