Emma Wunsch’s short stories have been published in: Lit, The Brooklyn Review, The Bellevue Review, Fugue, J Journal, and Natural Bridge. She is currently revising a YA novel.

Age of kids: Georgia 3.5 and Dahlia 22 months

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

I’ve really never had a writing schedule—generally, I’ve scheduled time to write in between things. Even though it feels like its never enough time, I’ve always been more productive with structure. Before kids, I wrote when I wasn’t teaching adjunct English classes or working as an administrative assistant. Now, it’s generally a few hours a week when the kids are in preschool/with a babysitter. Since my oldest was six months, I’ve had between 4-10 hours a week of childcare. Because I don’t have a ton of time, when I do sit down to write/revise I’m fast. I’ve learned that when I’m away from the girls, I can only do two things. I can write and I can go to the gym, but I can’t also clean my car and get a haircut. The two-thing rule has helped me utilize my time better.

Also, since my husband teaches at a college, he’s around during the summer, which gives me more time to write.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deeply into a current project?

It’s not a choice: even the most riveting character in my mind, can’t compete with a toddler’s meltdown or demands for an animal tea party. I’m okay with that. The stories will wait; the kids can’t. I tend to think about plot points when I’m swimming, doing yoga, or driving alone.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

Whether it’s having a teenage narrator or writing from the perspective of a dad agonizing over his daughter’s anorexia, I’ve always written about family. There are younger children as minor characters here and there since they’re very good for details (snot-encrusted sippy cups for example), but I don’t think my writing has changed that much. I have an idea for a novel about a sick parent of a young child and I decided that I just couldn’t do it—too scary/ close to home at this time in my life. Maybe when my kids are older, I’ll write it.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a working artist and a parent?

Money. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to be home for almost four years, but I’m going to need a paying job soon. Having a job, raising kids, making time to hang out with my husband, and also trying to find the time to write seems really daunting.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

I’m not sure I’m the person to ask for advice since my books haven’t been published yet, but I’m okay with messy floors and unfolded laundry if it means I’ve spent nap-time reading a novel, frantically editing, or playing with my older child. I’d much rather have dust bunnies under the beds than miss out on my kids’ childhoods. Soon enough, they’ll be gone and it’ll be me and the stories in my head. And the dust bunnies since I’ll probably never get around to tackling them.

It happened this morning. It went well. Very well. The only way it could have gone better is if they’d offered me a million bucks and a contract on the spot and a guarantee that I’d win the Pulitzer next year.

They won’t ever be offering me a million bucks. That’s okay. The novels aren’t part of my retirement plan.

What I did take from the meeting was the other version of Every Writer’s Dream: an enthusiastic editor who totally gets what I’m doing, who loves my book, and who wants to work with me on it. The revisions they want? Totally reasonable and totally doable.

Thanks for bearing with me on the vagueness here. I don’t want to get too specific with the details before there’s an offer made and accepted. No commitment has been made by them or by me. But the editor and I are both excited, and that is an excellent place to start.

1. This week, one of my top-choice publishers requested revisions on The Revolution of Every Day. We’ll be talking about it on Tuesday. I’m stuck somewhere between excited and terrified, because I have no idea what changes they’ll ask for, if they’re changes I’ll agree with, if they’ll even be doable. But let’s be optimistic, shall we? This is a huge step in the right direction.

2. I’ve been a shamefully promiscuous reader of late. I can’t seem to settle down with any one book. Right now I’m reading Glaciers, Bringing It to the Table, Damascus, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. I’ve had the last two on the go for way too many months now, which isn’t a reflection on the books at all but rather an indication of how completely scattered I’ve been.

3. Are any knitters still out there? Because I’m unloading a bunch of yarn on Ravelry. I’ve got some up now, with lots more to come.

4. Speaking of optimism, I bought the summer starts today: tomatoes, peppers, cukes, eggplant… I never put the heat lovers in this early. I’ll cloche them at night for a while, and we’re due for some ridiculously warm weather in the next few days, but it’s still risky. But you can’t garden and be a pessimist. It just doesn’t work.

5. What I really want to be reading right now:

I think I’ll go do exactly that for however long I have left in Girlie’s nap. So make it five books on the go. No one’s keeping score, right?

