I love writing!....Am I still allowed to do it?

A few administrative items!

First, my novel THE GREAT WHEREVER (out 7/7/2026) has a gorgeous, splendid cover, which you can see below:

Are you kidding me? Look how beautiful it is. Waiting to see cover options is one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the publishing process, and my delighted relief at seeing this one was intense.

Also, this is, haha, certainly not the last you’ll hear from me on this topic, but you can preorder the book already! And please do, because preorders determine so much of what this book’s life will look like. Order it from your local independent bookstore, if you would be so kind; and if you don’t have one of your own, order it from my beloved Loyalty Bookstores.

Finally, if you’re near DC, please come to the Politics & Prose location on the Wharf on Friday 10/24—I’ll be in conversation with Amber Sparks about her debut novel HAPPY PEOPLE DON’T LIVE HERE. Amber is fantastic, and I can’t wait!

Admin over. You see? There is being a writer (the part that involves sitting alone in a chair, writing), and then there is being an author (the part that involves haranguing people about preorders), and the two have almost nothing to do with each other, and neither is particularly compatible with parenting small children during high illness season. I’m just saying.

On to our topic. Almost a decade ago, in the 20 minutes before the Pussyhat Project veered into the irredeemably cringe, I decided I needed to learn to knit. I’ve always been pretty dexterous, and picked it up quickly using a $5 book from Michael’s and a variety of YouTube tutorials. My first project was, in fact, a child-size pussyhat. After a couple years of experimentation, I figured out how to source good yarn and what kinds of needles my hands prefer and moved onto shawls, my true knitting passion.

Knitting changed my life for the better, no question. As a hobby, it’s both meditative and productive. It engages you creatively and mathematically. If the handiwork itself is the primary pleasure, then designing color palettes is the secondary pleasure, and there are also tons of tertiary ones: collecting fun stitch markers, winding cloud-soft yarn, housing your projects in cute bags. Once you know what you’re doing, you can knit while you watch a movie. You can knit while your children play, and you can remain 100% engaged in whatever they’re doing. My wine consumption decreased dramatically after I started knitting, because of how relaxing knitting is (and because you’d be a fool to knit too close to a glass of red). It is, in so many ways, a perfect hobby.

Of course, because I’m a mother/daughter/wife/woman, it’s Not Okay for me to have a perfect hobby that primarily benefits me. Enjoying something as much and as purely as I first enjoyed knitting is a luxury, damn it. So I got a few months of that, and then I ran into the following issues:

• Non-knitters tend to assume that a person actively knitting is being antisocial/rude. (When in fact a good repetitive knit will not remotely prevent you from holding up your end of a conversation—personally, having something to do with my hands sharpens my attention a lot!)

• High-quality hand-dyed yarn costs money, and pocket-watchers love to raise their eyebrows at it. In the online knitting community, women “joke” about hiding yarn purchases from their husbands and fret about reserving their most special skeins for heirloom projects. A $30 yarn is an extravagance! (When in fact I spend almost no money on luxury items—knitting is my luxury!)

• Nothing annoys society more than a woman doing something she enjoys because she enjoys it. Nothing. Nothing. It’s a crime against her family and the social order. Everybody wants to know why she is doing it, who is allowing her to do it, and how it will benefit the people in her life. They will not, will not, stand for the enjoyment itself as the justification.

Okay, fine. So I started making shawls as gifts to loved ones and then learned how to knit baby sweaters. Sometimes I will make some special item for my husband. Everybody accepts that! No one ever asks me where I find the time to make a gift for someone else, unlike when I was primarily making stuff to personally wear and I was constantly being asked, usually in an accusatory way, where I found the time. Now if I happen to be knitting in public and someone asks what I’m making, I just show them a picture of a baby sweater I’ve already made, and they are happy.

(I do still knit things for myself in secret.)

Now that THE GREAT WHEREVER has a cover and a pub date and is almost through copyedits, I…can start writing again. WUT. Not only can I, but I should, if I want to publish anything else afterward.

And now it’s the knitting problem all over. Namely: If writing takes time, and particularly time I could spend doing other things that would benefit people other than me, where exactly do I get off doing it? Because unlike knitting (which sometimes yields a useful result very quickly), so much of writing is truly, truly selfish. I can make my son a very thick hat in about a day and a half. In that same period of time, I can only write a few decent paragraphs; and a disembodied 8% of a story isn’t going to keep anyone warm. Also, as previously discussed, the people around you can smell any pleasure you take in writing, and some will use that as an argument against its larger importance.

