Bibliography: Screaming on the Inside

This one was partly for research, but partly for funsies. Inasmuch as reading about how thoroughly this countries fails parents is fun, I mean.

Often, even if we know our own boundaries and set them, maintaining them takes extra time and work as we push against society’s expectations.

I wrote quite a lot on the subject of boundaries when I gave Burnout and the Cult of Busy as a conference talk, and I imagine it’s gonna come up pretty frequently in the new book, too. This is one of the many difficult things about setting boundaries, that other people are so resistant to them and it feels like you just have to keep resetting them.

Toddler Scraps

My toddler gives me scraps. I made a sandwich, for me, which he commandeered and then offered the crusts back. He gives me scraps of food, scraps of time, little scraps of brain space.

Hustle culture and caregiving don’t go together. Kids, little kids particularly, demand a lot of brain space, and the time that they require is totally non-negotiable. They need food, and diaper changes, and Mickey put on the TV, and attention, and they have questions, and usually these things come rapid fire in 10 second intervals. Our big kid, who will be 7 soon, is a lot more capable of entertaining himself and acquiring snacks of questionable nutritional value on his own these days. But the toddler needs me, often.

Aside from just the actual time spent on tasks, he also needs me to respond to a thousand statements and questions and thoughts of his own every day, because I’m supposed to be teaching him things. All of these little pings – Where is the blue car? This one is Chuggington. Look, a bird! Sing itsy bitsy – they’re all opportunities for him to learn, and they also make it nearly impossible for me to organize a thought. He is always talking, it’s how he organizes his own thoughts about the world. I remember reading an essay on early parenthood that said something like “tried to fold laundry, but meat suit has forgotten shapes.” I often feel kinship with meat suit, although I think I’ve kept my grasp on rectangles. My brain is a busy space, these days, and it doesn’t lend itself to a lot of analytical thought.

These things are on my mind because I’m trying to write a book, and I know I’m not the first parent on this planet to have accomplished such a thing, so I know that it’s possible. But I also know it’s a difficult thing to do in scraps. It’s a thing done best with chunks of focused time, which is something toddlers simply cannot allow. It’s actually taken me weeks to even write this little rambling blog post. There seem to be two options for the brave souls who have attempted this anyway.

The first is to just put in more hours. Once you’re off the clock for caregiving (i.e., your child has fallen asleep) you work into the wee hours, or maybe you wake up in the wee hours well before them. You add on another 2, or 3, or 5 hours onto your day. Which is hustle culture gold. The rise and grind crew go nuts for this kind of advice, simply wake up at 3am and work until your kids get up at 7am. If you want a thing badly enough, you’ll ignore your body when it says it needs rest or food or anything, really. They don’t have a ton of advice for what you’re supposed to do when 3pm rolls around, though, and you’ve been awake and working for 12 hours and you still have 5 hours until you can even consider starting bedtime. Wait, it’s summer, make that 6 hours. It’s fine, though, if you go to sleep immediately after they do, you can still squeak in 6 hours of sleep before you do it all again tomorrow.

Whether it’s because of the RA or just my general nature as a human, giving up sleep time isn’t a great option for me. In the short term I can push through, but things start unraveling quickly, and again, it puts my brain in a space that doesn’t really allow much in the way of deep or analytical thinking. Brain wants sleep. My brain is even more useless late at night after the kids are asleep, after a full day of nonstop sensory input. Brain wants quiet.

So the other option is having child care. This is an area that I wish more people were really honest about. Many people who create something great – authors, painters, entrepreneurs – aren’t quick to point to child care as something that allowed them to do their work. There was a kerfuffle about who was doing Thoreau’s laundry (his mom did). And it’s easy to say, who the hell cares? He wrote great books, what does it matter who cooked his dinner or washed his clothes? But writing great works is a great deal easier when someone else is handling the more mundane aspects of day to day life (cleaning the house, washing the clothes, cooking the food, watching the kids.) This kind of work is largely unpaid, which isn’t a thing that hustle culture values, even as it completely relies on it. Caregivers actually do a ton of hustling, all day long, but they don’t draw a paycheck. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for people to ask these questions, and to give recognition to the people who allow them to do what they do. I asked Austin Kleon how he went about going on a book tour when he had small children, and he was very honest about only being able to do such a thing because his wife was caring for those small children while he was away (he also wrote a bit about Thoreau’s laundry). I’ve also seen Melanie Lynskey thanking her nanny in an award speech, because how could she do her work without knowing that her kids were being well cared for? So there is more recognition of this, publicly, than there used to be. But there are also still parents saying “jeez, how do they do it all?” only to find out that they are not, actually, doing it all. Seeing that these people had help breaks the illusion that you’re the only one who can’t keep a house clean, mother children, feed a family, and also write the great American novel all at the same time.

