Husband, getting into the van with six boys: It smells like fart in here.
Me:
Him:
Me:
Him: Never mind.
[At the dinner table.]
Husband: Put that thing away.
Me [Not looking]: We don’t bring toys to the table, boys.
Husband: It was his penis.
Me:
5-year-old:
Me: We don’t bring toys to the table.
Me: When Jadon was little, he used to point to the moon and say, “Da Moonah.” It was the funniest thing.
6-year-old: What did I say for the moon?
Me: You said it correctly.
6-year-old: What did I say for Fa China?
Me:
6-year-old:
Me: You still haven’t mastered that one yet.
Me: Oh, my gosh. What is that awful smell?
9-year-old: That was my toot, and it smells like heaven.
3-year-old #1: You say stop, I say go.
3-year-old #2: Go.
3-year-old #1: No, I say go. You say stop.
3-year-old #2: But I am the leader.
3-year-old #1: No, I am.
[30 minutes later]
3-year-old #2: No, I am.
3-year-old #1: No, I am.
Using time wisely is an important part of a writing career when it comes to being a parent writer who creates in all the margins. And it can seem almost impossible, because it’s hard to know what a day will hold in its hands until you’re actually there.
But it’s possible to use our time wisely.
We’ve talked about goal setting, and we’ve talked about making a daily schedule. Both of these will help us use our time more wisely, but there is one more step we must take before we will see the most efficient use of our time.
For me, that step looks like a hard-copy to-do list. I used to be a reporter, so I have all kinds of old reporter notebooks that I use to write down everything I need to do each day, in the order in which it should be done. For others this could look like a task app, where they can write down the steps that will get them to their goal.
It’s all well and good to make goals, but if we don’t separate the steps necessary to meet those goals, we’ll never reach them. It’s all well and good to make a schedule, but if we don’t know what to do with that schedule, we’re not going to use it the way it should be used.
So the next step in increasing our productivity is working backwards from our goals. What do we need to accomplish each month in order to reach our goals? What do we need to accomplish in each week? What do we need to accomplish each day?
I make a list of everything. I make a list of all the submissions I’ll make. I make a list of all the projects I want to work on. And then I assign each of those steps a particular day that makes sense.
Some people don’t like to divide out their days like this, because they think it’s too constrictive, but I would argue that if we don’t have our days scheduled with activities that will move us farther along toward our goals, then we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re just going to be spinning our wheels.
[Tweet “To-do lists might seem old-fashioned. But they keep me right on track to reach my goals.”]
When we wake in the morning without a plan for the day, we can feel aimless. We’ll most likely end up saying, “Well, I’ll just write on whatever today,” and then we’ll spend all our writing time trying to figure out what we “feel” like writing, and before we know it, we’ve wasted our 15 minutes on wondering and figuring instead of putting pen to paper. We have to first have the structure, the box of a day, to then deviate from that box if we so wish.
[Tweet “Using time wisely is more than just committing. It’s also about making the plan to facilitate it.”]
Every day, before I go about my day, I look at my to-do list. I don’t have it memorized, by any means. There are too many lines on it. I write everything: read this, write that, send an email here. I write my week’s daily to-do list on the Friday before, after a meeting with my husband about what might be happening that has the potential to change what I’m hoping to accomplish (it’s good to be prepared instead of blindsided, though, of course, we can’t be prepared for everything).
Using time wisely also means that we minimize the distractions. Those distractions can come from a variety of places. It can be our children bursting into our room when they think they want us and our sitter or partner didn’t catch them in time. It can be things like social media, where the pings of notifications will knock us out of flow. Some of my biggest distractions are when essays are picked up by Scary Mommy or Huff Post. I constantly check the shares to see how it’s doing and whether I have any comments. Using our time wisely means we are working to eliminate, or at least minimize, all the extraneous noise.
As parent writers, we don’t have as much time to work on our writing as our counterparts might, which means we have to be using our time wisely. We don’t have the luxury of messing around on the Internet for a little bit of the morning, because all our time is sacred and precious. We will learn to work better and more productively because of our time constraints, but for a while they can feel like impossible chains we need to break before we can bust out as a legitimate authors. If only we had more time. If only we had more freedom to play around a little. If only.
If only never gets us anywhere. Planning and minimizing distractions does.
How to use time wisely:
1. Know exactly what it is that you need to do when you sit down to do it.
Like I said, I keep a very detailed to-do list, and I schedule out all the tasks that need doing in my day. When I know exactly what I’m working on before I even sit down to work on it, I’m much more likely to get right to it, instead of caving to a distraction on the Internet.
2. Minimize distractions.
There are all kinds of apps out there that allow you to block the Internet and other distractions. Put your phone on do not disturb. Close out your browsers. Just sit down with your page and your story. Distracting ourselves can be a great way to procrastinate, but when we’re parent writers and don’t have a whole lot of time to work with in the first place, we’re not going to be able to afford procrastination. There is no I’ll-do-it-later for parent writers. It just doesn’t get done.