Kate Hopper’s first book, Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers, has just been released from Viva Editions. Kate teaches online and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she lives with her family. She blogs at www.motherhoodandwords.com.

One morning a few months ago, my older daughter woke up on the wrong side of the bed. She’s not really a morning person and she’s eight, so morning time often involves high drama at our house. But this was a particularly challenging morning—Stella’s pants were too tight; or we didn’t have any eggs left; or Zoë, her younger sister, who is always naked, sat too close to her on the couch. I can’t remember exactly what precipitated Stella’s flinging of her body onto the dining room floor with whining laments, but I was clearly not responding the way she wanted—I could not restart the day for her on a brighter note. Finally, she looked up at me and wailed, “Mom, you don’t even love me!”

I knelt down, took her shoulders in my hands, and said in my most reassuring mother’s voice, “Honey, you know that’s not true. I love you and Zoë more than anything in the whole world.”

Stella narrowed her eyes. “Do you love us,” she said, “more than your book?”

Ouch!

I must admit that at the time I was neck deep in copyedits for my book, and I’d been spending a lot of time either at the coffee shop or in my tiny office with red pen in hand. I was waking up at 5 to try to get an hour of editing in before my girls got up, before the lunch-making ritual, before wrangling Zoe into some clothes, and getting myself showered and off to my day job. Put plainly: I’d been working a lot.

That morning, I hugged Stella and said, “Of course I love you more than my book—If I had to choose, of course I’d choose you girls.” I squeezed her tight, and then I added, “But I’m glad I don’t have to choose.”

She seemed satisfied with that, and I was able to coax her off the floor.

When I thought about this after the fact, I realized that when I said I was glad I didn’t have to choose between my daughters and my writing, I meant in a life or death kind of way. Like a bad joke—my writing is in one boat, my girls in the other and I can only save one boat from going down. My daughters would clearly win that contest.

But I also realized that I regularly—weekly, daily—make a choice between my family and my writing. Some Sunday mornings, I decide to skip the coffee shop and take the girls to the park. But more often, I pack up my lap top, leave the girls at home with my husband, Donny, and head out the door even though I know they’d rather have me stay home with them.

This is a choice I’ve made since they were little. When Stella was 16 months old, we enrolled her in a Montessori preschool 8:30-3:30 three days a week. At the time, I was finishing my MFA and I needed to write and teach. When I finished my MFA program, however, she stayed in preschool three days a week.

Over the next few years, I spent those mornings writing. Later, I added teaching and some freelance work and some stints at part-time jobs into the mix, but writing was always my priority during my work time. The challenge always being to make enough money through my odd jobs to cover childcare (and a portion of household bills) so I could continue to write.

When Zoë turned 16 months old, she joined Stella at the preschool. Stella is, as I said, now 8, and Zoë is four, and both girls have only known me as is a working writer. The truth is I can’t imagine motherhood without writing or writing without motherhood. Perhaps this is because I believe I really became a writer when I became a mother.

Before Stella was born, I didn’t actually write much. Well, I wrote enough to get into an MFA program—and I did my assignments for my classes. But I spent a great deal of time procrastinating, waiting for inspiration and generally wasting time.

But motherhood—and the need I felt to reflect on the larger issues that came up in my life as a result of me becoming a mother (faith, marriage, writing itself)—made me into the writer I am today. And now, if I have two hours, I write for two hours. I no longer have time to wait for the muse to shine her light on me (she’s incredibly unreliable anyway).

Sometimes it’s a tricky balance. What I always tell my students is that if you want to write, you need to make it a priority in your life. It doesn’t need to be number one on your list, but it needs to be on your list. I’m not someone who believes you need to write every day to be a writer. That’s just not realistic for many of us. But you need to figure out what is realistic. Maybe it’s an hour or two on a Friday morning. Maybe it’s Sunday afternoon at your local wine bar. (Yes!) You need to figure out what works for you, and then communicate with your family and partner about how important it is for you to write.

But it does take some sacrifice. You have to make choices, as I now realize I have done. But even though I sometimes choose my writing over my children (in that non-life-threatening way only, of course), I hope that my daughters understand how important writing is in my life—and grow to someday respect my work as a writer.

