I Don't Know How I Do It
I Don't Know How I Do It
When I was younger, I used to try to make budgets, only to discover that I was somehow spending more money than I had, yet still putting money aside in a retirement account. It was like a magic act. The numbers stared back at me, allegedly infallible, but somehow I made it work. I put away 12 percent of my salary, I paid my mortgage, I avoided credit card debt, I was broke, I had new boots. It was like the old myth about the bumblebee, which is said to defy physics when it flies. (It doesn't.) http://www.snopes.com/science/bumblebees.asp
Now I feel the same way about time, only I knowI am profligate with time. I throw it down the rabbit hole of social media, I watch stupid television shows, I shower. Obviously, if something's going to go, it's the showers.
Last weekend, I decided to make a healthy dinner for my family, chicken thighs and Turkish chopped salad from Mel Jouwan's Well Fed, a cookbook for people who try to avoid grains and dairy. (I'm on what my trainer calls a reset.) At 4 p.m., my husband dropped me at the grocery store after a visit to his mother's house. I then walked home, a journey of maybe 20 minutes, figuring that being weighted down like a pack mule made it a workout of a sort. I diced a sweet potato, tossed it with coconut oil and spices, then put it in the oven. (Recipe here, https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1013488-coconut-oil-roasted-sweet-potatoes although I don't use the sugar.) Fifteen minutes later, I slid the chicken thighs http://meljoulwan.com/2016/04/17/basic-grilled-chicken-thighs/ into the oven, assuming I could make the Turkish chopped salad http://meljoulwan.com/2009/05/26/eat-your-vegetables-turkish-chopped-salad/ in the 35 minutes of cooking time. Wrong! My family sat down to chicken and sweet potatoes while I frantically chopped, finishing the salad five minutes later.
My husband then worked on a project with our little girl and put her to bed, while I set the kitchen to rights, something I find perversely enjoyable. By the time I finished, it was almost 9 p.m. And then the dishwasher started to leak, apparently because of the way I had stowed a pan and, well, by the time I sat down to watch Feud at 10 p.m., my only thought was: I picked a bad month to give up drinking. (See reset, above. I'm gathering data for an annual physical in 10 weeks time, curious to see what's really going on with my body as I age.)
I am achingly aware at my -- overused word alert -- privilege. Since my daughter was born, I have been able to afford to work fulltime and, for pre-k and kindergarten, a Montessori school. When I don't want to cook, I don't. If I'm wasting time, it's because I have time to waste. When I read, I can justify that it's "work." If I can't get it done, who can? Ah, but as the poets told us long ago, in dreams begin responsibility. If my books aren't as good as they should be, I can't blame my life. Or can I? I am forever haunted by a reader's casual observation that a certain writer's work suffered after she became a mom. I didn't agree, by the way, but I hated that the judgment, that way of thinking, was out there. I've certainly never heard that said about a man.
When I'm in that peculiar gap between books -- I won't begin the next one until I confront the copy-edits on the last one -- I can't imagine how I managed to write a book in a year's time, give or take. The math doesn't work, yet somehow it does. So I turn to other women writers. Here are some essays that help me wrestle, as so many women wrestle, with being a writer and a mom. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but reading them helped me figure out what I do think: The bumblebee may not defy physics, but every working woman just might, each in her own way. (H/T to Vulture.com, which included most of these links in one handy article this week, but I had already read them all. And I added the Heather Havrilesky piece to the mix.)
Rufi Thorpe: http://velamag.com/mother-writer-monster-maid/
Lauren Sandler: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/the-secret-to-being-both-a-successful-writer-and-a-mother-have-just-one-kid/276642/
Kim Brooks: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/04/portrait-motherhood-creativity-c-v-r.html
Heather Havrilesky https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/the-sound-of-bravado/490754/
I'd tell you the novel I've read recently, but I can't because I was very rude about it in a Twitter subtweet. I did re-read Celebrity, the glorious Tommy Thompson novel that doesn't seem to know it's a soap opera, but maybe it does. (It was definitely a big influence on Wilde Lake, fyi.) And I'm sure I read other stuff, but it was Mardi Gras and some of February passed in a purple (green, gold) haze.
Laura Lippman
March 2017