Because this is our second rodeo, I know that we’re in a difficult spot currently, but that things will get easier. As our little guy gets older, he’ll spend a little more time doing his own thing, and cultivating his own deeper thoughts about railroad layouts and imaginative play. He’ll be in preschool a few days a week to learn about socializing with kids he isn’t related to. But for right now, his brain is absolutely exploding, which is amazing for his development and also keeps us very busy. For right now, I’m doing research while he’s away at my mom’s, taking notes in the scraps of time where he’s occupied. But I’m going to be sleeping at 3am, thanks.

We have a blog.

I haven’t kept a blog up in what feels like a million years. But I’m writing a new book, and I wanted to have an outlet for some things that are too long for twitter.

I kept putting this off, because writing a first post seemed like so much pressure! What kind of tone should I set, what sort of content will end up here, how often will I update it, etc. There’s a bit in my first book that I love especially, that says “you can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.” Usually when I write anything, I start in the middle. Introductions feel so difficult, so I just skip them until I have an idea of what I’m writing and can go back to it. So I’ll just do that. Write a middle post.

I took the kids for a hike. It was a cub scouts requirement for Johnny (he’s 6, nearly 7). Hank, 2, tagged along and dad stayed home sick. It was one of those trips with kids that’s kind of magical and great, while also being just a wall to wall disaster. We started our trek with almost no water, because Johnny had… drank it, I hope? I’d filled up a sports type bottle before we left, and it was nearly empty when we arrived. It could be all over the floor of our van, I lacked the will to investigate. Hank, obviously, fell asleep in the van on the drive there. He barely registered me moving him into his stroller.

We hiked. We looked for different animals and plants, per our scout badge requirements. Tigers in the Wild, I think. Johnny pushed his brother along. He insists on pushing the stroller in a serpentine pattern, as though we’re being hunted. Going down a sort of washed out hill, he dumps the stroller over entirely, with a sleeping Hank inside. I am not gracious about it, Hank is surprisingly chill to be woken up so abruptly, sideways in the gravel. We press on, because Johnny wants to see the creek, and I know there’s an inlet close.

I had intended on just checking out the creek, but as soon as we laid eyes on it, I could tell that Johnny was absolutely dying to put his feet in there. He didn’t want to ask for anything, since he had just rolled his brother, but he was intensely excited. And I, a moron, really thought the kids would simply dip their toes in politely and that would be it. Hank doesn’t even really like to get into water, generally, but he was fully sitting in the creek. Pretending that rocks were fishies, while his decidedly non-swim diaper ballooned ever larger. Johnny splashed through the creek, made potions out of mud and leaves, and threw the biggest rocks he could lift into the water. This part of our hike was honestly lovely, the kids were so thrilled.

And then I noticed some people hovering nearby on the trail. I thought “if they’re waiting for these kids to leave, they may as well just come on down, because it’s gonna be a while.” They didn’t. After a few minutes, I saw runners come through, and the hovering people threw colored powder at them. We had wandered into a color run, which meant I would have to somehow return these completely soaking wet children to our van… through a color run. Does this stuff stain? I’d never done one. Surely I’d have to wash it out of the kids’ hair, and they hate that. I’d mentally arrived at “fuck it, let’s get colorful” when the rain started.

The kids were already soaked, but I had managed to stay dry throughout our little creek excursion. Now I was pushing a stroller along with wet hair and fogged up glasses that kept sliding off of my face. The kids ran down the trail, Hank’s diaper threatening to explode as he bounced along. We were the better part of a mile away from where we’d parked, but Johnny ran almost the whole way. I stripped the little guy down, and some unsuspecting teenage bikers walked into a disheveled lady trying to wrangle her naked toddler while folding up a jogging stroller covered in mud. I got the little guy into a new diaper, but I saw him making his mad face at me in the mirror and asked him why. “Pants,” he said. “You’re mad because you don’t have pants?” He was. But when we got home, dad put the guys in a warm bath and got them jammies, and everything was great again.

This weekend is the scout campout, and I’m sure that will all go very smoothly.