3. Re-evaluate goals.
When we set a goal to achieve, many times we’ll find that we’re much more likely to do the work necessary to achieve it if we’re constantly checking in with it. Don’t make goals and tuck them away until the end of the year. Bring them out periodically and see how you’re doing. Set your word counts by them. Schedule your projects on the calendar based on how much time you’d like to spend doing them. Evaluate.
4. Group like items together.
I’ve talked about this before. Keeping like items together helps us maximize the time we have. There is the business section of our writing career, which includes marketing and emails and submissions, and then there is the creative side of our writing career, and those aspects require different parts of our brain, for the most part (though everything about our business needs to be creative, too). It can feel jolting for a brain to go from writing a weekly newsletter to writing a fantasy series. If it’s possible to group like items together, we should try to do it. We’ll be able to get much more mileage out of our time. Look at your schedule as if it’s a giant puzzle, except with time, analyzing what might fit where, and then constantly experiment. If you notice you’re not logging as many words as you’d like to, see if something can be adjusted so that you are, in fact, writing enough words.
Using our time wisely is imperative as a parent writer. We will never be able to have the career we want to have if we don’t master the art of productivity. We must do this work.
Every now and then, I reach this mysterious place where parenting feels really easy. The boys are behaving perfectly (as if that’s the measure of easy parenting), and everyone is loving each other well and, most importantly, no one is complaining about what I just put on the table for dinner before they’ve even tasted it. We are all a happy family. I like them. They like me.
It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, watch out. They wake up different people the next day, and I find I’ve told myself a whole parcel of lies like this one:
I have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent.
Fortunately, this one gets knocked off-kilter quite regularly by my oldest, who is a practiced diplomat who never lets an answer stay an answer until he’s rolled it all over on the ground and wrestled it to near death.
After nine years of parenting this kid, I know better than to believe this lie. I don’t have really easy kids because I’m a really good parent. I have really easy kids because they were born easy. I have a few of those in the mix, and they’re delightful. They’re also easily forgotten, because they don’t require as much work. I could leave the 6-year-old home all day alone, and the only thing I’ve have to worry about is the state of the refrigerator when I get back (this kid once ate three pounds of red grapes when I raced upstairs to take a record-breaking shower). The others, well. They’ll argue with a sock, if it told them them to put it on.
There are a lot of other lies we tell ourselves, too. Like:
It’s going to get easier.
This is your lifeline when you’re the parents of twins. You spend the first year telling yourself it’s going to get easier, because they’ll be able to feed themselves, and then you spend the next year saying it’ll get easier when they’re 3, because they’ll understand things like “Don’t take the cover off that baby-proofed light socket. It will kill you,” and then you spend the whole third year dying, because you have not known fear until you see 3-year-old twins with their guilty faces on standing outside a bathroom door they just closed, saying they did “Nuffing.”
Crap. It’s not ever going to get easier. I’m just going to tell myself that, and then maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised (but probably not).
The other day I found myself thinking of another lie while I was scrubbing the dish that had somebody’s sour ranch dressing caked on it.
Eventually they’ll do the chores to my standards.
Eventually they’ll do the chores, that much is true. But it will probably not be up to my standards. I know, because I remember myself as a child. My mom had a rotating dish schedule, and after my shift, the sink was always splattered with water, and my mom told me over and over and over again that part of the dishwasher’s job was wiping up all the excess water, but yeah, yeah, I just wanted to get on to the part where I got to sit on the couch and read a book. They didn’t have streamed audio books back then. If they had, it would have been a different story, Mom.
And then, the other night, when I’d finished a dinner of sautéed pork chops with mushrooms and garlic sliced infinitesimally small so no one would complain about the unknown grossness caking their otherwise perfect meat, somebody, before he’d even tasted it, said he didn’t like what we were having and he wasn’t going to eat, and I discovered another big, fat lie.
One day they’ll stop complaining.
It’s a lie, too. I know, because the other day, when something was taking too long on my computer I started complaining about how you’d think we’d have faster computers in this century and how it was taking SO MUCH TIME and how I didn’t have all this extra time at my disposal and how I wished I could jut hire someone to do this part and blah blah blah blah blah.
The only way my kids will stop complaining is if I magically somehow stop complaining, which is probably not going to happen anytime soon, because have you seen the mess kids can make in two seconds of inattention? Complaining is my feel-better.
On Christmas morning this year, I found myself agreeing with the lie flipping through my head when my kids emptied their stockings and asked to eat a peanut butter cup.
It’s just a little sugar. Just this once.
“Just a little sugar” is like saying, “It’s just a few broken pieces of furniture and a few more holes in the wall and a few whiny kids at the end of this day. Giving kids sugar is like rubbing yourself with raw meat and walking out into the African bush. You’re going to die.