I love what novelist Julie Schumacher said when I interviewed her a couple of years ago. She said, “I think my kids understand what are for me the two enormous truths of this parenting/writing experience: 1) I love my children wildly, unreservedly, and 2) I can’t live my life without writing things down.”

She couldn’t have said it better.

(Adapted from a presentation I gave on the panel “Barefoot, Pregnant and at the Writers Desk” at the 2012 AWP conference.)

My neighbor said that a few weeks ago, in response to the infodump I’d just delivered about keeping backyard chickens. I hadn’t thought of myself that way, but when he said it, it felt true. I do love to research. Every new interest sends me straight to the library web site where I’ll put way more books on hold than I’d ever have time to read.

It’s no different with the novels. A few of the books I read as I was working on The Revolution of Every Day: War in the Neighborhood, Resistance, Suffer the Children, Dark Remedy, and The Revolution of Everyday Life, from which the epigraph* is drawn. And then, of course, there were the hours of digging around on the internet, turning up firsthand accounts of squat evictions in the East Village and in Amsterdam, newspaper articles and listserv posts. I researched as I wrote and revised, weaving the facts in with the narrative.

For the new book (no longer known as Cold Black Stars because that doesn’t fit it anymore. For now let’s just call it the Portland novel), I’ve been reading up on farming. Farming memoirs (It’s a Long Road to a Tomato, The Dirty Life, The Seasons on Henry’s Farm), and of course lots of Wendell Berry. But farming? You need to get your hands dirty, too.

I contacted a farmer who I’d taken a class with a couple years ago and asked if I could come work with them (in whatever capacity would actually be helpful rather than slowing them down) and ask them questions, and she kindly said yes. They needed me to come on a Wednesday, because that was the slowest day in their schedule. It seemed like it was working out perfectly. I would drop Kiddo off at school, arrange for the girlchild to be at daycare (she usually goes on Tuesdays and Thursdays), and off I would drive to work on the farm and do my research. I was so excited.

But. (Yeah. You heard that but coming, right?) But turns out there wasn’t room for the girl at the daycare on Wednesdays. There had been flexibility in the past and I just assumed that flexibility would continue. So that takes care of that assumption. I can’t leave my kid with just anyone and drive a half hour out of town and be away for hours. That’s way outside of my comfort zone. It would have to be her daycare provider or Billy or nothing. Billy doesn’t have a desk job. He’s got patients in pain who count on him showing up. So nothing, then. I missed the early spring window. The farm is now too busy for me to come on any day of the week. Cue sighing violins, right? I know. Let this be my biggest problem.

The farmer has agreed to answer questions sent in a Word doc, and I’ve done that. And the farmer we buy our meat from is doing the same, and we’ll be heading down there to visit once the mud dries up. All great, all helpful. But the only dirt under my nails comes from my own garden. Nose still firmly planted in books. I can admit to being disappointed without sounding like a petulant brat, right? Though I do feel a little bit like that, stamping my feet, not able to research the way I want to.

Our overgrown backyard. The closest I'm getting to a farm for a while...

*“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.”

—Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

Brad Green, author of: mostly unrequited hope

Age of kids: 1, 4, 10

What is lost:

