I Asked For More Detail

Thoughts on the writing life

After what feels like years of preparations, work began this week on the construction of a second bathroom in our apartment. The bathroom is being built inside a small and narrow room at the back of our home, next to the kitchen. Half of the apartment is laid out with protective mats, there’s dust everywhere that I attempt to vacuum up at the end of each day, and to make room for the workers’ equipment, which doesn’t fit into the future bathroom, we had to empty the boys’ shared room as much as possible and drape the furniture with huge plastic tarps. The boys are camping out with us at night. We moved their most important toys into the dining room, which is also where I work, and we store clean clothes for them in a plastic Ikea box at the end of the bed. Mercifully, the children don’t seem to mind, it’s all a big adventure to them, and the workers are moving very quickly now that everything has started.

But this is what my workspace looks like right now.

Behind me, piled up next to the stereo, are clean clothes that I can’t put away in the boys’ room and at my feet are Ikea boxes full of Magna-Tiles and Playmobil. The drying racks for the laundry are leaning against the wall, there are stacks of books everywhere. Crumbs on the table leftover from snacks of the past few afternoons when we couldn’t use the kitchen. Hugo’s bells for band are balanced on a stack of laundry just to the right of me, and there are bills piling up and German cookbooks and magazines everywhere and a basket full of essential medicines, since we can’t access our medicine cabinet right now, and a dirty hot chocolate mug and a stack of Bruno’s Valentine’s from school and aaaaahhhhhh, I think I’m losing my mind.

Even when things are as neat and tidy as I need them to be, I have a hard time concentrating when I work from home. Several months ago, I started going to a co-working space, where the peace and quiet helped me work productively, but right now, in the thick of testing and writing Classic German Cooking, I need to be home, just a few steps from the kitchen, so that I can dip in and out, test recipes, run back to the computer, pull something from the oven, type up a headnote. In some moments, the chaos feels benign, manageable, there’s even something briefly charming about it. In others, I feel like I’m drowning in clutter; the disorder affects me like constant static buzzing in my brain.

There’s a certain narrative that goes around, mostly on social media, about how women, especially ones with small children, should let go of perfection, let their houses go uncleaned, embrace the clutter. Implying that there’s something regressive about cleanliness, a connection between a tidy home and a life wasted. Speaking only for myself, of course, I would like to point out that for some of us, the cleanliness isn’t about achieving perfection or presenting some sanitized version of life to the outside world. It is far more about soothing some internal distress signal. When I see clutter, I see problems that need to be dealt with. Bills that need to be paid, clothing that needs to be folded, work that needs to be done. Tidiness allows my mind to rest. And my mind at rest is able to think about things that matter.

So what it is that matters?

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. With two little boys, my default, of course, is to make sure that what matters most are their needs. Our lives revolve around them. There is privilege inherent in this; if they’re sick and have to stay home from school, for example, there’s no question that I stop what I’m doing to be with them. They come home each afternoon to find me there, waiting for them. We have dinner together every night, cooked mostly by me. We spend our weekends together. Occasionally, we’ll go out at night without them, and of course we make plans with friends, separately, but on the whole, the children are the focus of our lives.

Does this sound claustrophobic to you?

When I type it all out, it sounds both utterly, boringly normal and, yes, a little limiting. I have a whole other part of me that wants nothing more than time to write, time to lose myself in the solitude of my mind, time to be alone—really, truly alone—so that I can hear myself think and let those thoughts transport me somewhere so stable and true that I can find it within myself to eventually bring it to life. That solitude and that time is inherently at odds with what my children require. My boundaries, yes, are porous at best and nonexistent at worst. I am trying to work on them, and yet it is so hard. So I wait for time to pass and for the little boys to get a little older and for me to matter less to them. I wait despite the fact that I know I shouldn’t. I wait despite knowing, occasionally, that what I need matters too.

I ran into a neighbor the other day. No, ran into makes it sound accidental; it wasn’t - her child and my child take the same bus to school. After the bus peeled away from the curb, the two of us waving madly at the little ones inside who craned their necks to still see us as they moved further and further away, we stopped to chat for a moment. We are still getting to know each other and so, when she said something offhand about her cozy weekend routine with her children that didn’t include her husband because of his job, I had to ask her to remind me what he does for a living. He’s a writer, she said. Working on a novel.

I needed no further explanation, though, like a true masochist, I asked for more detail. Well, he cooks for the family, no small task, she said, and made sure to show her gratitude by raising her eyebrows, tipping her hat. And he helps get the kids out of the door before school, she went on, with what looked like a resigned shrug. But the rest of his days, including weekends, are devoted to his work. She finished speaking and we looked at each other for a moment in silence as my brain worked furiously to fill in the gaps of what she was telling me.

Oh, reader, oh. I wish I could adequately explain the inner turmoil I experienced in that moment of silence, standing there on our little corner on a humdrum weekday morning. It nearly made my head spin. Because it wasn’t exactly surprise or jealousy or sadness or relief or indignation or gratitude, but rather an unnerving mélange of all of those feelings, bubbling up into a strange and confusing brew. I wanted to laugh out loud and to sob at the same time. Instead, I just stared at her.

Gallons, tankers, really, of ink have been spilled on writing about being an artist and a mother, or about being the spouse of an artist, about the unequal division of labor, of the struggles of people who work outside the home and rarely see their family and the struggles of people, often/usually women, who are constrained (I have a hard time with the word “choice” in this context) to stop working outside the home in order to better take care of the people within it, about the ways in which writers or artists who are mothers of young children either step away or slice their available hours into ever-shrinking chunks, about the parenting decisions they make in order to squeeze out time to work, about the early mornings and late nights and time stolen next to their children occupied by screens as they attempt to write or paint or think.

And I have read all of the pieces, all of the articles, all of the newsletters and Twitter threads, parsing them for wisdom or relatability or something concrete I could extract from them that would help me feel better about my situation, the choices (“choices”) I’ve made, the sacrifices, as I see them, the devotion, the resentment, the grief, the fury, the contentment, all of the emotions that jostle and fight for the upper hand within me as I apply myself to my life as a mother and a writer every day anew.

What would my writing life look like if I had the kind of time and space my neighbor’s husband has? The guarantee of seven working days a week. Can you imagine? Can I imagine? Would I have long finished revising the novel I spat out in four months in 2019? Would I have written two more novels since then? I certainly have the ideas for them. But I don’t have the time, the headspace, the feeling of freedom and time that I convince myself I need. Nor do I want to remove myself so completely from my family’s life. (Nor could I practically.)

Which leads me, of course, to the crux of my insecurity about my life as a writer. If I was a real writer, I wonder again and again, the kind who felt entitled to as much time as she needed, the kind who was ruthless and devoted to her work in a way that I can’t bring myself to be, then wouldn’t these silly limitations that I say are insurmountable be surmountable? If I was a real writer, then wouldn’t putting my mind to it and buckling down be enough? Isn’t the fact that I struggle so profoundly proof that I am not a real writer?

Writing all of this down for public consumption feels, of course, deeply vulnerable and profoundly terrifying. Putting all of this insecurity and shame on display isn’t easy. (Because what if it’s true?) And yet, despite what I tell myself at 3:00 am, I know I am not alone. For all of those writers with spouses who enable their creativity and single-minded devotion to their craft, there are probably as many writers who are the spouse. This is for all of you.

Also, this.