I feel the annoyance creeping in, because it’s the third time this morning I’ve tried to finish this sentence—just this one sentence—and the boys are fighting again, so the baby starts crying and then someone says those dreaded words: “I’m telling Mama.”

It’s unusual that I’m working right now while they’re playing, but I sent some facts to be checked, and the source confirmed them late, and I have to finish this one little sentence, just seven words, to get it sent off before deadline.

But a little boy is shaking my arm, trying to tattle on a brother who took his toy, and I drop my head and let out the longest sigh in the history of air and say, “Can you just let me finish this one little thing? Just this little thing?”

He cries and blubbers and shakes my arm some more, so I shut the laptop harder than I intend to, and I can feel all the wrong words exploding from my mouth.

Sometimes being a writer and a mother feels dang near impossible.

“I don’t know how you get it all done and still have time to be a good mother,” my friends and family occasionally say.
I understand the question, because mothering is hard and mothering is intensive and mothering is never-ending. When in the world would I possibly have time to write?

How does a good mother become a good writer? How does a good writer walk away from the writing desk still a good mother?

How does a woman change diapers and spend time with her children and kiss the booboos that happen every other minute and build a star out of shape blocks and still put coherent thoughts down on a page?

We become mothers and believe that’s just the end of our story.
But I want you to know it’s not. Not if we don’t want it to be.

///

When I was 4 years old, I could already read, mostly because my 10-months-older brother came home from kindergarten and taught me everything he learned that day in class.

Reading opened up a whole new world for me, and I loved it so much I wanted to contribute to it. So I sketched out my first stories, with characters called Laura and Mary Ingalls, who would get into the same adventures my brother and sister and I would get into—meeting the ghost in the tree house out back, playing a risky game of dodge ball with the millions of pecans carpeting our backyard, building forts out of blackberry brambles before we knew they were mostly just ready-made snake nests.

I knew early on that I wanted to be a writer. I knew I wanted to write kid lit. I knew exactly what I had to do to get there.

I told everyone I knew of my plans. They agreed and nodded and patted me on the head with smiles that spoke of great amusement that here was a little 5-year-old telling them what she wanted to be when she grew up, already, and watch how she would change those plans when she got older and real life happened.

Except the plans never changed.

They didn’t change when I went off to college and was encouraged by a guidance counselor to major in a field that would actually pay, so I picked journalism. I wrote out my stories longhand in the extra hours between classes.

They didn’t change when I married my husband and I got my first job at a large newspaper in Texas. I wrote my stories in the hours between dinner and sleep.

They didn’t change when we had our first baby and started talking about the possibility of quitting our jobs and pursuing music together. This time, though, there was no time to turn plans into pursuit.

So I put them on hold.

///

I didn’t know they would be on hold for so long.

I didn’t know that my husband would quit his job and I would stay at mine, because it was flexible enough to allow travel and there was another baby on the way and someone had to get a steady paycheck to make sure we stayed caught up on our budget.

So I worked as a managing editor and took care of the baby and spent evenings practicing or playing gigs or trying to get some sleep even though there was so much, always, to do.

You couldn’t really see it from the outside, but I was withering into only a piece of who I am.

A piece doesn’t live like a whole does. A piece has only a matter of time before it dies, cut off from the whole.

I was slowly dying, and no one could even tell.

///

Six years later I still felt stuck, working a job I hated, trying to make ends meet, trying to love kids well, trying to just keep up, trying to feel fulfilled.

But all those stories were burning holes clean through me, and they kept getting deeper and wider and blacker.

I snapped at children and picked fights with my husband and became a person I didn’t really like, because I felt so dried up inside.

It didn’t matter that I had all these beautiful boys or that my husband has only ever been supportive or that I got to work my job mostly from home so I got the best of both worlds—designing pages and editing articles while my kids romped around in the same room.

It mattered that I wasn’t writing. It mattered that I could not create all those stories that had lived in my imagination for more than a decade.

So I started taking moments where I could. When my boys were eating breakfast and we’d finished the morning devotional, I jotted down story ideas. When they napped, I crafted essays and chapters. When they went to bed at night, I wrote random thoughts in a nightly journal.

When I read to them, I picked books that would make me a better writer. When we engaged in our after-dinner family time, we incorporated a writing time and independent drawing time for the littlest ones. When school let out for the summer, we brainstormed a family story-telling project.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, I started coming back to life.

///

It’s never easy, being a mother who writes.

I feel the pressure of do-it-all and try-to-look-perfect and volunteer-for-everything-at-my-kids’-school.

I know many mothers who feel it, too.

We want to be the best mothers we can be. We want to have perfectly clean and put-together houses. We want to spend the most time we can in our kids’ classrooms so the memories they have at school are always associated with us, too.

We want to keep on top of laundry and cook the best and healthiest meals and organize an afternoon of pure fun for our children.

Because we just love them so much.

But we can’t do it all. We just can’t.

So we need to stop trying.

There’s an easy answer to the question, “How do you do it all?”

The truth is, I don’t.

If you were to come to my house on any given day, you would see a thick layer of dust on the bookshelves, because I was busy building a flower garden out of shapes with my 3-year-olds this morning and every other morning for the last three months. You would see the mess the 4-year-old made with his crayons and art paper during his Quiet Time today, because he no longer naps and I needed to make the deadline on an article. You would see that tonight we’re having raw carrots and raw cucumbers tossed in a bowl, along with the chicken that’s been simmering in the crockpot all day, because I had a lot on my mind that I needed to get down on paper.

You would see that the laundry has yet to be put away, even though I finished it three days ago. You would see that the 6-year-old frequently bursts into my room when I’m in the middle of an essay and asks if I’ve seen the other Spider-Man sock that went missing. You would see that sometimes, when I’m sitting in my wing chair crafting a chapter on a novel, my 8-year-old will sneak quietly in and sit in his daddy’s wing chair without saying a word for a whole hour, just because he wants to be near me.

This is what it looks like to be a writer and a mother.

It doesn’t look perfect. It doesn’t look neat all the time. It doesn’t even look completely consistent, because sometimes someone throws up on the carpet and needs Mama to lie down beside him so his tummy feels better. Sometimes the twins won’t stop fighting over who gets which train and Mama has to step in to defuse emotions. Sometimes the biggest boy threatens he’s going to run away and I have to talk him out of it.

Some days all I can be is Mama.

That’s okay, too. Because do you know what living does? What engaging with our children does? What being a mama does?

It makes our writing richer.

Maybe we will always feel this tension between creating and mothering. Maybe we will always hear the voice that whispers we are being selfish in our pursuit and we should just be content with being a mother. Maybe we will always feel guilty that we want and need something more.

But what I have learned in my years being a writer and a mother is that I am a better wife and mother and person because of my creating.

This is whole-hearted living.

And it’s way better than doing it all.