And, of course, we decided to have our first Family Fun Day on the first day of the new year, because our word for this year is “play,” and we wanted to end the boys’ Christmas vacation on a good note, on a day when we would all be able to enjoy each other and play, and twenty minutes into that day I found another lie sneaking in, like maybe I wasn’t paying attention:
One day it’ll take us less than 30 minutes to pack up and get in the car.
It seems like it’s taken longer the older the boys get, mostly because now they have wills of their own. There is always another shoe to be found. There is always a drink someone forgot. There is always something they need to “pack up real quick” because they want to take a billion art supplies to the zoo.
Another lie that happens to me often, when I’m posting a picture of my boys and I’m disappointed that only 157 people liked it is:
Everybody thinks our kids are as adorable as we think they are.
Nope. People think kids are cute, generally, but no one thinks they’re as cute as we do (except twins—other people think they’re cuter than they really are.). I’m speaking generally, of course. That’s not the case for my boys. Everyone in the world thinks they’re cute.
Some lies knock us right off our parenting pedestal, like this one:
Not giving in to bad behavior makes bad behavior magically disappear.
I remember the first time this illusion was shattered, when my oldest threw a major fit because he wanted the green plate instead of the blue one. But the blue plate was the only one clean. And thus began the oft repeated phrase in our home, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.” I didn’t give in. Of course not. That meant the tantrums would go away.
Not what happened. In fact, I suspect he tried harder. And I stuck to my boundary harder. And we danced again the next time. And the next time and the next time. Now he’s 9. We don’t fight about the green plate instead of the blue plate anymore. We fight about things like how he needs five more minutes of technology time to finish this one thing, even though his time’s up.
Not giving in never solved anything in my house.
Every now and then, when a kid is talking about how they want to run away and how they wish they had different parents, I find myself thinking:
One day they’ll understand.
One day they’ll understand the boundaries we set, and one day they’ll understand why we said no, their friend can’t come over today because we want to spend some time together as a family, and one day they’ll understand why we limit that technology time and require creative time every day. But even if they don’t, that doesn’t change the fact that:
One day they will know just how much they were loved.
I’ve gone over and over this one, examined it inside and out, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this one is not a lie. They may not understand the love of it all right now, but one day they will. I’m certain of it.
Now, excuse me while I go fish out of the toilet a stuffed animal that wanted to “take a mud bath” in the present someone forgot to flush. It’s going to get easier.
I’ve begun studying the art of memoir writing and have a great long list of memoirs to read this year, since this is the nonfiction writing I feel the most drawn to write. Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club was one of the first on my list of memoirs to study, and I’m glad I picked it first.
Karr writes with the brilliance of a poet (which, if you’ve noticed a theme in this book blog it’s that I love poetic writing). She tells her stories with great emotion and carnality, in a way that puts you right into the scene with her. She writes truth on the page, interspersed with the stories of her childhood, which serves to widen her specific experience into the shared experience of others, details aside. She is writing about humanity as much as she is writing about her family.
Karr’s story navigates through her tyrannical grandmother, her mother’s Nervous condition, the split-up of her parents, their getting back together and on into her father’s death when she was a young woman.
One of the aspects of The Liars’ Club that I enjoyed the most is that she is unashamed to say that her memory is not always the same as others in her life. It makes me trust her more, because memoirists who claim to recall everything perfectly from their earliest memory on are usually lying. But Karr’s confessional truth about relying on memory, that being a slippery thing, makes me trust her all the more with the story she tells.
Here’s how she puts it:
“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being (missing). It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept going back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”
This is the way of memory. We know from experience that when we try to remember those places that are too painful to remember, they seem to elude our grasp. The mind has a mysterious way of protecting itself. Sometimes we have great chunks of our lives that we cannot remember because our mind has blocked it out. But those holes are like whirlpools; we’ll always circle back to them, pulled into their depths.
At other times, Karr admits to not remembering something by admitting that her sister would tell a different story (or perhaps her sister doesn’t remember it correctly). What this serves to do is show us that we all interpret our lives in different ways. What one remembers is not necessarily what another would remember.
She writes about a birthday memory going dark on her:
“I sucked up as much air as I could get and blew the whole house dark.”
She is blowing out candles, which are keeping the house lit, and when she blows them all out, not only does the house go dark, but so does her memory.
I love the lyrical nature of Karr’s writing. Her sentences are structured beautifully, and though she is telling the true story of her life, it doesn’t feel like an autobiography. It feels like a story. It feels like a commentary on life. It feel like one great long string of what it means to be human. In one place she writes about going through a hurricane when she was just a little girl, and though I’ve never actually been through the horror of a hurricane, I felt like maybe I had. I’ve been through other hurricanes, the life kind, and it seems they’re very much alike. This is what Karr’s writing does: links a very physical detail of human existence with some emotional detail of human existence.
Her description are incredible. Here, she’s writing about a loogie her sister smeared on her:
“She hawked up a huge bogey gallop from way back in her throat, passing every now and then to tell me she was fixing to suck it at me. It had bulk and geometry. It was hanging in a giant tear right over my face, swinging side to side like a pendulum, when Daddy came slamming out the screen to haul her off me.”
