Talking myself out of a slump

On creativity, parenthood, and the big desert night

I have been in an inspiration slump, and so I decided to go look at some art and see some plays to get out of it. Instead I became furious.

I left a play recently and told my friend, “I could write a play. Anyone can.”

Men do it every day.

Some of them are FINE. Many of them are bad. And blockbuster movie stars are in them regardless!

Museums are full of works by men who declare themselves artists and you look at their flights of fancy. I walk around and wonder what their wives would have rather indulged in while caring for their children so they could paint. Or write. Or compose. Or accomplish any of the other forms of artistic mastery.

I am torn, constantly, between wanting to write and work on my book and wanting to be with my children. This tension is so unoriginal it feels like a cliche. It gnaws and scrapes at me as I type these words, as real as a bear trap.

My children are at school for part of the day, and that’s when I’m supposed to write. I have childcare for part of the day and that’s when I’m supposed to write. And yet, before I had children I would go away for long stretches of time and sit and do nothing before I sat down to write.

I wrote much of my first book from Airbnbs near Joshua Tree Park in California. I’d go with my husband and cousins and they’d hike during the day while I wrote from whatever desk-like surface existed in the house.

I’d look at the desert and wander around the martian landscape and come back to this very laptop (I’m too superstitious to write a book on a new one even though this machine sometimes sputters when I try to toggle between internet windows) and there would be pages, and ideas, and entirely formed thoughts.

At night, I’d shut my computer and look into the vastness and reset my brain into a space that existed only for writing. I’d look at the stars and feel connected to the past in a way that let me write from a perspective that existed before I was born. The desert night was the writing mentor I never got from a residency. It was stupidly easy to be creative when the only thing around me was nothing.

And now, in the corner of my bedroom in Brooklyn, stepping almost out of the fog of my children’s babyhood, I have the paralytic gift of discrete periods of time. If I could train my brain to be productive from 10AM to noon, would I be Faulkner? Or at least, Eggers? Or any of the child free women whose works I savor and whose writing I savor and whose books I studied in school. Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and George Eliot had that in common.

I begin to write and I get a text — the babysitter has a medical emergency. The school needs a vaccination report. The soccer camp is starting but does he have the right shoes?

It is an intellectual circus act to balance writing a book with determining the right pair of shoes for a toddler with rapidly growing feet.

I find myself completing an essay and then wandering to another screen within the screen, wondering if the pajama pants in my shopping cart will have an itchy seam, or if the blue is a satisfactory shade of blue, or if the swim shirt will be too tight getting over his head.

Most days internal dialogue goes like this:

WRITE WRITE

Oh no the dentist. They both need appointments.

WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE

There is no milk. Make a note to get the milk.

WRITE

Apply for kindergarten with the fire of a thousand suns.

WRITE WRITE WRITE

Everyone is sick. Look up cough syrups for toddlers.

WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE

Presents. Everyone needs Hanukkah presents. Which Ninjago lego did he want again?

WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE

Playdates. They all need playdates. Email the other moms. Moms that I can talk to for an hour while the kids try to semi-peacefully coexist.

And then there’s the reality behind the reality: I do love looking for shoes. I get into the weeds about cute pajamas. I was born to navigate the school system. When they are sick, I can’t be anywhere else but curled around them.

And when they go to bed, and I go to wash off the day, I look at my misshapen body in the mirror, which from some angles and in the right lighting might vaguely resemble how it looked before them, I see how utterly and inescapably they have changed me.

And even though I’m not writing Northanger Abbey by candlelight in an ecstatic burst of uninterrupted inspiration, I have a kid who wrote this:

The big, beautiful desert night. The starry desert night. It’s him and everything he contains.

And now, it’s 11:45. Time to pick the little one up from preschool.