No time most of all. There’s also no space. Everything is crowded as a room full of elbows, a hallway of mother-in-laws. Reach out a hand and there’s a wall or a task or some child’s warm face demanding a pat. Something must always be done. Homeschool, diapers changed, bills paid, a dish that needs a scrape, fourteen balloons having popped now demand their shattered skins gathered up, the trash, of course, don’t forget that, and where the little one drew on the wall, please clean there, dust too, laundry as well, and the TV’s messed up, please check that and help me upload these pictures to Facebook, a faucet’s leaking too, the furnace appears congested, some squeak or squall, perhaps a burning, plus there’s something foul in the east corner, a mouse got in or worse, another skunk—we’re out of oranges too, get the organic kind as the store brand tends to be bitter, or perhaps the potatoes have sprouted roots in the bag or the tub of butter is suddenly lacking, the dog’s eaten all her food, the baby is hungry, or my (she’s always mine when being difficult) daughter will only eat ketchup or cupcakes today and all afternoon she cried, look at her, she’s regressed, the baby has a rash, the diapers are bad, the diapers are sick with chemicals, look what they’ve done to between her legs, my god the rash! so let’s try cloth, or wet napkins, or the off-brand, the softer kind, the sensitive-skin ones, the package with the pleasant picture, you know, the fluffy clouds as those can’t possibly burn, or the flowers perhaps, which would be the best? Look at my hair! Look at my hair! It’s a mess. I can’t do this. The cat howls. The dog barks. A baby cries. What are you writing? Can’t you spend a moment paying attention to us? Can you get a glass of water? Can you be part of this? Press and the heart grows smaller, self-obsessed, the way a folded sheet can no longer spread easily beyond its shape, having come to love the crease. There’s a leak in the water line from where the ground clenched with ice. The car’s dirty, a tire looks low, the snow broke another branch on the old oak. There’s two novels to write that both need a horizon for thought to roam, some quiet at least, an hour of gentle breath. There’s an essay, a post for a blog long ignored, submissions to be read, feedback to offer, interviews to be done, days and day to labor through. There are things to be done. Everywhere I’m crowded and I have no time, no time most of all.

What is learned:

That a baby’s foot clenches in the shoe, that birth is a wet affair, that the cord is a deep moon blue unlike any color you’ll encounter elsewhere. You learn to crave sleep and to do without. You learn that people assume it’s ok to pick up your child, that it’s expected that she be passed around. You learn that showers by yourself are a rarity, that sex is a hushed, panting affair done with constant worry that the baby will rise to stare at you through the crib mesh as you labor to be human. You learn that corn syrup is everywhere, in everything and you worry. You worry that you won’t learn enough, that you won’t be able to meet her needs, that you won’t know the answer later, that she’ll hate you because you’re frail, or fat, or self-obsessed. You learn that a baby’s cheek against your chest is a singular warmth. You learn that language is a game and arbitrary. You learn that your concerns pale. You learn that your work comes second, often third, and occasionally it won’t come at all. You learn to write in smaller snippets of time and with your thumbs on a phone. You do whatever is necessary. Or you don’t. Sometimes you give up, sometimes you snap and bark because a sentence was interrupted. Sometimes you wonder what it would be like if you were alone. But then you remember. You recall the way she waddles and clutches your leg. You recall her belly laugh, her questions, the wonder that takes her face when you fly her through the air. One day she’ll believe you invented the grilled cheese sandwich and another she won’t. Nothing waxes without a wane. What you learn most of all though is that children enrich and bring depth to what’s likely an otherwise superficial plane. They help to deepen your fiction with concerns that matter. But sometimes you’ll stand in the light of the refrigerator stunned that you’ve done this thing, made this person. Sometimes you’ll stand at the square of the black window in the kitchen and stare out into the night. Your breath will fur whitely on the glass. You’ll watch that white bloom rise and fade, rise and fade, content that you’ve done something so ordinary it’s a miracle. But then you worry that she’s not breathing and creep over to the crib or to the bed, concern lodged in your throat. You hold your wrist over her open, sleeping mouth. She’s so small. Her limbs pale in the moonlight. The little toes, the hand balled to a soft fist, those soft fingernails. Panic seizes you. The tops of your ears warm with fast blood. You think she’s blue, that she’s been tangled in the blanket, that she simply stopped working, that she’s been taken away because you’re not good enough. But then she senses you and stirs. Her chest rises. Your hand finds her head, strokes the fuzzy hair there and you watch her chest fall. And that’s all you needed, really. That’s what gives you hope. The warm blush of her breath reaches you.

It might stay. It might take off again. It just wants to be friends, really. And while it’s here, we can bang out a few pairs of socks. You know, that might be cool. But nothing too heavy. No sweaters, no scarves. For fuck’s sake, don’t even think about breaking out that Habu jacket kit. Nice and easy. We’re just having fun here, just going to see what happens, yeah?

The sock yarn has started to accumulate on the bookshelf closest to my standing desk. That is, right at eye level as I work. I may have even completed a few pairs of socks while watching the kids on the playground after school every day. If I talk about it too much, the will to knit might disappear again. So let’s just keep between us, okay?