This passage made me laugh out loud, not just for its gross description but also from the way it showed so perfectly this relationship between her and her sister as kids.
Here’s another great commentary on the sibling relationship (her sister has been stung by a man-of-war and has the marks down her leg):
“By the next day, she was charging neighbor kids a nickel to see her blisters, a dime to touch one, and a quarter to pop one with a straight pin we’d dunked in alcohol. Sometime during those transactions, she got mad at me and eventually got out of bed to stuff me once more into the dirty clothes hamper that pulled out from the bathroom wall. I heaved my body against the hamper to open it a slot, but the heavy lid fell back closed and mushed my fingers before I could get out. I wished her dead again, Lecia. I sat in the dark among the sandy towels and damp bathing suits for nearly an hour before she finally let me out. It seems Daddy had gone back to work, and Mother had gone to bed for the foreseeable future. There was no one else around.”
Another time, her sister told her that their mother had hauled their dead grandma in the back of their car.
“For years Lecia had me convinced that Mother left us behind because she was hauling Grandma’s body in the backseat of the Impala. Lucia fed me this lie pretty soon after we got off the phone with Mother that night, and I swallowed it like a bigmouthed bass. I needed an excuse for being left behind, I guess. The truth—that we were murder on her nerves, which were already shot—must have been too much for me.”
I love this passage for so many reasons. First, the image of swallowing what her sister told her, “like a big-mouthed bass.” She’s from Texas, and she’s slipping in a fishing reference, which is what people from Texas do. I also love her truthfulness here. She knows that she was probably too much for her mother to handle while she was trying to bury her own mother, but she felt slightly abandoned because of it.
At times, she writes irreverently, saying this of her grandmother’s death:
“I sat in the back of Uncle Frank’s white convertible going home with Lecia blubbering nonstop in the front bucket seat and him putting his hammy hand on her shoulder every now and then, telling her it was okay, to just cry it out. What was running through my head, though, was that song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy’s house lands on the witch with the stripy socks: ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead.’ I knew better than to hum it out loud, of course, particularly with Lecia making such a good show, but that’s what I thought.”
But what it really comes down to is her manner of description, how much she knows and understands about the people in her life, from this grown-up place, looking back on her childhood. Here is a description of her father. The details in this passage bring her father alive on the page:
“He had the easy glide of men who labor for an hourly wage, a walk that wastes no effort and refuses to rush. His barrel chest and legs were pale. There was a wide blood-colored scar up one shin where one of Lee Gleason’s quarter horses had thrown Daddy, then dragged him around the corral till six inches of white shinbone was visible on that leg. On the same leg, just above the knee, there was a knot of iron-blue shrapnel bulging under the skin left over from the war. Still, he didn’t limp one bit coming toward us. He had an amused squint on his face.”
And another:
“Evenings he wasn’t working, he sat in bed to study his receipts and bills. He liked to spread out the old ones stamped PAID along the left side of the bedcovers. The new statements still in their envelopes ran along the right. He’d worked out a whole ritual to handle those bills. When one hit the mailbox, he slit it open, then marked down what he owed over the front address window where his name showed through. That way he nodded at the debt right off, like he was saying, I know, I know. Plus, he then didn’t have to reopen and unfold every bill in order to worry over it. With all those envelopes staggered out in front of him, he drew hard on bottle after bottle of Lone Star beer and ciphered what he owed down the long margins of The Leechfield Gazette, all the time not saying boo about one dime of it.”
She knows the characters in her story so well. Here she is, speaking about her sister:
“I knew we’d never get back there and said as much to Lecia, who claimed that was the least of our worries. I looked at her serious profile while she watched the trees tick past. She had a way of tucking her chin in. Her head dipped down like a gull’s would facing a steep wind, so her brown eyes peered up at the world from a definite slot under her blond bangs’ sharp border. She drew her chin back further into her neck’s folds. That was her way of digging back into herself, of getting down deep in the solid foundation of what she was before another change swamped over her. Seeing her profile go all chinless in the car, I felt a whole flood of dark fill me up, cold as creek water. Daddy wouldn’t even know where to come get us when he got ready.”
In other places, the verbs make scenes come alive, like when she is describing being out in the Colorado open with her dad:
“Once the fire was high, Daddy swamped each little fish carcass around in a pie tin of cornmeal, then fried it in Crisco. I was hungry as only a day on horseback can make you. A canopy of evergreens waved overhead. Stars were bobbing into view in between. The fire kept popping to send whole handfuls of sparks skittering up in the air.”
And one day, when she is riding a horse back to the stables, after a long day out:
“The horse rocking me as he picked his way over stones had a rhythm like the Gulf, which until that night I’d never once thought of. It was a fetal rhythm, I guess, the kind that sneaks under your heartbeat and makes your brainwaves go all slack and your eyelids seam themselves together.”
