Back to life, back to reality

Today my 4-year-olds each got a piece of much-awaited mail: the letters from their soon-to-be PreK teachers, welcoming them to their respective classrooms. They start Thursday. It’s official! Summer is over and the school year is almost underway. (Cue Hallelujah Chorus.)

We had an extremely dynamic summer. To recap: For a lot of the summer, including nearly all of August, Wes and I were operating with two full-time jobs and no organized childcare. I won’t go into all that again, but I’ll add the extra detail that my employer is in the middle of some major cultural changes that have meant I had to be more present and focused at work than usual, while also being more present and focused at home. The kids are high-energy and are at risk-taking, boundary-pushing stages where their physical confidence significantly outstrips their physical agility. They have extremely robust social networks, their friends are constantly knocking on the door or asking about playdates (which have to be supervised). And of course dinner had to be cooked every. single. night. All week. Every week. All summer.

There was so much joy!! So much. But/and we had to be the provisioners of most of it. While not getting fired.

Sidebar: I was trying to think of the last time I was this tired, and what I landed on was this one particular summer in law school, when I was, shall we say, not exactly thriving, and found myself panicking before exam week. I wound up making the extremely 24-year-old decision to pull a double all-nighter, assisted only by 5-hour Energy. I stayed awake through two consecutive nights, cramming like a desperate idiot, and took my exams so excessively caffeinated that the classmate next to me had to ask me to stop jiggling my leg like that. After the exams were over, I walked from campus to the downtown retail area still quite wired, and it was almost Christmas, and so I remember walking very wildly through Barnes & Noble searching for gifts and realizing as I reached the register that I was so tired I was breaking from reality and had been planning to buy a gift for a relative I didn’t actually have, a character from a movie I’d seen recently. Once I realized that, I walked home without buying anything and then slept through the rest of that day and then a lot of the one afterward. THAT is the tiredest I ever was before having kids, and this summer I was at least that tired at least four days a week. The difference being that I couldn’t just go to sleep at will. Whee!

So as of today, Wes and I are like fish flopping desperately toward water, and the water is Thursday.

Let me be so clear here. We LOVE the kids’ schools. Our oldest is thriving in second grade at the same school I attended as a tot, where several of his best friends are his classmates. The twins go to a co-op school that means everything to us: We love the staff and the other students and their families SO MUCH, and I’m the school’s board president this year. Our first in-class co-op shift is next Tuesday! Sending the kids to school does not feel like drop-kicking them into the abyss, but rather sending them to something like an extension of our home, or at least our neighborhood. The major difference being that now we don’t have to exist in survival mode every minute.

Because that’s what it was for a lot of this summer. With, say, 16 waking hours in the day, I was having to figure out a way to allocate 10 to work (I was on an alternate work schedule) but also approximately 10 to childcare and another 10 to household admin (making appointments, stocking the fridge, organizing and supervising play dates, everything else non-negotiable) (folding laundry did not make that list). But by this time next week, I’ll be back in the more manageable rhythm of working during school hours and parenting during non-school hours. Leaving quite a bit more time to actually feel like a human being and not like a carebot. My job will still be challenging, but it will be a fixed quantity. I won’t have to leave my desk at unpredictable intervals to fix snacks or crises. Dinner will happen at the same time every night, and we’ll talk about our days, and the kids will have tons of stories about things that happened that I wasn’t present for. They will have regular stimulation provided by someone else, they will have regular time with their friends facilitated and supervised by someone else, and they will be dreamily sleepy at bedtime. A whole new paradigm.

And right on cue, I have a new story idea.

It’s perfect. I didn’t write all summer. What I did instead was edit/revise my novel, which is on target to be published next July. I’m proud of the result and very excited to head into another publication season!…but revising is not writing. I don’t want to force a metaphor here, but revising a novel is to writing what summer is to the school year, in that revision and summer vacation are both necessary parts of the cycle (our beloved teachers more than deserve the reset), but writing and the school year are all about generative progress.

