Writing While Mothering
One minute, you’re writing in between diaper changes. The next, your children suddenly have lives of their own.
Republishing a blog post I wrote in early 2014, to tell @slmgoldberg, and all the other mothers in her early baby and toddlerdom, that they are right, early motherhood is a fleeting stage.
I’ve always known that full-on housewifery would be temporary, but I hadn’t thought about it in a while. I’ve been busy with kids, household management, and slowly growing freelance writing and legal work.
Events conspire. Life happens while you aren’t paying attention. Happily, they are good events. My professional life, which had been growing slowly, has recently picked up speed.
Around the time of the speed up, I received two articles on housewives and moms. One from Melissa Langsam Braunstein on not calling her a homemaker and another by Penelope Trunk on what it means to work full time. Since this is a blog called An American Housewife and my first blog was An American Housewife in London, I obviously have no objection to anyone calling me a homemaker. Where Melissa sees an “unnecessary invitation to condescension,” I see a dare. Go ahead. Condescend to a housewife. (Melissa thinks I have atypical energy. I told her I have atypical hard- headedness.) Besides, I know from what sources the modern condescension came, and I’m more than willing to butt that nonsense.
But she did get me thinking about the changes in my day to day life.
Gone are the days that I blogged at the kitchen table while the children napped, or composed posts in my head in the grocery aisle. Gone too are the fractured days, random bits of time split by naps, nappy changes, cooking, temper tantrums, random bathroom cleanups, and midday school runs. I still work largely on the children’s schedule, but the “largely” is new. Six months ago, I always worked on the children’s schedule. But now they all have school and are starting to have lives of their own. And they started relying on their father more a while back. These are each normal developments, which have meant chunks of time are back under my control.
As I mulled these things while watching a half-dozen or so kids in my pool who didn’t need anything more than my general supervision — another change — my sister-in-law came to pick up Charlie Brown [nickname for my nephew who was 5 at the time] and told me she didn’t need our shared nanny and housekeeper anymore. Charlie Brown will be in school next year and often at my house. (Her office is about a mile from my house and on his dad’s way home from the office, so days she went back to work after school pick-up, he could hang out with cousins.) All of this meant I could offer the wonderful LuzElena a full time position, if I wanted. Since my workload had shot well past manageable part-time freelance, I offered LuzElena a full time household admin job. She accepted.
And then it clicked.
I’m not a full-time housewife anymore. I oversee the day-to-day life administration, yes, but I don’t do most of it anymore and have been phasing it out for a while. [Update 4 years later: and now I’ve “outsourced” some personal assistant tasks like bills, filing, and grocery lists to my now young teens/tweens. My husband and I were getting to the point we needed a personal assistant and then we realized we had children who needed to learn life administration skills.] I am [still] the first go-to for the children, but they don’t seek my intervention as much these days. They are becoming more self-directed.
For a second, I panicked. That Penelope Trunk post suddenly took on new meaning. Thinking of her comment about what full time work and motherhood looks like from the kids’ perspective, at dinner I casually asked my children what they thought mommy did. The answers were mom things with the eldest two mentioning my writing. They are older and gaining independence, and so they hadn’t noticed a change and don’t feel like they are competing for my time. The progression seems normal to them. The youngest did not feel the competition, either.
I was relieved, because that’s how I planned for this to go back when I plotted this whole counter-clutural housewifery thing. Of course there would be life after infant and toddler days. (How exactly did women get sold on this all-consuming motherhood thing anyway?)
My husband picked up on my worry and reassured me. He’s not worried, I guess because he thinks I know how to balance these things. He sees me merely adjusting to the changes. Well, we will see.
