That other self was a fiction anyhow

On being a parent and a writer.

On the counter behind the kitchen sink is a half-potted plant. A Christmas cactus I bought at Ikea during a long, difficult winter where blooming things seemed the only solution to the problem of darkness. And it was a good solution for a while, though this particular cactus hasn’t bloomed in at least two years.

I started my potting project a few weekends ago and, though I imagine I will finish it eventually, there’s no telling how long that half-potted cactus will sit there, listing gently to the left, while life clatters on around it. I managed to get the philodendron into a new pot, which is a win because it had been sitting in almost no soil for months. My children kept grabbing it on the way to the change table and knocking it to the floor. Each time, a little less soil survived until it was just a ball of roots tucked into a pot. (This is the plant my friends gave me when I moved into the hospital at 26 weeks pregnant so it has always done a lot of symbolic heavy lifting when it comes to surviving against the odds.)

Now the change table is gone—moved out of the dining room into the bedroom and, wow, does it feel good to eat further away from the diaper bin. The philodendron sits high out of the reach of grabby hands and at least this one thing in our home has been set right. Everything else remains in a state of indefinite transition. The transition from what to what, I’m not totally sure. Maybe from the home we have as dictated by the needs of two toddlers to the home I imagined having as an adult—a home which is orderly and stylish, where all the plants are healthy and have the right amount of soil.

Lately I’m struggling to inhabit this life in which everything feels half-finished, pushed aside, in limbo, waiting.

I spent the summer writing—joyfully trucking along on a book proposal—and then in September classes began and my kids started daycare and the writing stopped in a dramatic foot-on-the-brakes, slammed-against-the-seat-back kind of way. There were lunches to pack, meetings to attend. 

Sam, my agent, sent the book proposal to a handful of publishers several weeks ago and now it, too, is in limbo. Which is just fine, I tell myself, because so many other things need doing. When, exactly, would I write anyway? But I long to write. Sometimes the longing feels like it’s taking over my mind.

A few nights ago I dreamed that Sam called to say that he couldn’t sell the book but someone at Simon & Schuster wanted to include a single chapter of it in an anthology they were publishing. “Great,” I said, “which chapter?” 

“The one about the shipwreck and the dragons,” he told me. 

“Right,” I said, trying very hard to remember which chapter of this memoir was about dragons.

“Don’t worry,” the anthology’s editor said when she heard the confusion in my voice. “I’ve got plenty of notes for you.” She overnighted me a tote bag with a legal pad full of scribbles, some photocopied drawings of dragons, and eleven different highlighters. On the phone, Sam told me that he’d gotten some swag too: a folding commuter bicycle and a crop-top hoodie. 

This, I guess, is how badly my subconscious wants to write. I will give you a dragon story in exchange for eleven highlighters! You can pay my agent in crop-tops!

I’ve been reading playwright Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write* and thinking about what it means to be both a parent and a writer. 

Ruhl writes, “There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at the theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over.” I remember this exact moment: lying flat on the ultrasound table, slick with goo, thinking, I’ll never write again. 

I assumed I would have this thought once and then, slowly, life would start to right itself and I would come back to the person—the writer—I once was. But this has not turned out to be the case. Instead, the thought is more like the chorus in a pop song, a refrain that keeps circling back: my writing life is over; I’ll never write again.

“There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me,” Ruhl continues, “…and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.” 

I thought of this line last weekend, as one of my children was throwing books in my lap shouting “Mama read it! Mama read it” while the other mantled up my torso and onto the back of the couch with a plastic bulldozer in one hand and a dump truck in the other, shouting “No read it, mama! No read it!” 

I thought of it again on Wednesday evening, when someone puked right on the dinner table, not ten minutes after Mark had left the house on his bike. As I tried to soothe the sick toddler while also stopping the dog from eating the puke, which was full of raisins which would then make the dog sick, I thought: maybe I have not quite come to terms with my annihilation. 

I began this project thinking about a very specific kind of loneliness. Let’s call it the loneliness of comfort, or of success. The loneliness of the American Dream. Of white, western, middle-class individualism. The loneliness of not being needed by anyone. I was interested in the ways that The Good Life I’d been striving for—the one with a room of my own and plenty of time to write—turned out to be hollow at its core. 