Isn’t that shitty? Don’t you find that very fucking annoying, as I do? But I don’t hold it (entirely) against them. We are all socialized to value mothers in proportion with what we perceive of their sacrifice. There is a reason that when we talk about the prolific male writers of our day, no one really argues that analogous mother-writers should be afforded the same freedoms, or that their husbands should look to Tabitha King as a role model. We expect that mothers will first fill their family duty (which often includes providing a stable income via a day job that doesn’t turn on spaced-out advances), then go above and beyond that, and THEN, if they aren’t dead on their feet by 10:30 PM, maybe squeeze in a little bit of leisure.

So, okay. What do we do with that? Well.

I do now make money from writing/writing-related pursuits, and the people in my life do respect that, and understand why I have to carve out time for it. But making money from writing usually has to do with writing I did months or years earlier. (If you sell a story to a paying market, you aren’t getting paid for a LONG time. You definitely can’t plan the next Pepco bill around it.) So when I mention that I’m writing something new, it is understood by most of the people around me that no money is immediately on the line. And then we’re back to: Wow, you sure do knit a lot. What is that about? How do you afford the yarn? Do you only knit for yourself? Are you actually listening to me if you’re knitting while I’m talking?

😑

Writing sometimes feels selfish because writing sometimes is selfish. Here is how I suggest dealing with that fact:

First, remember that everything you do in the real world (that murky place outside the cocoon of your writing desk) is grist for your creative mill. I’m an introvert, and I find small talk with strangers pretty horrible. Also horrible: pre-arranged gatherings that balloon to include people you weren’t expecting. Also socializing that takes place around sports. All horrible. And all are extremely common elements of life with small children. We love our children, so we do certain things for them, and we grow accustomed to the horribleness, and eventually it dissipates. And then we get to walk away with all sorts of data to use in our work. Feel free to tell yourself that your purpose in surviving the function is to mine it for meaning that can help your writing later. And you might find that you are a better version of yourself at said function, and that is great for your kids. There you go.

Second (advanced mode), the reverse is also true. Writing is an excellent way of processing experience and of locating the root of your own feelings. Anyone who regularly journals knows this. But it’s also true for fiction writers, who have to interrogate truth to achieve verisimilitude in their stories. And a lot of parenting—especially in the early years—is all about understanding feelings, our kids’ and our own. Taking some time to work on a cherished short story might feel selfish, but is it maybe a way of processing something that will help you in your real-world life? (THE GREAT WHEREVER, for example, includes a mother character who struggles because her neighbors, fellow mothers of small children get on her last nerve; as I wrote her part of the story, I found myself more attentive to my own behavior in scenarios where she would have faltered.)

Third, here’s that old cliché: A happy mom is a better mom. Doing stuff that makes you happy is worth it for the fact that it leads to more happiness for your children. I write at night, and I am far less tense and impatient during the day when I know that time is coming. You are justified in giving your kids the gift of a parent who isn’t desperately yearning to go do whatever thing they can never fit into the day.

Finally, and maybe this one is the most important one—YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO THINGS YOU LIKE JUST BECAUSE. You are a human being. Your purpose in being alive is up to you, but most other currently living people agree that happiness is allowed to factor into it!!!! I don’t spend money on myself at the expense of my kids’ wellbeing, but I’m okay with spending money on food for them and for me. Like, I wouldn’t blow the last dollars of our grocery budget on yarn; but if the fridge is full and they have 10,000,000 Legos scattered throughout our house, then I think it’s okay to buy yarn that I think is pretty and that I can knit into something useful while they play (instead of buying more Legos). Likewise, if I give them my all for the entirety of the day until they fall asleep, I think it is more than okay to do something I like to do after that!

To take it a step further, I don’t think I have to wait until they are older—until they’re in school or moved out of the house or whatever—to justify this. I’m not doing everything I’m doing just so that someday they’ll be good fathers to someone else. Likewise, I don’t think my parents made their endless sacrifices in order to benefit their grandkids, who didn’t exist at the time. They gave me piano lessons so I’d be dexterous, encouraged me to go to college so I’d be self-supporting. The fact that I like to knit and can buy myself yarn is one logical result of their choices, and I think that’s reasonable. They also surrounded me with books and read constantly for their own purposes. The fact that I’m a writer—including of a new book that you can now preorder—results directly from that. It isn’t a liability to my own kids.

That is what I think. But of course there will be people who feel otherwise. A mother should not focus her energy on anything that doesn’t benefit her children, they will say. To which I say: How exactly do your kids benefit from your being a hater? Just wondering.