Yannick Murphy, author of:
Novels: The Call; Signed, Mata Hari; Here They Come; The Sea of Trees
Short story collections: Stories in Another Language, In a Bear’s Eye
Children’s books: Ahwoooooooo!, Baby Polar, The Cold Water Witch

Age of kids: 15 (omg!), 13, and soon to be 10.

What was your writing schedule (ideal and actual) like before kids, and how has that changed?

My writing schedule changed when I met my husband, a racehorse veterinarian who had to wake up at 4:40 a.m. every morning to get to the racetrack on time and treat the horses. Because he went to bed early, I started going to bed early. Before that I liked to write at night, usually from 8-11 p.m. When we had children, I would sit down with just a cup of tea and write after my husband left the house and while the kids were still sleeping. When the kids woke up around 6:30, I would cook breakfast and we would eat together. I often had to remind my husband to be quiet in the morning when he’d get ready to go off to work, I was always on tenterhooks that a flushing of the toilet, or an early morning throat-clearing, or a squeak from his leather boot sole would wake them up too early and I wouldn’t get in my writing time.

How do you remain present for your family even when you’re sunk deeply into a current project?

I don’t work certain hours of the day when they come home from school, so they know I’m around for them then. I used to think there was something the matter with me, that I wasn’t present enough for my writing and that it couldn’t possibly be quality writing if my thoughts and concerns about it weren’t seeping over into my daily interactions with my family, but then one day I actually realized that I do think about my writing while I’m cutting the carrots and going over irregular Spanish verbs with my kid. There are many levels to my thoughts, I realized, and I’m always scanning a situation or event or a bit of conversation in order to mine it and see how it could work with my writing. When I regroup and sit in front of the computer, the events of the day inform my writing. Nothing I do away from my writing is in vain, not the chopping of the carrot or the irregular verb tense review or the reprimand to pick up a dirty sock. It’s all the stuff that stories are made of.

How has parenthood changed the work itself, if at all?

I had a teacher once tell me that when you start writing, everyone and everything will be against you. I think he was right, if you want to look at it in that light. Nothing about being a wife or a parent (or a teacher, which is what I also do part time) is conducive to writing. Being those things takes up your time and energy. You’ll always be pulled in ten directions. As much as I hate that feeling, it’s good for my writing. It makes me fight harder for my right to write. The more I see it as a challenge to spend time on my writing, the more I struggle to do it, and the more productive I become. In that way it benefits me.

Do you have any advice to other writers with kids or who plan to have them?

I think you have to do what works best for you and what you’re comfortable with. I can count the number of times my kids ever had a babysitter on one hand. I think I toyed with the idea when they were younger. (All three are relatively close in age.) I thought, “Yes, I’ll get a baby sitter for them three hours a day, and then I’ll work on my writing,” but that never became a reality, simply because it was easier for me to be around them than to have to fit some babysitter’s schedule into our busy day. Also, I very much wanted to be around them when they weren’t asleep or napping. Because the time they were awake was the time I knew I wouldn’t be able to write, I felt the urge to make up for it when they were sleeping and I could write. I didn’t waste time at the computer, and I decided any project I was going to undertake, since I had such a limited window of time to do it in, was somehow going to be an artistic endeavor worthy of my life. Ideally, the only guilt a writer should let themselves feel is the guilt that they’re not working enough on their writing.

In the realm of trashed kitchens, we hit absolute bottom this weekend. It got so bad I was compelled to post a photo on Twitter. I think I made a lot of people feel a hell of a lot better about the state of their own kitchens. No matter how bad they are, they likely didn’t look like mine.

Ready for the excuses? See, the whole house was spotless last weekend (confession: because we had a house guest). And then last week I had a cold and had a tight freelance deadline and didn’t have the energy to clean at night after working on the freelance because of that cold and…and… Yeah. I never clean at night when I’m on deadline because there isn’t time to do both and deadline with a paycheck at the end of it trumps clean house.