One of my favorite passages was this one, a commentary on what it feels like to not have a dad:
“His kids spilled out of the truck and scattered, me hating every one of them for having a daddy. I wanted my own tall daddy to come there and make me a patch of shade with his big cool shadow.”
It’s so sad and so accurate. When you don’t have your dad around, you practically hate everyone else who does. Especially when she had a relationship like this with her dad:
“Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher’s lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.”
Mary Karr has the hand of a practiced poet in all of her stories that make up The Liars’ Club. She has written several memoirs, and they have now joined my to-read list.
I recently made a few waves with an essay I’d written in response to a friend venting to me about how her girlfriends kept saying that their husbands were going to babysit their kids so they could have a girls’ night out. Apparently, it struck a deep nerve.
I feel like there’s something more that needs saying, so indulge me for a moment while I work it all out.
My husband is not a babysitter because he’s a parent. We’ve already established that. But how about we break this down a little, so, at its simplest, it looks something like this:
A parent knows what he’s doing.
It seems that not only have we, as a society, gotten so used to seeing mom as the sole caretaker of her children, but we have also gotten used to believing dad is an incompetent caretaker.
We see this everywhere. We see it in the public men’s restrooms that have no changing station included, because men, of course, would not know how to change a diaper. We see it in the lack of paternity leave at most businesses (maternity leave’s not much better, but that’s another subject for another day), as if no father in his right mind would want to spend those early weeks helping his partner and acclimating himself to this new dynamic of family. We see it in our TV shows and our movies and our commentary on clueless celebrity dads who carry their children all wrong (who of us really knows what we’re doing the first time out of the gate, anyway?).
So maybe this is where the real problem lies, why both men and women express outrage at seeing men put on pedestals for taking responsibility as a parent—because, the truth is, men don’t want to be there. They don’t want to be held up as an exception when they’re just loving their kids the best way they know how, and some days that’s taking care of the explosion that happened in their six-month-old’s pants, and some days that’s mopping up the puke that happened in the hall, and some days that’s teaching a kid to ride a bike or roller blade or drive.
Of course we want to thank them for their contribution. Of course we want to acknowledge that they’re doing a great job as a parent, same as we are. Of course we want to make sure they know how beautiful it is to see a dad loving their kids with his time.
But what our “Dad’s babysitting tonight” and our “Your wife is so fortunate to have a helper like you” does is it unconsciously undermines who men are as parents. Babysitters and helpers don’t know their children. Babysitters and helpers don’t have to stick around. Babysitters and helpers don’t make decisions about what to do with the kid who’s getting beat up in school or how to handle the not-turning-in-homework conundrum and where to put the baby until he’s sleeping through the night.
Husband and I are fortunate enough to split our days down the middle (Not everyone is able to do this. That’s okay. Our schedule is not the point of this essay, so don’t get lost here.). We do things differently as parents, though we share the same core philosophies. The kids know what to expect when a parent takes over the parenting shift. They know that I don’t like a lot of noise, so if they want to wrestle or play freeze tag, they better do it out back. They know their daddy doesn’t care about noise as much as I do, so they know they can play music through the loudspeakers and try to talk over the music if they want. They know their daddy makes them read stories in the home library while I prefer they read in their rooms with me, on my lap. They know they can probably get away with some things when Husband’s on duty that I would never tolerate, and vice versa. We have different preferences because we’re different people. Our kids adjust accordingly.
But just because we do things differently doesn’t mean I’m a better parent than he is. It doesn’t mean he has no idea what he’s doing. In my house, Daddy knows what to do when a kid stubs his toe on the curb, and he knows where the school papers belong (recycling or keep-it-forever?), and he knows how to read a story so a 3-year-old will pay attention. He knows how to teach kids about multiplication tables and metaphors and the proper way to dance “Whip It Nae Nae,” and the deeper things, like love and honor and respect and grit and perseverance and identity.
It seems that we’ve traveled a little too far down this path of Dad as the joke, Dad as little more than useless, Dad as a bungling idiot. It’s time to change this perception, too.
I know men who don’t have sole custody of their kids, and they want nothing more than to be more than a babysitter for their kids. I know men who stay at home while their wives work full-time, and they want nothing more than to be seen as competent caregivers. I know men who are serious about their parenting and just want to be seen as responsible dads.
DADS KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING, SOCIETY. We should let them do it.
It takes only a look from those evening sky eyes, so much like your daddy’s, before I’m lost in time, lost in space, lost in a world where only you and I exist. It takes only one sweet, joyful smile to send me reeling, end over end, in a twister of tears, for the growing up and the getting older and the never again. It takes only one slobbery kiss to crawl all the way down to my depths and remind me, This is it.
This is it. You are it. You are the last born son.
We knew it from the first moment we knew of you. You grew and you kicked and you formed so perfectly, so beautifully, so wonderfully, and I tried to enjoy every minute of your growing, before I’d even met you, because this was the last time.
