Twenty something years ago, I was sitting in a living room with an infant. Much of the time he and I were alone. I adored him, but this was early on. It was less an interactive arrangement than me trying to anticipate what I didn’t understand at the time, were very simple needs. I was adjusting to life as a mother the way I did most things — feeling utterly inadequate and also completely, unjustifiably overconfident.
“You only have to be good enough,” my therapist told me. It was wonderful advice, but I didn’t ever feel good enough about anything. And it wasn’t from lack of trying.
Long before Covid, way before my son was born, I was working from home as a freelance editor of sociology textbooks. Most of my work was done from my literal laptop. Cup on the coffee table, orange tabby curled precariously near the keyboard, my workday happened as the sun crossed the living room. It suited me. Until the pandemic that is. In my case, quarantine was another way of saying, let’s all move into Mommy’s office and demand constant snacks!
But I get ahead of myself. I was a new mother also working on a new novel back then in suburbia. A woman raises her kids in a gated community, drowns beneath a kind but benignly negligent husband, along with his recently widowed mother. Relax, it was fiction. Mostly.
In the beginning, honeymoon married and excited to love someone else, I put my writing aside though no one asked me to. If writing is the primary barrier that keeps you this side of sanity, you don’t give it up easily. I picked up the pen again.
I am a seat-of-my-pants kind of writer. The story unfolds while I sit, the voice swirls, taps itself to life without much thought. Writing has been the only safe road in my mind for as long as I can remember. That sort of chatter-free thinking is a safe spot where I have all the confidence I can’t seem to lift from the page.
Let’s go back again that 20 years ago. My son was asleep in his carseat on the table in the living room. The house was as clean as I was ever going to make it. The laundry was full and churning. I’d found a corner of an idea of a chapter that had been plaguing me. I didn’t want to let it go. Or it wouldn’t let me. It’s hard to tell.
I heard my son cry, but I was turning a corner on a plot I thought was more essential. I was typing, aware of the rhythm of his sobbing. It got worse. It got better and then I was just going to finish one sentence…
By the time I looked into my son’s swaddled face I was horrified. I lifted him up and unpeeled the blanket from him slowly. He’d wet himself and was full of so much diarrhea I wondered where he’d housed it in the first place. Shame embedded its way into both of our folds as I cleaned him up. I was determined never to let that happen again.
I trained myself to concentrate on the surface in tiny increments of time and became good at it. I could zip in and out of any scene; any thought really. After all, isn’t that what a mother does? The better ones of us, anyway. In the meantime my son doesn’t seem to have sustained any lasting damage. At least none I can trace to that moment. Ultimately, or at least so far, it seems I was good enough.
The nature of these Kate Chronicle pieces are compatible with everyone’s shrinking attention span, including my own, but I have a bear of a novel I’m working on, which is different altogether. In their early twenties now, I no longer have to worry about my children’s shit. For large swathes of time, I’m by myself again. Unless you count the dogs.
Instead of starting in the middle of the story, I took a shot at a prequel for this work in progress. I wanted to amp up the stakes, show the devastation instead of looking back on it. You know, drama. I sat in front of the screen once more, figuring I’d work for a half hour.
Like a piece of raw clay, the magic conduit of my fingers began to tap. I offered the breath of life to my characters once again. I outlined even though I knew I’d never refer to it. When I looked up again because my bladder was restless, it was 2:30. I’d sat down at 10:00.
For four and a half blissful hours, the rest of my world fell away. I remembered that shameful moment with my son all those years ago, while I went to get a snack and take a stretch.
The circumstances are different now. I don’t have to shut it down because someone is hurt, hungry, or in need of a ride. Though I recognize my “flow state” as the reason I began writing in the first place, I’d forgotten it was an option. Meditation aside, writing inside that womb is the closest I feel to a power greater than myself — being one and having one, and boy have I missed it.
Not that I have any regrets. It is a special kind of pain to have a parent that can’t drag themselves up from their own bliss in order to see you. I was in the trenches with my boys, stepping away from a thought, or a purpose or a song when they needed me to. I’m not claiming to have been a great mom, nor did I do it for them, but I was just good enough. In the meantime, if you’re looking for me, I’ll be in the zone, hoping my writing is good enough as well.
To hear this story read by the slightly Brooklyn accented author, click here.
