Sam Tschida: Write Like a Mother

I just read this time management book, 4,000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book begins with the stark fact that we only have 4000 weeks to live, if we’re lucky. That’s not a lot of time, especially for a woman. Let’s face it, we have a lot more to do, unless you’ve figured things out better than I have. For all the progress we’ve made, women do almost all the housework, the childcare, plus two incomes are generally required to keep Netflix on, unless you married a sugar daddy. I didn’t think of that in time. My husband was the hot janitor when I met him. As soon as you have kids you have to share those 4000 weeks with tiny people. If you want them to survive the first several years, mothering is a significant time commitment. If you want them to become productive members of society, it’s even more. Screens will take them off your hands more effectively than a husband in my experience, but they might not turn out very well. When I first got pregnant, I felt my life constrict in a way that made it hard to breathe. Instead of nesting, I wrote books. Well, for the first baby I nested, but then it was all over. Despite what capitalism tells you, a healthy baby needs hardly anything to survive besides a mother, but a mother needs a whole hell of a lot. For me, I yearned for creative fulfillment. During my second and third pregnancies, I wrote books on my lunch hour or during naps. The first one was published, but even if it hadn’t been it would have been worth it. I liked the second unpublished one even better. An agent told me it wasn’t marketable because you can’t write about nuclear weapons in a chick lit voice. Seems obvious in retrospect, but another problem for women. Restricting my available time clarified my priorities. My family and my writing are at the top, plus my business because a girl’s gotta eat. I don’t get much else accomplished, but […]

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