It’s funny how a new baby comes into a family by storm, how those first few months feel blurry and unreal, and then, looking back, it’s hard to remember a time when new baby was no baby. I try to see what life was like before you, and it’s impossible to remember what I did with my nights but give you the last goodnight, sleep tight kiss. It’s impossible to remember what I did with my mornings but burrow my face into your belly to make you laugh. It’s impossible to remember afternoons without your curled up form, sleeping soundly in a crib.
Ours is not a complete family without you.
I know your brothers would agree. You are the light of their day, smiling no matter how the world is falling apart around you, calling to them when they pass you on their way to the refrigerator, missing them when they’re away at school. You are sunshine in a hurricane. You are morning song splitting a silent night. You are breath and hope and life and love and miracle.
I spent my birthday last year holding you, just three hours old, against my chest, and I did not think that I would ever put you down, because you were beautiful, and you were here and you were ALIVE and you were last.
And then we brought you home and you fit right in like the whole world had waited on you before it started turning again, in just the right way. Your brothers lived for one little smile, one little contagious laugh, one little hand pat on their leg. You looked around for them when they were gone, because the noise was a constant in your existence, and you did not know, exactly, what to do without it.
It’s hard to explain what you mean to me. But I will try.
That first moment in the hospital, you looked into my eyes, and you reminded me that I mattered, because you were born on the day before my birthday, and I’d always had a complicated relationship with birthdays, because there was always someone missing from mine, but you reminded me that my birthday mattered, that I mattered, and you have no idea what that did for me, my sweet. I was able to unfold in your first year of life in ways I had never done. I was able to dream truer and hope wider. I was able to, finally, live.
You are my last born son. You are the culmination of eight years of childbearing, a whole lifetime of longing. I have given my skin, my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my hair to all of you, some getting more of one than others. Mostly, though, I have given my heart, marveling at who you are and how beautiful this mothering is and what a wonder it is that you are all here, breathing, sleeping, living out loud in the very center of me.
But, you see, there is a sadness you brought with you (if, in the future, you happen to notice this sadness shaking my face, it is nothing to do with who you are). Because everything I watch you do will be the last time.
Your first smile—it was the last first smile I would see from one of my babies. Your first wobbling steps—it was the last first steps I’ll ever see from my own. That 2 a.m. feeding, the splendid silence of it, was the last 2 a.m. feeding I will experience.
It comes with being the last child, but it has nothing to do with who you are. You will see the sadness in my face the first day of kindergarten, but it has nothing to do with who you are. You will see the sadness in my smile when you walk the stage at your fifth-grade graduation ceremony, but it has nothing to do with how you’ve done or who you’ve grown to be. You will see the sadness in my pride the day you drive away from home, but it has nothing to do with who you have been beneath our roof.
You will be the last one who learns to drive a car and the last one who takes Algebra II and the last one who marches in the school band or sings in the choir or lines up on a football field. You will be the last one to go to the senior prom, and you will be the last one to pack your stuff and leave home. And so all along this growing up will be moments of such great pride and wonder, and they will be moments of profound sorrow and pain, too.
Soon, you will learn to wield a spoon, and you will learn to dress yourself, and you will learn to tie your own shoes, and there is a grief in this passing away, because what does a mother do when she has nothing left to do? When she is not needed anymore? When she is just an important person in a life instead of a vital, I-can’t-make-it-without-her person?
Well, she loves. She keeps on loving. She keeps on.
I know we’re a long way from those days of doing for yourself and walking to school on your own and leaving home for good, but here we are, in the blink of an eye, at your first birthday, and it’s the last first birthday I’ll experience with a child of my own. So it is a day of celebration, and it is a day of sadness. This evening I will pack away your clothes, which you outgrew weeks ago but which I’ve been slow to clear out, because it’s the last time. I will mail them to your cousin, and, meanwhile, you will keep growing up, never to stop, no matter how desperately I want you to stop, for just a small moment in time so I can preserve that gummy smile and commit it to memory forever and ever and ever, so I can remember the way you reach for me every time I come into a room because I’m your favorite person in the world, so I can watch you giggle and laugh and do a dance of your own when your brothers turn the music too loud. I don’t want the moments to go away, and, like every moment, they must.
So I guess what I want you to know on your birthday is this: You are perfect just the way you are. I love you with all the love I have in my heart. You are a wondrous ending point to our family with your great joy and wide smile and sweet nature.
In this episode, Rachel’s baby walks for the first time! Also, Rachel talks about a 2016 Newbery Honor Book, a great resource for writers navigating social media, the difficulty of selling yourself on a page, and the great music known as The 1990s.
3-year-old: The sun broke in half, and now it’s a moon.
Me:
3-year-old:
Me: Are you a poet?
3-year-old: No, I’m a boy.
Me: I’m bringing the veggies over.
3-year-old: Those aren’t beggies. They’re bitchables.”
Me:
3-year-old:
Me: Just don’t say that in public, ‘kay?
