...for Moebius moms and dads, and of course for non-Moebius parents too. How DO you, after all, balance work/career...and parenting? How do you do that and still be a good parent? We all struggle with it. Here's the perspective of a writer, writing an essay in today's NY Times:
“I’m reading your book, and now I’m worried about you,” an
acquaintance told me about my (fictional) novel, which concerns the
(fictional) misadventures of a (fictional) depressed mother. My whole
head flushed. My immediate response was anger, then denial, then guilt. I
was practically going through stages of mourning, and maybe I was in
mourning, mourning for the simpler vision of myself I was able to
project on Facebook, or you know, in person or whatever.
But here we are: I’ve written a novel about a mother who on the
surface looks like me (Brooklyn, two kids, scraggly dog), a novel that
is also meant to be an exploration of the stormy waters of motherhood. I
wanted the book to be a comfort to other mothers. I wanted the book to
be about a woman who realizes that having her own creative work actually
helps her to be a more balanced and happy parent. This woman, it’s
true, is troubled, and sometimes not entirely in love with her children —
essentially a misdemeanor in Park Slope. But she is only a character,
not a true reflection of me. So then why do I feel so guilty? Why do I
feel like such a crappy mom?
Without thinking about it very clearly, I suppose I’ve always assumed
that writing at all makes me a slightly worse mother than I might be
otherwise. Being a writer means I’m, at very best, 77 percent focused.
I’ll look up in the kitchen to see that while I’ve been scribbling story
ideas on the back of an envelope, the kids have given themselves
honey-and-peanut-butter facials. On weekends when I should be playing
soccer with my kids or at least vacuuming, I instead disappear to write.
Crappy.
Or else I actually do spend a day or a week fully engaged in
mothering, trying to be present and fun, spending post-bedtime evenings
not drafting pitch e-mails but organizing the paper dolls and inventing
little projects for the next day, never handing the kids the iPad so
that Mommy can do just a few more little edits on her short story.
Predictably enough, during these times I feel guilty for not writing.
“Do you think I’m going to write myself?” the new novel whines,
hypothetically, I assume, from inside my desk.
Then one day, my 4-year-old was having one of her regularly scheduled
Scarlett O’Hara-ish nervous breakdowns. I found myself watching her
from a writerly distance, dissecting her motives the way I would a
fictional character’s. What hidden desires and fears fueled this
particular tantrum? She wanted to wear woolen tights even though it was
92 degrees out, sure, but what else?
The tights had to be symbolic. In a story, anyway, they would be. Of
course they were. Everything with a 4-year-old is symbolic. Really, she
didn’t want to go to school. And really, really, she’d gotten wind that I
was going to do something fun with her little brother while she was at
school. This quick character study dissolved my urge to yell; suddenly
instead of irritation I felt sympathy, and we were able to defuse the
fit and move on in a matter of seconds.
Writing is so much about the work of noticing. Fiction writing in
particular demands intense noticing — studying how the emotional
scaffolding of a human is built. When we’re not ignoring our loved ones
in order to go write, we are living like watchmakers — picking apart
conversations, analyzing recurring arguments, holding up to the light
the wheels and cogs of our people so that we may understand them, yes,
but also so we can learn how to create new people from scratch. You
know, like mothers do.
In creating my novel’s mother-character, I wanted to take the Truths
of what I know as a parent and apply them to a world full of other
fictional truths — feelings I don’t actually feel but have observed. If
people conflate this character with me, I can take that for what it is,
and know that I’m still the actual human person trying my darnedest not
to yell at my kids, and taking them to the park even when they take six
hours to get their shoes on, and, most of the time, paying attention to
them. Real attention. Trying to know them, to learn them by heart.
The mom-guilt is, I’m guessing, just part of the whole enterprise.
Everyone wants to give their kids more. I’m sure I would have mom-guilt
if I were a lawyer-mama or an astrophysicist-mama or a
doughnut-shop-cashier-mama. But the writer-guilt I can probably attempt
to let go of. It may well be unsettling for my family to live in my
world where, in the words of Nora Ephron, everything is copy. But on
good days I’m able to see how the peculiar skills of a writer overlap
with the peculiar skills of a mother: we work so hard — we must — to
notice, to understand, to dig deep, to know.
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"What's a good parent? Someone who does the best he/she can."--Overheard one day a few years ago...
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