What really happened is that the kids usually get screen time once a week, after Kiddo gets home from school on Friday. I love Friday movie day. I look forward to it all week. I clean the kitchen and straighten up the downstairs and get dinner going while the kids sit on the couch all glazed eyes and slack jaws. It’s about as luxurious as it gets around here. This past week, though? The same week that I had a cold and a tight deadline? I went and shot myself in the foot and took away movie day as a consequence for bad Kiddo behavior. I regretted it as soon as it was out of my mouth. Couldn’t I have taken away his Legos for two days? Made him clean the bathtub? Put him on compost duty for the week? Nope. Had to right off the bat go to the consequence that punishes me. I’m quick like that. Losing that bit of cleaning time was enough to let the whole mess slide into absolute chaos.

And then this weekend we had two glorious days of sun, the first in a very, very long time, this being Portland and all, and there was no way anyone was staying inside to clean this weekend. (Gotta keep your priorities straight.) By the time the kids were asleep last night the kitchen was more than I could face so I cleaned the living room and dining room (no small feat) and left the kitchen for today.

And then came downstairs this morning and wanted to run away from home.

So don’t tell Kiddo, but this morning I plugged the Girlie in to some Yo Gabba Gabba (on a non-movie day!) so I could tackle the kitchen. The fact that I felt so guilty about this that I had to confess it on Twitter probably bears some looking at. The kitchen now looks like this:

Yeah. Miles to go before I sleep. Am I missing something? Some key instruction I was supposed to be given when the kids were born? How am I supposed to keep the house reasonably clean without plugging the kids in to hours of screen time while also working a freelance job at night and writing novels and every once in a while actually hanging out with my husband? (And yes, Billy does some cleaning, too.) I look at the kitchen and I want to gag, but I’m not sure how to keep it from sliding into that absolute hell all too often.

One of our neighbors, who has two teenagers, has on more than one occasion walked into our house and looked absolutely horrified, which I can only assume means her house didn’t look like mine when her kids were younger. So what did she do that I’m not doing? I refuse to ask her, because of those horrified looks. (Shhh. Don’t judge. She’s a wonderful woman.)

I suppose I could cook less. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the right solution, though.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, New York Times bestselling author of At Knit’s End, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, Free-Range Knitter, Things I Learned from Knitting, Casts Off, Knitting Rules, All Wound Up, and her blog: Yarn Harlot.

Age of Kids: 18, 20, 22

I began to support my family by writing books (although I’d always written, just without the pressure of any real success) about eight years ago when my daughters were ten, twelve, and fourteen. At the time, I remember people telling me that they thought that it was a great match, being a mum and a writer. After all, I worked from home, my workspace could be wherever my kids were, I worked the hours I wanted to, and I had great and tremendous flexibility, so I could always be there for them.

At the time, I believed everything people were saying to me. I could see how it was all true, and I kept trying to feel lucky, and like my life was easier than theirs, but for some reason I couldn’t quite puzzle out, every single time someone told me how great it was, I wanted to pluck their nose hairs out just to watch the tears well up. It has taken years for me to clarify my position, and Cari said I could write whatever I wanted for this blog post, so I’m using it to do what I hope is a little favour for writing parents everywhere. Read this next sentence carefully. It’s the important one.

Writer is not a synonym for stay-at-home parent.

I have a job. I know writing looks like it isn’t a job, I know it sounds super fun, and I know I get to do it from home, and I absolutely concede that it is pretty amazing to be able to go to work in my underpants, but I feel like after almost a decade of trying to balance my culture’s perception that I’m unemployed with the reality of having a full-time job, I’ve decided it’s a diaper of a different colour. Like most parents – or at least, like most good parents, I have always put what my kids need first. Absolutely first – so I did feel lucky that when one of my girls re-enacted the vomiting scene from The Exorcist I could put down the work and pick up the kid, but like all parents who work, it didn’t change the amount of work that had to be done. All of the allegedly amazing things about my job turned out to be big challenges. Enormous challenges, and as the years went by I became increasingly jealous of the parents I saw who had guaranteed and protected time to work every day. I had to work very hard to learn how to defend the time I needed to write, and how to explain to the people around me that while I wanted to be there for my kids 24/7, and how I knew that it looked like my job made it possible to do that….that I really was going to need some time to work that was protected the way that leaving the house and going to an office protected the productivity of other people with jobs. I needed to learn what I was going to say when people were surprised that I needed childcare now and then, and I needed to learn how to explain to my family, friends, and community, that writing wasn’t play time, or personal time, or fun time, or a hobby. It was the same as the work they did. That last part turned out to be harder than anything else.

