Disruptions and Difficulties

I’m feeling a bit rushed today. It’s spring break and we’re not going anywhere, which means that everyone is home and a little bit in each other’s spaces. With three kids, even as independent as mine are, there aren’t that many uninterrupted blocks of time. And over the years, I’ve found that it takes twenty minutes of winding down time before I can even think about getting some writing done. So it’s hard, when kids are bursting in and out, to collect my thoughts.

Friends are constantly telling me about the writing habits of successful authors they’ve read about. Did you know such and such does this? And did you know so and so does that? All I can think of is a quote about parenting that I read a long time ago. I must have read it somewhere, because I hand wrote it on an index card and put it on my pantry door. It goes like this:

“It’s the golden rule of parenting. Lie. Lie to the mothers on the street, to the people who ask how you did it. When they ask about sleep, or feeding, or toilet training, lie. Tell them you never had the least trouble.”

I’m not sure what the context was, but I found it so useful over the years, when some older, more advanced mother would tell me something like, “Oh, I just mashed up bananas and fed them those!” or, “When it’s time for potty training, it’s time! Your kids will let you know.”

I don’t think those parents are lying on purpose. But they’re not remembering the whole story.

Because as I age, I could say those same things about my kids. My eldest did love mashed bananas. But she also didn’t quite get the hang of the chewing thing, leading to a lot of coughing and back-slapping, and eventually, to my current twitchiness which led me to purchase an anti-choking device that my children affectionately call “The Throat Vacuum.”

And yes, the twins did let me know that it was time for potty training. During Christmas week, they refused to wear diapers at only 2 1/2 years old. We were in the middle of holiday craziness, so I spent a hectic week squatting over other peoples’ toilets, hands under their armpits, keeping tiny bottoms from falling into the water. If they’d only waited a week, I could have ordered one of those portable kids’ toilet seats, but noooooo, when it was time, it was time!

These days, those hardships have (almost) faded from my mind. I am sure that in another decade, I’ll spout the same platitudes. It’s the same way with writing. As soon as a manuscript is done, I start to forget the hours spent on researching dead ends or the endless rewrites that make me doubt my sanity. And I know that, in the same way every parent has had very different, yet very similar struggles to mine, every author has their own difficulties. Whether or not they talk about them publicly.

One of my favorite authors, Madeline L’Engle, writes these delightful memoirs about how difficult it was to write and do all of the other things she was expected to do - as a mother, as a community member, as a wife. There were too many demands on her time and she’s very clear and unapologetic about the difficulties. She struggled, like many of us do, to access her creativity while meeting the needs of the people she loved. She couldn’t jump into and out of writing as though it were a pair of rain boots.

I appreciate her. I appreciate her honesty and I appreciate that even though her struggles happened half a century ago, they’re not so different than the ones we face today. Mostly I appreciate that not everyone tells you “they never had the least trouble.”