Summer Writing while Caregiving (It's no Joke)
An addendum to last week (and what they can do instead)
Last week I wrote a post about different summer writing vibes. Later that afternoon, I met with a client who kind of laughed and said something to the effect of I loved your last post, but it also made me mad/sad. I am super excited about my book but also have to drop off and pick up two kids from summer camp every day. I so want to be writer 3, but who has the time?
That night, I had dinner with one of my graduate school best friends. “I’m so busy, but with what?? School’s out, so it’s all kids all the time.”
What kind of summer writer can you be when you’re balancing three different camp schedules and ballet lessons and a midwest trip to see your partner’s Aunt Bess? An awesome one—we just have to do it differently.
Creativity while parenting
As fate would have it, on the train ride home from dinner with my friend, I stumbled on an episode of the #amwriting podcast where the host and her guest were debating whether Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic* or Twila Tharp’s The Creative Habit were more effective writing guides. I have strong feelings about Twila Tharp. Someone gave me her book several years ago, and I hate-read the whole thing while trying not to throw it across the room.
Tharp, a dancer and choreographer, prescribes a seriousness of purpose and a habit of mind that were critical to her ability to create at such a high level. You get the feeling that she’s staring at the void of a blank canvas, or in her case striving to impose discipline and virtue on a blank stage. But my stage is NEVER blank. It’s covered in legos and homework assignments and sharpie drawings of unicorn pigs on the walls and kids that need to tell me poop jokes in the middle of Zoom calls.
It’s filled with sick babysitters and editing til midnight and waking up to write at 5 am only to have a toddler crawl out of bed and demand to watch Daniel Tiger (who should be banned until at least sunrise). It’s reaching for your favorite notebook and finding it covered in homeopathic cough syrup, whatever that even is. It’s deciding to write, or create, anyway—even through the mess. When I read Tharp’s prescription for living a creative life, I felt like she was definitionally excluding people like me from ever engaging in a meaningful way with the creative world.
A few years after I read The Creative Habit, I started taking writing classes with the brilliant Janelle Hanchett. and I loved how she would talk about making time for writing in the context of familial chaos, because the two worlds aren’t separate. She has four kids. She knows this shit is hard. Instead of lecturing us about discipline of habit, she reminded us that Toni Morrison wrote every morning before dawn so she could raise her kids.
Janelle talked about how she skipped family movie nights and let dishes become someone else’s problem to finish her book. This felt a lot more like me. Her classes, her model, made me think that parents of young kids could be writers—and that it was also ok not to be writer when you had three super small kids, you could just write and figure out what you wanted to do with that writing later.
*Big Magic is all woo. It’s kind of fun, but you don’t want too much rubbing off on you.
Shoestring Travelers
Anyway, all of this musing made me realize that my post last week was incomplete. It even excluded myself — I have 72 days left this summer without consistent childcare (but who’s counting?) because camp in Brooklyn would run us about $1500 A WEEK, and I’m not a fancy enough editor to pull that off. I am not a glamper (though I’ll take the wine), or a weekend warrior with a set agenda and purpose, and for damn sure not a backcountry adventurer, spending the whole summer lost in the wilderness with my book. If anything, I fit into a new category, that I invite all of the other writers with caregiving responsibilities to join me in: the shoestring travelers.
Your philosophy: Diminished time and resources just makes you scrappy and nimble.
Your approach to writing: You know how when you turn over a needlepoint you can see all of the messiness that went into creating that amazing work? It’s like that. You might be scanning poetry at soccer games or thinking about independent variables standing in line at Disney, but it all gets done in the end.
The strategy: You need to beg, borrow, and steal time and then protect it—and do that for everything that’s important to you. Here are a few ways people with caretaking responsibilities can write anyway:
You time: 5 am, 10 pm, nap time - whenever the house is quiet and yours, those are your writing hours. Protect them. No email, just coffee (or wine) and your writing.
Every yes is a no, every no is a yes. In order to protect that time and space, say no to things that don’t serve you — a lot. Every time you say no to a service commitment or a “quick favor,” it is saying yes to your family and your kids. And every time you say NO to something, it’s opening up time, space, mental energy for you to say yes to something you need in the future.
DIY retreats: Go on airbnb or hotels.com. Find somewhere easy to get to from your house and book two nights. Go there. Order Thai food and wine from Doordash. Write. Your family will order pizza and be fine. You’ll get an incredible amount done when you don’t have to read Goodnight, Moon for the twelfth time. Or, send your kids and your partner off to visit their parents for the weekend, and take back your house, order Thai and wine, and write in bed.
Longer retreats: Give yourself the gift of community, and make it count. Find a retreat that fits your timeframe, lifestyle, and budget, and go all in. (We’ll have exciting news about that soon.)
So, all of my fellow parents who have suddenly found school out for summer living in a country that provides no care three months of the year but also expects parents to keep working…I see you. It’s tough down here in these trenches. But we can do it - we can string together enough stolen hours and nights away to write something brilliant.
And with that, tomorrow I am going to finish hosting a writing retreat and drive my kids and Squirtle the Turtle (we’re summer turtle sitting, apparently) down to Austin just in time for a triple-digit heatwave, stopping in North Carolina for a dear friend’s wedding on the way. I’ve made some big writing commitments to myself, and I’ll let you know in July if I met them. There are a lot of shoestring traveler vibes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
A Few Announcements!
NEW! Writers’ Circles coming this fall! (These are starting to fill for the fall and the spring-apply now!).
Do you have new colleagues joining your department or a colleague going on sabbatical that could use some accountability? Please share this with them!
I’ve spent the past few months designing something I think you’ll really be excited about: semester-long Writers’ Circles. When I shared a survey asking what you thought the writing world was missing, you overwhelmingly responded that we needed more places for community building, feedback, and accountability. Let’s build those structures together.
In small groups of no more than eight, we’ll come together to set goals, create support and accountability structures, and workshop your work through weekly Zoom calls (scheduled around the group’s schedule), co-writing sessions, and private Slack groups.
If you have a writing project that you need to focus on this fall, join us! More information here, and the application form is here. And please - tell your friends and colleagues!
Working together this fall!
While we’re on the subject of the fall—if you have a project that you could use some help with, now is a great time to get on my calendar. I am fully booked through August (as always, you are all amazing—thank you!) and the fall is starting to get busy as well. I’m always happy to schedule a 30-minute call to see how we can work together in the future!
Thank you so much for this post. I am in the same situation as yours (but with daycare during the summer) and it is so difficult to find and protect time to write with 2 young kids (5 and 3). Thanks to share