One summer, a mum and I chatted about how she’d just managed to secure summer daycare for her kids – and I responded with envy. I think I said I had a ton of work to do, and was really worried about how I was going to manage once the kids were off school, and this mum expressed surprise that I would want or need childcare when I had the flexibility of being a writer. Didn’t I want to put that time with my kids first? Weren’t they my number one priority? At the time I was on a book deadline, and while writer isn’t a synonym for full-time parent, writer on a deadline is absolutely equivalent to lunatic – and it was all I could do not to smack her. I asked her why she needed or wanted childcare. Why wasn’t she putting her kids first? She owned her own business – there was no boss to stop her, I mean, why not just take that pack of hooligans to the office? What could possibly be the problem with that?

She laughed that way people do when they’re a little bit frightened of you, and said that she absolutely could not take the kids to work with her. She had work to do, and though she tries to put her kids first, if she had to take care of her kids nothing at work would get done. She’d have to let them watch too much TV or spend their whole summer photocopying parts of their various anatomies, which (while fun) was hardly good for them. She giggled with the ridiculousness of it. I stared – and in that moment I realized something. She didn’t just think that I had all that flexibility about when I worked, she thought I had flexibility about how much I worked at all. After all, I was a writer.

If a writer doesn’t work, they don’t make money, just like any other job. The other real truth is that there’s more than one way every parent needs to care for their family. Meeting their physical need for a loving parent is one thing, but what part of not buying them food is helpful? For most writers with kids, the gift of flexibility means that on those days when one of the tykes has barfed for nine hours, a writer can put absolutely put off their work. That gift then pays off as the writer starts typing after the kids are finally in bed, after they have put the disgusting sheets in the washer… and then they stay up half the night pretending that drinking a whole lot of coffee is good for you because of all the antioxidants in it, and silently pray that the dose will mean they live long enough to finish the book. For writers who need to write (and I don’t mean that in a spiritual, but financial sense) being a writer and a good parent means that you are sometimes going to have to choose between your kids and your work, just like if we had office jobs, and while we’ve accepted that – it would be a hell of a lot easier if we didn’t have to deal with a world around us that thinks that being a writer means that we’re the parent on the committee who has the time to bake those 98 cupcakes the school needs for the bake sale, because of all our fabulous work flexibility.

From the outside, I know that the perks of our jobs must seem pretty amazing to parents who don’t have them, and I bet that right now, some non-writing parent who’s searching for good daycare is scoffing the snot out of the idea that I’m envious of them, but I have been. The reality of the writer/parent is that the stuff about working full-time outside the home can look like heaven to us. Every writer/parent I know does a huge chunk of their writing after the kids have gone to bed, working into the wee quiet hours, and then staggers through their day with the kids. The ability to use what flexibility the job granted me was amazing – but the difficulty of having that work respected, and protecting the time to do it was almost impossible. I know I’m not the only writer fantasizing about a world where every day they went to a small room that their kids weren’t allowed in, and worked without interruption. Being a working writer who has a child or three, and who can’t afford or doesn’t choose childcare means that parent/writer is actually doing two jobs at once, with both being disrupted by the effort. Like someone working outside the home who has to leave their kids to get it done, the writing gets interrupted by the parenting, and the parenting gets interrupted by the writing and the writer struggles to find some kind of balance.

Over the years that I’ve been a mum, I’ve watched the phrase “working parent” disappear, and fairly so, it’s been replaced by the idea that all parents work, either inside or outside of the home. As the ideas around work and where it happens change, as more and more people telecommute or work from home, maybe the next step is to work on our creating a way of thinking about the dilemmas of working artists at home with their kids, cleaning up puke, baking cupcakes, trying to nail a word count, drinking way too much coffee, and thinking a whole lot about Virginia Woolf and how right she might have been about having a room of one’s own. All that flexibility has a price.