3:24
Elline Lipkin
Keywords: parenthood, motherhood, pandemic parenting
Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; (De)Constructing Writing
“The average length of an uninterrupted stretch of work time [for parents] was three minutes, 24 seconds.”
—Washington Post article
I am writing this in the ten minutes before I have to go pick up my child at school. I will add notes to it while waiting in the car line. I will continue it between getting snacks, fixing toys, going to “see” an elaborate new drawing, giving hugs, wiping up a spill, drying tears, helping in the bathroom, changing laundry, adjusting the TV, starting dinner, and any number of other household tasks my elementary school child can’t entirely handle on his own.
I will write it while wanting, desperately, to have time for attention to myself, to bubble in a quiet room with a closed door, while also longing to hear about my child’s new discoveries, unburdening from the school day, and simply have his warm, still-small body near me.
There was a long while when I tried to find solace by reading various writers I’ve loved comment about how they changed their writing practices once they became parents (let’s face it—mothers), writing in fragments because they could capture a line while cooking; writing shorter projects; writing while sitting in the bleachers; while in the doctor’s waiting room; while bored at a kids’ birthday party when you can’t drop your kid off.
Then, after reading a recent essay on LitHub about just this, I found myself almost shaking with rage. Why should parental writing time be squeezed, fragmented, sliced, diced, and then broken up again into motes? The answer is perfectly clear: necessity. And I am getting this done in these fractures (perhaps fractals?) of time. But the idea of this being acceptable, even considered “good” because it reflects will, determination, and the good old American value (said ironically) of bootstrapping versus acknowledging systems that privilege work above all else and leave parents to fit in what they can enrages me. Where is the acknowledgment of the losses that come from attempting to write while managing ten thousand other things? This has been my situation for the past year and a half.
My child has now been in school (full-time) for one week. I don’t trust how long it will last. Unexpectedly, when he’s gone the days are almost too wide, the hours too long. The silence, which I craved so deeply, the mere thought of four uninterrupted hours, nearly made me weep, reverberates in my ears. Some mornings (and it’s only been a week) I couldn’t find my focus. I sat at my desk and did nothing. I told myself I was “silence-bathing,” as I needed to soak into the stillness that had been unavailable to me for a year and a half and let my mind unspool.
Yet, after 18 months of togetherness, I was shocked to find that I almost worked better once he was at home, and I had to dig into the work against the sounds of the TV in the background and yelling because LEGOs are lost. Was this positive adaptability or a worrisome reality that working while in his presence had become so naturalized that I no longer knew how to handle a swathe of open time? I wish I could say for sure, but after the upending of everything during these past two years, I trust little right now. Which is another way in which my concentration frays again—there’s so little to latch on to.
I want societal support for all parents; I want the pandemic to end; I want my child to have a sense of “normalcy,” though I have no idea when any of these things might occur. I want a vast sense of flow to be available to me again. And I want proximity to my child and the messy, aggravating, at times wondrous refraction that is life with a small person.
The phrase “enjoy every minute, it goes so fast” is, to me, one of the cruelest things you could say to a new parent. What parent, buying diapers in three-month-sized increments, isn’t aware of how rapidly a child changes? Being told to treasure a time in my life that required the most sacrifice, the least sleep, that I whittle my own needs down to bare subsistence, was not enjoyable through and through. I also remember being baffled by this comment. When my child was six months, I wasn’t nostalgic for the days just after he was born. Now that he is older, I can look back at his toddlerhood and remember its particular sweetness in ways that have passed. But heaping “enjoy every minute” onto a new parent, often frazzled, overwhelmed, and exhausted, does nothing but layer guilt onto the sense that parenthood should be valorized no matter the stakes, and any dissent from this vision is then invalidated.
This past year and a half has left me thirsting to be alone in a way I cannot slake. It’s left me crowded, in physical space and consciousness in a way I didn’t know was possible. And it’s left me missing my child, now that he’s back in school. Parenting often seems like nothing but trying holding contradictions together—nesting with the knowledge your child will fledge one day, trying to understand how that’s a good thing. Our quarantine experience has left me holding similar contradictions. “We’re safe at home, not stuck at home” my son’s third-grade teacher kept repeating last year over Zoom, a reframing that I appreciated at the time. We’re together, and there’s solace in that; we’ve survived and there’s gratitude for this; and we’re desperate to have a margin of space back again, too.
Bio
Elline Lipkin is the author of Girls’ Studies and The Errant Thread. She is a Research Scholar with the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA and teaches writing in Los Angeles.