I’ll use THE GREAT WHEREVER as an example. Over the summer, I worked with Emily, my brilliant editor, on producing a final draft of the novel. It had to be done. It was necessary, head-down, iterative work. There is at least one part of the book, a climactic character death, that I had to read 40 times before I finally figured out how to improve it. And then once I figured that out, i didn’t nail it on the next draft! I had to try again and again and again, torturing this one little sequence of a few pages until I had something that read well and played its role within the book and satisfied Emily’s queries. The result is an improvement, for sure! But the process, Jesus Christ. How does a person with kids and a day job revise a book? By firing up her laptop as soon as the kids are asleep, even if her brain is half-dead. By forgoing leisure. Wine! Snacks! Eventually, I had a finished draft, which is now on its way to being a book, but I had none of the feeling of having created something new. Not this summer.

Likewise, I’m sure I spent at least 40 hours and probably a great many more in the pool with my kids this summer. We were on a mission to get them all swimming confidently, so we invested in a county pool membership in June, and then we went every time we possibly could. I’m NOT a pool girl. I’m self-conscious about wearing a swimsuit, and I have complicated natural hair. But I swam with my kids multiple times a week all summer. A lot of struggle was involved! Their learning curves were diverse. Which is to say that we didn’t nail the swimming thing on any one trip to the pool! We had to try again and again and again; we had to pay for group lessons and private lessons; we had to resort to bribes; we had to do, easily, one thousand loads of chlorine-reeking laundry. Likewise, the kids didn’t start the summer as perfect buddies to their neighbor friends! We had to coach them through numerous kiddy conflicts; we had to navigate the tough inevitability of “Our house rules are different from your friend’s”; we had to serve dinner on the lawn when everyone was having too much fun to come inside. Also, I had to come up with new fun outings every single week. By the end of the summer, our kids were better swimmers and better friends; they had learned a lot about group dynamics and their own agency. And Wes and I were dead in body and spirit. I asked Wes yesterday—Would I be able to tell if I had popped my Achilles tendon? He said yes, I would be able to tell, Why do you ask? And I had to tell him that I’ve been waking up every morning feeling like I can’t walk anymore. He said my feet are probably just tired from the endless chasing, the pool tending, the zoo trips. Again—the process, the process!

Anyway—now my second book is (nearly) done, and so is summer. And now it’s time to get back to the generative season.

Every day, the kids will learn something new. My newly minted second grader already came home chattering about photosynthesis. And that means I can write something new. I’ll have little mental breaks at work, whilst walking between meetings and on my lunch breaks and such. I will give my kids my absolute all when we’re together, but then they’ll go to bed and I will be able to set my new ideas to paper. Rather than being so exhausted and so dead inside that I can only watch IASIP until I fall asleep. TV might be on pause for a while, in fact. Who wants to read a short story about middle-aged moms reaping the consequences of their monkey’s-paw wishes? Okay, give me a few weeks.

I’ve talked to a bunch of younger (than me) writers who worry about how kids will mess up their writing lives, because they’ve heard it is so. And it is. But to those writers, I offer this. As much as kids vacuum up your time, Kirby-style, as much as parenthood makes it impossible to go on an alcohol bender and lose yourself in an exciting new manuscript—well, let’s think about it holistically. My last 5-hour Energy was during that particular exam week in law school. There is very little chance I’ll ever do that again, because I can’t, because kids. And that is GOOD NEWS, because anything I wrote during that time would have been an incoherent fever dream. You have to trust me, the old-ass version of me with kids writes stories far better than anything I wrote in my idiot days.

And that is fine, because having kids in school means life now occurs in seasons, and writing also occurs in seasons. Could you perhaps line up the seasons? You don’t have to spend every summer revising, but what if you could find a way to make use of the natural structure your kids’ structure imposes? I’m just saying.

*speaks out of the corner of mouth* You can actually preorder my next book already, by the way!