9-year-old: No one in this family has a disability.
All the other kids: I do!
Me:
Husband:
Kids:
6-year-old: I do. I can’t climb up the shed door.
Husband [coming in from getting a haircut]: How do I look?
3-year-old: Daddy, you look like weird.
Husband: What’s your favorite thing about being in this family?
6-year-old: Nothing.
Husband: The cool parents?
6-year-old: Definitely not. There is nothing fun about this family, especially the parents.
9-year-old: More beans, please. I want to get really gassy tonight.
In the life of a parent writer, schedule is everything. You are taking care of your children and dealing with job responsibilities and taking care of the home responsibilities on the side. Where is the time to write?
And then, if your schedule opens up more, because you finally get to quit the day job and just work on your writing like you always dreamed, how do you ensure that you’re using your time wisely?
The secret is schedule.
My days are very well structured, from the morning to the evening. Our household runs on a tight schedule, because it leaves less room for other things, like 3-year-old twins tearing down the walls around us, and kids function better when there’s a predictable schedule in place. We know what time we’re going to eat and what time we’re going to have Silent Reading and what time we’re going to call for lights out. This makes some of us in the household (myself included) pretty dependent on this schedule and a little irritable when something unexpectedly knocks events out of whack (there are drawbacks to everything).
Our schedules can be more fluid, if that’s what works for us. But if we want to reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves, we’re going to have to carve out time in the schedule. Knowing when you’re going to work on what, whether today is a nonfiction or a fiction day (if you write both—and if you have a blog, you’re going to have to write both) gives our productivity a helpful boost. It’s beneficial to know when it’s time to create all that social media micro content and when it’s time to shift into an editing frame of mind. It helps to know when we’re going to work on that rough draft and when we’ll have the time to brainstorm some blog topics.
For my scheduling, I do a thing called batching. This means putting like things together. I write all my blogs for the week on one day. I write all my rough draft fiction on one day. I do all my editing on one day. I write finals on several days, but always together. I juggle several different projects at a time, shifting between fiction and nonfiction, producing content for a video show, creating all my social media content. I work much faster when I can knock it all out at once, instead of a little here and a little there.
I work hard on my schedule. I started the new year with a pretty rigorous one in place. When I realized I hadn’t built enough margin into that schedule, I adjusted.
[Tweet “Creating a writing schedule doesn’t mean we’re bound to it forever. It’s a framework.”]
A framework will make us more productive.
(Sound familiar? It’s the same with goals.)
My schedule happens in blocks of 90 minutes. I’ve found that I work best in 90-minute blocks, because I can focus for that 90 minutes, close out everything that will distract me, take a quick break and ease right into the next 90-minute block.
I schedule my blog posts, I schedule the topics I’m going to write about, I schedule which books I’ll be working on each week and their deadlines. I even schedule my reading.
Setting up a schedule helps our brain maximize the time it has. When we’re given only a small block of time to create, we don’t want to be wondering about what it is we’re going to create. That takes time. If those pieces are already in place, we can get right to work during the window where our kids are (hopefully) napping.
Creating a schedule isn’t rocket science, and it’s not something that will look the same from person to person. I spend time revising my schedule whenever it feels like it’s too aggressive or I’ve missed something somewhere. Some of it is trial and error, because I don’t know what it’s going to be like grouping two particular activities together, and if it doesn’t seem to work, I’ll revise the schedule, and then I’ll revise again, until I have it exactly right and I’m producing as much as I can with the time I have.
How to make your own schedule:
Step 1: Look at all the time you have.
Write out all the blocks of time you have. I try to work in 90-minute increments and then take a quick break for water, but not everybody has the kind of time I have to write. That’s okay. Write out the time you do have, and organize your time into blocks. Maybe it’s half an hour here or 45-minutes there or just 15 minutes somewhere else. Write them all down. Some of those small blocks we won’t be able to fill with work, of course, because maybe it’s the very time our kids come home from school and we always want to be available to greet them. But use all the blocks you have and write them all down.
Step 2: List everything you’d like to accomplish in a week.
This would be things like publishing blog posts or writing a particular number of words on a story you’re working on (consulting our goals will be helpful for this step.). It would also be things like writing and sending email newsletters and creating social media content for your business. All the tasks that you have in a week that are important for a writing business need to be listed out. The point of this is that sometimes our expectations don’t match our time. Writing everything out helps us prioritize when our time is short.
Step 3: Match what you’d like to accomplish with your blocks of time, as if you’re putting together a puzzle.
This is my favorite part. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of time. That means we have to take away some of the tasks until our time opens up a little. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of tasks, in which case we can either schedule more tasks for ourselves or we can do what every writer should be doing—read. Or we can choose to rest, which is just as powerful.
Step 4: Don’t be afraid to adjust the schedule.
