Road Trip

When a writer friend invited me on a road trip with her, I impulsively said yes. It would be part fun, part work, reminiscent of the days when my job sent me to a conference for a few days. She picked me up at home, and we took off toward our destination. The first twenty-four hours were the most relaxing I have had in several months. We drank wine, dipped spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream from the container, and shared stories on a range of topics from lucrative part-time jobs to strippers (Hmmm....that might sound misleading....). The next morning, we slept until we woke up. We eased into the kind of parallel play that writers do: reading, writing, and drinking tea or coffee, interspersed with conversation. We went out to lunch, debating whether a long walk or a nap would come next.

Somewhere along the way, after breakfast but before lunch, I said, out loud, this feels so good.

Then came the phone call from school, and the self-doubt. What was I thinking? Can I ever get a break? What makes me think I can be a writer and a mom? Is she going to be okay? Do I need to go home? Am I a bad mom?

I did return home, the next day, one day earlier than planned. There was nothing I could do that my husband could not do for the kids. I didn't set to work making comfort food; we ordered pizza for dinner, and I set up my binder to copy the day's Anna Karenina pages while we waited for the delivery guy. The next morning, my husband made omelets for all of us. The kids cleaned their rooms and did laundry. I finally packed up the Christmas ornaments.

Is it a coincidence that I am reading a book called Bad Mother, by Ayelet Waldman, who was criticized for admitting to loving her husband more than her children. I highlighted my favorite passage: "There is nothing sexier to a woman with children than a man holding a Swiffer." This is where I confess to never cleaning the bathroom. My husband does it most of the time; when he is not available, I pay my youngest daughter five bucks to do it.

I know how lucky I am. Not only because someone else cleans my toilet, but also because I have the luxury of being home for my kids and my work. And yet, there is something I long for that I rarely get: uninterrupted time. When I was a single mom, I worked ten and twelve hours days when my kids were with their dad. When they were with me, I was home by the time they got off the bus. I was able to set up my time so that I could focus on either my work or my kids and home. But with writing, there is no separation. You will quite often finding me writing or reading alongside my kids while they do homework. This does not, I realize, count as me helping them with their homework. I cannot claim any credit for helping my daughter with her science fair project. But as I often tell my kids, I have already been through seventh grade. When did being a good mom come to mean giving up my own work so that I could help them finish theirs? If you read the Little House books, Ma was doing her own work, mending and churning butter, while Laura read to the family. Ma's priority was feeding and clothing her family. If Laura wanted to learn to read, that was her job. What would the public say about a mom who chose her writing over her children? Is there any work a woman does that can compete with being a mother? Is it possible to be a good at both?

My friend emailed me this morning to see how I was. I told her that I knew I had made the right decision, coming home, not because there was anything for me to do but because my daughter needed me to be here.

She responded: "I don’t know how we navigate this weirdly strange road of artist mother, and I suppose that there is not a narrow path either. That there are as many ways as there are artists or mothers and that finding our own way is the hard thing because a road map would be so fucking nice."

Imagine this: the ability to plug a completed, published manuscript into a GPS that gives me an exact route, with detours for traffic jams and other obstacles. I know this is never going to happen. I have to write and live the way I drive, turning left at an intersection, knowing that it means I will never know what would have happened if I had turned right.

 

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