Becoming a parent is hard. Eight to 12 hours a day are spent breastfeeding or preparing formula milk and washing bottles. In addition, there is carrying, singing, soothing, putting to sleep, trying to sleep yourself and waking up to repeat this several times a night. So many new activities that before were unknown, filling up every day.
This is time that was once completely at your own discretion, and the new constriction is a shock.
But – after the necessary physical and mental healing – it is also what can make parents become creative about their use of time: being a parent can make you more productive by using the gaps in the daily routine. While enhancing productivity is a trope of self-optimisation content, this is not a capitalistic productivity. Caring for a baby can feel like a remove from the self previously constructed. To me, writing felt like an alleviation of this loss of self. Simply draft a paragraph, a few sentences, get on with a text as a means to stimulate the insufficiently challenged mind.
“I write in the small pockets of time that exist in between everything else,” says the Swedish writer Johanne Lykke Naderehvandi, when asked in a documentary what she needs for writing. She has four children and has published three novels since 2020. She needs to be surrounded by sounds, she says. The noise of a child playing or a baby breathing is like a reminder that the moment for work is fleeting.
At the 2022 Berlin literature festival, the Colombian writer Pilar Quintana talked about how she wrote a large part of her novel, The Bitch (about a woman who is involuntarily childless), in the notes app of her phone, typing while breastfeeding or holding her baby. When she copied the text into a document, she was surprised by the high word count of the work that she had done on the side.
Sitting around holding a sleeping baby is an experience of being unfree. If you move, the baby might wake up. The impossibility of doing anything else made me feel like a captive. Being stuck in a reclined posture, thoughts could race to obsess over insecurities, or they could be focused on creating fiction, an alternative reality under my control.
It is the opposite of a serious routine, the opposite of a room of your own. But there is an element of lightness about producing work in this way.
A whole, empty day solely for work can feel daunting. But who can feel such pressure when there is only a period of about 30 minutes in which the child might be content and calm being left on a blanket on the floor? Before parenthood this would seem too short. But, with a child, half an hour can suddenly become a window of usable time (as long as you are able to forget the other tasks, such as cleaning the house or sleeping, or eating, or showering).
The US writer Kate Zambreno describes such scenes in her memoir, The Light Room, which recounts how she and her partner worked as lecturers and writers throughout the pandemic with two small children: “As I’m writing the above passage, the baby wakes up on my lap.” Then, a few sentences later: “I put my nipple in her mouth so I can continue thinking.”
In My Work, the Danish writer Olga Ravn focuses on the messiness of a new mother’s thinking, the inability to write coherently, and the necessity to scribble down notes that lack any kind of legibility.
The fragmentary access to time can affect the form of the work that emerges from parenthood. Ravn’s protagonist is struggling with herself and with writing. Consequently her book, like several of the novels on early motherhood, is made up of paragraphs, blocks of thoughts, notes. There, the production of the work and the work itself become a reflection of the experience.
Because, early on, working can simply be impossible. My friend edited her book in the first three months of her second child’s life. She took the sleeping baby to a nearby cafe and was able to work for two hours. I thought this would be me with my second child. I remembered how my first child would play happily on the floor for an hour in the mornings while I could write. But it did not happen. The second birth was too hard to go to a cafe, the baby’s sleep too irregular, I was too tired. And parental productivity comes at the expense of time to relax, time alone, time without anything to do.
When, in The Light Room, one of Zambreno’s students suggests to her some idle activity, she notes: “There is nothing more foreclosed to her than such free time – with children, with students, with deadlines – and yet nothing more desired.” Time, for parents with young children, will never be a resource unused.
Tania Roettger is a journalist based in Berlin
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