Who can resist a face like this?
Every Tuesday, on my to-do list, I have a 30-minute block that says, “Fold laundry.” This is valuable work time I’m spending separating laundry so my kids can put their piles away. Every single week I have to do it, because when you have kids, laundry never, ever stops.
The problem is, it’s time I could be cranking out 1,000 more words on my computer, and I miss it. I mis sit every single time.
This week, the laundry pile was larger, because I just changed our my 5-year-old’s clothes, because he grew out of the old size, so there were hand-me-downs that needed washing and sorted. I ended up spending 45 minutes separating piles.
And when I finally made it back to my computer, cutting the cords of home-demands, I couldn’t help but think, “Something needs to be done about this.”
It’s not easy balancing life and work and home. Because my work is creative, there are so many times I have an idea kicking around in my head, and what I really want to be doing is fleshing it out, brainstorming how it might possibly work and putting it on my production schedule in a place that might make the most sense, but kids need to be fed lunch and read stories and put down for naps, and there’s just not any extra time.
Sometimes that idea living in my brain can make my vision dark and gray, like I can’t really be happy until it comes out on the page. Sometimes it just makes me walk distracted, so I fill up cups of water for the boys and leave them on a counter instead of a table, where they’re sitting. Sometimes it means I’m not really listening to my children or staying full present or engaging in conversation or play, because there’s something else pulling my mind away.
This can be frustrating. But the truth is, when we are artists, we are always working. Always. Even in the moments when we are caring for our kids, our eyes are still open to the realities of life, to the potential for story—a conversation here, a scene there—to the conversations we’re having and the feelings we’re feeling and the experiences we might be able to use later.
At first I tried fighting this. Because I wanted to stay completely present for my children when it was my turn to care for them. Because I wanted to stay fully present with my work when it was time to work. But it wasn’t ever easy to separate myself from my art or from my children.
I’ve thought long and hard about balance in the life of a writer parent. I’ve tried to figure out an exact definition or possibilities for what it might look like or how balance might be achieved, but what I’m coming to understand is that I cannot be the kind of mom my kids need if I’m separating myself from my art at certain times and from them at others times.
I see it like this: My children are like roots, grounding me to the earth of my life. My art is like a root, too, wrapping and twisting and growing all up under and around and inside the roots that are my children. Those roots are all connected, and they don’t look perfectly orderly or perfectly distinguished one from another, but they do look perfectly beautiful.
But because they’re wrapped all around each other, if I try to pull up one of them, they all suffer.
This balance is a complicated one. And that’s okay. There are seasons when our art needs more water than our children. There are other seasons when our children need more water than our art. But they cannot ever be fully separated.
Still, if I’m honest, there is a guilt that comes crawling to me on its knees, trying to whisper in my ear that I’m not doing enough to let my kids know I love them, and I’m not doing enough to make sure my art is perfect and wonderful and life-changing, and some days I can bend too far beneath its words.
So what does work and family balance look like?
Well, sometimes it looks like inviting our family into our work, because there are days we just can’t get the work off our minds. Sometimes it looks like walking our kids to the park and forgetting that work altogether, because what we’ll see and hear on that half-mile trek informs who we are, which informs what kind of art we produce on any particular day. Sometimes it looks like working an extra hour at night while a spouse takes the kids swimming.
The other day, I sat down with my boys and drew out a new work schedule while they worked on their summer projects, picture books they’re illustrating. I was helping them, but I was also helping myself. I told them I was working out a new schedule, and they came over periodically to see what that meant, and then went right back to their art projects. They drew for 45 minutes, all of us sharing in valuable creating time.
It was not wasted time. We were creating together. We were helping each other along in our separate pursuits. Something I don’t often remember, in the guilt of the moment, is that when our kids see us creating, they get to learn what it takes to pursue a passion—the hard work, the hits-at-a-moment’s-notice inspiration, the moments when we do something unexpected because creativity just hijacked our time.
What works for me won’t always work for you, but here are a few suggestions for finding balance in work and family life:
1. Enter into creating with your kids. One of our projects this summer is creating picture books. My three older boys told a short version of a story, I wrote it in picture book form, and they’re illustration 15-30 pages we’ll transform into a picture book. This helps me practice writing picture books, and it also helps me share the wonder of art (and publishing) with my children. We get to collaborate and sharpen each other in our work together (because kids have so much to teach us about creativity).
2. Make sure you get into the habit of rest. Resting is necessary in art. Our wells can run dry if we’re not filling them. I take weekly Sabbaths every seventh week, when I try to learn something new or just read books or spend more one-on-one time with my children. We do puzzles together. We play trampoline dodgeball out back. We sew and draw and paint and sing and dance.
3. Don’t even try to keep up with it all. The demands can be great in a household like mine. I don’t even try to keep up anymore. I used to want a clean and tidy house, but now I just settle for tidy. I vacuum every week, but I dust about every month. I haven’t scrubbed the baseboards in you don’t want to know how long, because who has the time? There just aren’t enough hours in the day to spend them scrubbing something that will just get dirty again in a day of living with children. One of these days, my boys will do all of that, and we’ll have a whole work force living in our home. But for now, we just live with it.
4. Invite kids into the home stuff, too. Our boys are responsible for doing after-dinner chores. The 5-year-old even knows how to take out the trash. They wipe the table, clean the countertops, sweep the floor and do the dishes (with supervision…they like those knives that are waiting to go in the dishwasher a little too much). We shouldn’t be afraid to ask our kids for help, because when they’re out on their own (which we don’t like to think about when they’re young), they’ll have to learn how to balance life and home and art, too. We’re just giving them practice.
5. Communicate your needs. Creating art and living with a family create so many needs for communication. When those seasons come around where you just have too much on your plate, communicate that to your family. No one wants to live with a stressed-out parent, and they’ll probably be willing to help with something, whether it’s writing with you in the evenings or doing chores so you have more time to write or reading in the library until you come out of your room in the mornings and tell them it’s time to get breakfast on the table.
Balancing our work and home lives isn’t easy, but it’s definitely not impossible. We simply have to work at it, like everything else.
And it’s in our best interest that we do.
