When I first landed on the Internet scene in 1999, I quickly checked out the situation and, without (too much) fear or overthinking it, I launched my first writing endeavor – The Writing Parent. It began as the worst site you’d ever laid eyes on with Geocities, and from there I announced a zine (online newsletter) was coming soon and…
My grandbaby just woke up. Quick 17-minute nap… She’s staring at me.
We play, eat, and have deep conversations, like:
“I want you to finish poopin’ so I can change you. Or do you want me to change you so you can finish poopin’?”
Baby smiles. Of course.
A couple of hours later and she’s asleep again but only because she fell asleep on my chest. I’m trapped in the sweetest way. Technology has come so far since I was doing this as a parent that I can stay put and still write—albeit with one finger—with a tiny handheld computer that is also playing white noise.
I barely get started again when my younger dog thinks he hears someone sneeze 6 blocks away and starts barking, waking the angel and starting another round of ruckus. Rude.
It’s so familiar. So similar to the days of yesteryear, the attempts to get as much down on paper as possible before children needed me again. Or before I fell asleep. Today, as baby girl falls back to sleep again, I just end up wrapping my arms around her and relaxing into the moment. Her calm becomes my calm, and her rest becomes my rest. And the balance will always be the same – the beautiful moments that go by too fast coupled with the dreams that still call to me.
All those years before, it was my mission to help other writing parents find time and inspiration to pour into both sides of their lives without guilt, to confront the lie that we needed to wait for our babies to grow up before we could be writers. I came at it from this idea that we could raise up dreams while we raised up our progeny, and it is good that I did, because what I didn’t know is that life would just keep getting busier.
Waiting for the kids to grow up before we could have time to write would have been the biggest tall tale we could have spun.
The baby wakes up again and we play and eat and change a diaper (hers, not mine) and walk around and chat about the deal we made about no more poop until her daddy takes her home, and with the passage of time, she tires again and goes off to sleep and I return to the page.
This isn’t my everyday life anymore, and that is bittersweet. I have so much time to write on a regular day versus how it once was. And yet, I think I wrote more then than I do now. So, if you’re a writing mama with littles, let me assure you, time doesn’t expand as they grow up. Your busyness can expand in a new way, especially if you’re like me, someone wh–
The baby just woke up again. She cares not for the words that are eager to bounce on out of my head!
–someone who has done life a little out of order. By the time the nest was nearly empty, the grandbabies started arriving, and time seemed to magically disappear. I was Grandma before I had the chance to ask myself how I might fill my time (this isn’t a complaint at all). And now that we are at five grandbabies with one on the way, I find myself re-learning how to have this career alongside tiny humans with whom I desire to spend time.
History has shown me life won’t slow down the growth of children, nor will it wait for the time to be perfect to write, to create, to live fully. The time is now.
That is the story I’m writing and sharing now. Again. The Writing Grandma. I like it.
And hindsight tells me I forgot to include “no puking all over the both of us” in the earlier “no poopin’” deal. Next time.
“I’ll Write When the Kids Are Grown” is the title of an ebook I published way back then, encouraging writing parents not to use that phrase or to wait. Here we are again.