But this isn’t a kind of loneliness I experience much these days. That loneliness has been replaced by two toddlers and their ceaseless needs. They have annihilated my loneliness and also the story I told myself about who I was as a person and a writer. As Ruhl says, that other self was a fiction anyhow. 

I keep thinking about what it would look like, what it would mean, to accept the annihilation, to write from within it. The thing about this kind of annihilation that we never discuss is—

[interruption to go sing the elevator song to my son so he will stop squirming long enough for Mark to wash the poop off his butt in the bathroom sink]

—the annihilation is—

[There’s a call from the other room, it’s my other son holding a block to his ear. “Hello?” he says. “Hello?” I say, grabbing another block and lifting it to my ear. He waits. I take a guess: “Is this the washing machine repairman?” He nods. “I need some work done on my washing machine,” I say, “Do you have an extra hose?” “Yeah,” he assures me. “Can you fix it?” I ask. “Yeah,” he nods solemnly.]**

The thing we don’t talk about is that this annihilation is beautiful. It is this miraculous, painful, exhausting thing. But what a thing! 

One reason I was so wary of parenthood is that I was afraid—terrified—of annihilation. I could only see it as a loss. It’s funny, given that I’ve made a career of trying to understand love, that I got this part so wrong. I don’t actually want to be the person I was before having kids. I have been (continue to be) undone and remade by them and this fact is not merely inconvenient; it is also remarkable. 

It seems to me that this is what’s missing from the conversation about whether one can be both a mom and a writer or a mom with a job (or, in my case, both). No one ever acknowledges what a loss it would be to miss out on the annihilation—to be the kind of parent (a dad, in most cases) who has never been undone and remade by the demands of love and care. When I think about the men who don’t take parental leave, who work right through the first days and weeks and months of their kids’ lives, who manage, thanks to the domestic and caretaking labor of others, to keep going despite it all, I feel a very specific kind of grief for them. I thought I wanted to be like them. But I was wrong.

I don’t want to romanticize the work of care. Or to suggest that women and birthing parents benefit from the burden of doing a (very) disproportionate share of that work. Nor do I want to imply that having kids comes with some special moral reward or that being a parent is the only form of care that can annihilate. I only want to suggest that maybe—maybe—our narratives of what a creative life should be like really overvalue coherence. Why not fragmentation, interruption, annihilation? Why not let the story of what it means to be a writer, the conditions under which that writing is produced, and the writing itself be shaped by the actual demands of our lives? Why not find, when and where it is available, aesthetic value within those conditions?

That orderly and stylish home I dream of—where all the plants are potted and thriving—has no baby gates. And it also has no babies. I used to live in that home and I do not any more. And that life, with its abundant time for writing, contained within it a story about what happiness was supposed to feel like—like freedom, like breathing room, like a clear head and a lack of obligation—but I could not understand why the story never quite felt true. And now I see: it’s because it was not true. Not for me at least.

To be clear, I still long for those things, for space to think and create. But Ruhl has me thinking: What if I just gave up on that longing? What if I stopped trying to be the writer I was? And I stopped thinking of all the things that are in limbo as being in limbo and started thinking of them as the substance of a creative life? 

What would it look like to live in this state of annihilation and also write?*** 

I honestly don’t know the answer. But I like the question. It keeps ringing in my head like a bell. 

Yours,

Mandy

PS: Here’s something good you can do today. 

* As recommended to me by Suzannah Showler, who I interviewed at the Vancouver Public Library recently, and whose weird, beautiful new novel you should definitely read.

** I’m borrowing this structure from Ruhl’s essay, “On interruptions.” But also these were the actual interruptions as I tried to sneak in a few minutes with my laptop while Mark dressed the boys for daycare on Tuesday. 

*** One answer, maybe, is that it looks like Lenka Clayton’s manifesto, in which she writes that she would like to imagine the roles of mother and artist “not as competing directions but to view them, force them gently if necessary, to inform one another.”