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.