Finishing My Third Book Proved That I Didn’t Have to Abandon Motherhood to Be a Writer
I would never have to tell my son that once upon a time his mother was a writer
I typed the final sentence and then got up from my desk at the Brooklyn Writers Space. Quietly, so I would not disturb those still working, I packed my things — laptop, cord, mouse — and then stepped out into the blue and gold afternoon. It was Saturday, four days before Halloween.
I stood on Smith Street, blinking. Adjusting to the world after writing was like leaving one climate and entering another. Imagine struggling through deep snow one moment and the next, strolling in a forest of falling leaves. Usually, the walk home was enough to adjust. My husband, son, and I lived twenty minutes away, in a one-and-a-half bedroom on the top floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.
But that day, I had plans to meet Travis, my husband, and Liam, who was almost three years old. So I walked instead to Warren Street where they were waiting for me in front of Idlewild, a travel bookstore with a bright, pretty storefront.
Liam was in the stroller. He was a blue-eyed, train-mad toddler who carried beneath his cap of bright hair an encyclopedic knowledge of subway lines and transfer points. Randomly and incessantly riding the trains was his favorite thing to do.
“How’d it go?” Travis asked as I approached.
In 2002, he’d moved to New York from Miami to attend a Master's program in Music Technology at NYU. He should have simply moved to New York, he’s said, but he felt like he needed a reason to leave home so far behind.
I was born and raised in Brooklyn, though in a neighborhood of brick, not brownstone. In Midwood, there are no elegant stoops that feel as soft as silk. The front steps are brief, functional, sharp-edged. New York transplants have often never heard of it.
Instead of answering Travis, I knelt to greet Liam, who kept eating goldfish crackers, unfazed.
Travis’s question was only polite, really. After all, I had been writing this novel, my third, for three years; he was not expecting an answer of consequence. I’d finished my first novel at twenty-two and my second when I was thirty-four. Both times I’d signed with an agent. Neither book had sold.
This novel was about five generations of women in a Brooklyn family of firefighters. An Irish-American Joy Luck Club was how I planned to pitch it. The story was vast, protean, impossible to control in drafts. Publishable? I had no idea. I no longer had illusions that writing was a profession with dues to pay, and once that bill was settled, success would follow.
You don’t write for rescue. You aren’t saved by people you’ve made up.
I wondered often when I’d have to start calling myself a failed novelist. If the third one didn’t sell? The fifth? Only if I quit?
When I found out I was pregnant, I had about one-hundred coherent pages. I kept working on the book but instead of dashing off notes during quiet stretches at my administrative assistant job, I surfed the internet. I read owner’s manual articles about how to put on a diaper and how to swaddle, how to choose a name that can be easily spelled or one that nobody can spell. Most of all, I searched for “motherhood, writer”
This is what I learned:
You will have a baby and disappear.
You will not be able to think, for a single second, about anything but your baby.
The baby is going to be born with your soul in both hands.
It’s like being bitten by a vampire. You will have no reflection in any mirror.
But you won’t mind because you’ll have a baby!
Except I would mind. Very much. Throughout the pregnancy, I worried about what would become of me as a writer, given that even more than hours and minutes, you need passion and energy to do the work.
Adjusting to the world after writing was like leaving one climate and entering another.
Liam was born in February of 2010. When he was six months old, I began renting a desk at the Brooklyn Writers Space. Occasionally, I indulged in the fantasy that I would sell the book and we would brush off our debt like ash. But you don’t write for rescue. You aren’t saved by people you’ve made up.
At first, leaving was easy. I did not have to tell my baby where I was going on Saturday and Sunday mornings, the only two days that he was not in daycare. But my toddler wanted to know. I told him I was going writing. He repeated it back: Going to Writing, as if it were a place, and maybe it was to him. Maybe that way, it made sense.
I had been Going to Writing for Liam’s whole life. I think this is why I answered him, even though it was Travis who asked.
“I finished,” I said and squeezed Liam’s soft hand. He gazed at me and kept eating goldfish. I stood up and looked at Travis, who was astonished.
“You’re kidding?” he finally said.
I shook my head. “I finished.”
“Wow,” he said. “We can celebrate that, too.”
The three of us then walked to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Ghouls and Gourds festival. We celebrated. Halloween, a complete first draft, and the fact that 27 October 2012 was my fortieth birthday.
Finishing a novel was like reaching the horizon and finding that, beyond it, a whole new sea existed. There is writing; there is publishing. Averaging a book a decade as I was, I knew that. But whatever happened next, at least I could say I was both a writer and a parent.
I would never have to tell Liam that once upon a time his mother was a writer, but she lost the habit. She lost the hope. Because I wrote the book, I am in all the mirrors.
Kathleen Donohoe is the author of the novels Ghosts of the Missing and Ashes of Fiery Weather, which was named one of Book Riot’s 100 Must-Read New York City Novels. Her stories and essays have appeared in Web Conjunctions, NYU’s Washington Square, Harpur Palate, Irish America Magazine, and the anthology The Writing Irish of New York.
On her mother’s side of the family, Kathleen is a fifth-generation Brooklynite. Her paternal grandparents arrived from Ireland in the mid-1920s. All four of their sons, Kathleen’s father and uncles, joined the New York City Fire Department. Ashes of Fiery Weather, which is about the women of an FDNY family, is not based on her family but was certainly inspired by them.
Kathleen currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. Like most descendants of Dodger fans, she roots for the Mets.
