Les Montres Molles by Salvator Dali
Ellen Potter:
Though I’m embarrassed to admit it, I am a self-help book addict. I just love the way they take your tangled, unruly life and comb it out, arrange it prettily, and send you on your merry way. Of course, your poor life gets knotted up again after a few days, but still, there’s always the hope that one day the pretty life will decide to stay for good.
Here is my attempt to help comb out a few of you Parent/Writers:
How to Find Time to Write with a Young Child in the House
Wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Zzzzzzzz
Lots of people told me to write when my son was napping. That seemed obvious enough, but it never really worked. Half my brain was upstairs in my son’s crib, obsessing over every twitch, and you can’t write anything decent with half a brain (although your sales might be spectacular).
But one day I noticed something interesting. I had woken up at 4 am to check on the baby. He was in that limp stage of sleep. No twitching. Just deep, deep R.E.M sleep. Suddenly I felt released. He was drifting through his own dreamscape, so I was free to drift through mine. I hurried downstairs, booted up my computer, and put in two hours of solid writing before he woke up and lassoed my brain again. After that, 4 am became my writing time. So that’s my first bit of advice: Notice when your child sinks into that deep, limp-limbed sleep, and hightail it to your computer.
Buy a smoking-great stroller
Zombie Moms. You’ve seen them in the supermarkets and playgrounds. You may even have seen one in the mirror. They have bloodshot eyes and they look like their brains have been sucked out of their skull with a breast pump. When you have babies or young kids in your house, thinking about anything becomes a struggle. Yet, so much of writing is thinking. What’s a writer/parent to do?
My solution was to find a fabulous stroller. It had all the bells and whistles. It kept my son happy and it kept me happy. We were able to take long walks and, miraculously, I began to think again. I’m not even going to pretend to know how this works physiologically, but as I walked I felt my brain limbering up. Before long it grew semi-coherent. Then, gasp! The story ideas began to pop.
I’m going to quote something that my friend always used to tell me when she bought something pricey. “It’s an investment,” she’d say. I used to poo-poo that, as in “Do you really think those $500 heels are going to pay off in dividends?” But now I’m going to make the same suggestion about strollers. Buy a great one. It’s an investment.
Finally, I have one word for you. Babysitter. Get one.
We’re not talking Nanny here. No big bucks involved. How about hiring the teen next door who will play with your baby for an hour or two? You don’t have to leave the house. I never did. You probably won’t be totally off-duty, though, so you might want to use that time for the less strenuously creative work, like revisions. Or sleep.
Anne Mazer:
Writing in Time
The Eye of Time by Salvator Dali
As the daughter of two obsessed writers, I grew up with a skewed view on time and its uses. While most people try to fit writing in with their crowded, busy lives, my parents squeezed their lives into their writing schedules. Want to talk to your parents? It better be something serious: arterial bleeding, mangled limbs, or at least a police car waiting outside. If you wanted serious attention, it helped to have insights about books and writing. So when I grew up and decided to become a writer, it was either a minor miracle, or the most obvious thing in the world to do.
For many people, figuring out how to manage their time as a writer is a titanic struggle. But for me, I assumed that writing was a priority to which all else took second place. This eliminated messy, uncomfortable questions about relationships, work, or what I wanted out of my life. At the time, I wasn’t married or a mother, so happily, no innocent bystanders suffered in the practice of my art. My “office” was a small round dining room table in the corner of my studio apartment (craning my neck while looking out the window, I could almost see the Hudson River) and every night after work I sat down at the typewriter and wrote for at least an hour. In fact, I don’t remember ever eating at that table. It seemed like a no-brainer to me; if you wanted to write, you sat down and did it. I dimly realized how lucky I had been to get writing habits hard-wired into my DNA.
When I got married and had a son and then a daughter, the first cracks appeared in this “perfect” system. As a child, I had often spoken to my mother through a locked door. It’s an almost archetypal image – me on one side of the door, begging to be let in; on the other, my reluctant, suspicious, and annoyed mother. Now both a mother and writer myself, I knew I wasn’t going to shut, much less lock the door on my children. But writing with constant interruptions was no easy task, either. My former husband helped out by putting our children to bed every night so I could write. Unfortunately, I was usually brain-dead by 7:00 p.m., and reduced to scrawling the same three sentences over and over for an hour. But it was better than not writing at all.
When my kids were growing up, I was constantly scrambling to find writing time. It became much more complicated when I found myself a single parent. I felt not only clever, but also downright heroic as I surfed the waves of illness, summer vacations, and school events. I snatched eagerly at every opportunity for a few quiet hours to write. There were no locked doors and my son and daughter became a part of my writing life, rather than an obstacle to it. Now that they’re adults, however, I find myself reflecting back on those days and wondering whether it was so important to always prioritize writing? Maybe not. It’s an ongoing struggle to balance relationships and writing. I'm still surfing those waves!
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 01:31PM 
photo by Anne Mazer
photo by Anne Mazer
photo by Anne Mazer