Sure, it takes time to adjust, but we’re saving time in the long run, because we’ll have a detailed schedule that will help us be the most productive we can possibly be. It’s important that we understand that making a schedule (even if we do it in pen), doesn’t mean it’s an always-and-forever schedule. We can constantly adjust to accommodate what it is we’d really like to do in a week. We’re going to eventually finish that book. What then? Have a plan.
Sometimes life will demand more from us, and we’ll have to sacrifice a bit of work time. Sometimes our children will demand more from us. Sometimes our day job will demand more, and we’ll have to sit and create while our kids are participating in family movie night without us for a season, because someone’s waiting on revisions. Don’t be afraid to play around with the schedule and adjust to the seasons of life.
Having a schedule at all will positively affect your focus and your productivity. It’s one of the simplest things we can do to set our writing career in forward motion.
We all make wishes and we all have dreams. It’s the most hopeful part of the human condition, to wish and dream. But when those wishes and dreams land in the hands of children, well, we have a different animal entirely.
My kids make wishes and dreams all the time. But do they make sense? Are they noble? Would they change the state of the world, for the better, I mean? Meh. It’s arguable.
If the dreams of my children came true, we would all weigh one thousand pounds.
This is because one of the recurring dreams of my children is to live in a world where breakfast is chocolate and lunch is chocolate and their afternoon snack is chocolate and dinner is chocolate and their nighttime nibble is chocolate. In their world, every meal, every drink, every single thing on earth would be made of chocolate. Now. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to live in this fantasy world, too, but I also happen to care about a little thing called health, and if all my kids eat is chocolate, the top floor of our house will no longer hold us. Also, have you seen my kids on sugar? No thanks. Find a kid on sugar and you find a parent far too close to crazy. Give my kids limitless chocolate and they’ll pull me right over the edge of madness, and I’d rather believe I have at least a small grip on sanity still. (It’s highly improbable, I know. I do have six kids.)
If the dreams of my children came true, they would own all the things.
It’s appalling how many things my kids want. You’d think we had taught them better than this, but, alas, it seems they have not learned the lesson of “be grateful for what you already have, because there are children starving in other countries.” If one were to ask them what they dream of most, you would hear things like “All the newest Beanie Boos” or “All the Pokemon cards in the whole world” (If you haven’t had the pleasure of being introduced to Pokemon, allow me to say you are really missing out. There are more than a billion of these cards in existence, and if it were up to my 9-year-old, he would own them all.) or “Legoland right in our house.” While it would be wildly impressive to live in a house completely made of LEGOs, I’m not quite sure that any kind of living structure made of plastic would even remotely stand up to the abuse of six boys. Also, Pokemon cards.
If the dreams of my children came true, the only music we would ever listen to is Kidz Bop or Minecraft music (Take popular songs! Add Minecraft lyrics! It’s delightful!).
If we tried listening to our 1990s Pandora station, which the 9-year-old calls “the worst music ever. It’s so bad it’s killing my ears,” all systems would shut down. And if all we listened to was Minecraft music all the time, I can guarantee I’d become one of those zombies you’re supposed to kill. Might as well shoot me now.
If the dreams of my children came true, they would never have homework.
Huh. You know what? That’s one of my dreams, too.
If the dreams of my children came true, the 3-year-olds would be allowed to do everything and anything for themselves.
This means it would take fifteen years to leave the house, because not only would we have to wait for them to button their jeans but we’d also be waiting for them to figure out how to turn the sleeves of their jackets right side out. They would be allowed to cross streets on their own and run through parking lots without holding a parent’s hand and ride the elevator whenever they chose, because they wouldn’t have the annoying rule about “staying within sight.” They would be allowed to jump in the river after the bread they just threw at the ducks, and they would be allowed to chase geese down a hill where a whole flock of them is waiting and they would be allowed to climb over the rails at the zoo so they could go wading with the black bear. They would, essentially, be able to kill themselves at will.
If the dreams of my children came true, they would be able to use some kind of screen all hours of the day, every day.
They would be able to watch so many hours of the boob tube that their brains would cave in. They would be able to play video games until their brains start frying in the oil of inactivity and overstimulation (“This is your brain. This is your brain on screens.”). They would be able dive into their phones without talking to anyone around them for years.
On second thought, that sounds almost…nice. Hang on while I rethink this one.
If the dreams of my children came true, we would never have such things as naps and quiet time and, God help us, bedtime.
There would never be such things as naps or quiet time, because children like to squeeze as much good out of a day as they can. Me? I just want to get two seconds alone where I can think a coherent thought without someone interrupting me with a crisis like “My brother peed in the trash can.”
And bedtime? If it were up to my kids, they would be able to stay up all hours of the night. They would not need sleep at all. They would walk around trying to remember where they last put down the baby, whining about how untidy the house is and how they’re too exhausted to do anything about it.
Oh, wait. That’s me.
I’m sure their dreams will become more refined over the years. Maybe they’ll even get to hang right up there with Martin Luther King Jr., inspiring people to dream for themselves and make change and dare to love. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself and the only thing they’ll ever want is the newest model Apple product.
