Of Books, Banana Bread, and Small Bottles

I think I need to be in touch with more mom-writers.

I'm curious to know if any other mom-writers ever feel torn between vocations (that's vocations with an "o" not vacations with an "a" -- I know most moms don't get the latter!) and long for writing time.

My vocation as a mom and teacher is dear to my heart. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love guiding my daughter, both in heart and head formation. I have days (especially perhaps during snowbound weeks when we both get cranky with cabin-fever) when I may not always do those things as well, patiently and creatively as I should, but it doesn't mean I don't love doing them and recognize them as one of the main calls God has put before me during this season of my life.

But oh, do I miss writing. Not little bits of posts on my blog, or jottings in my journal, or responses to my seminary students' essays, or reviews that earn us necessary pennies...all of which I do realize count as writing, all of which I enjoy and am grateful I get to do. I mean writing...the kind of writing I spent long stretches of adolescent and young adult time doing...short stories, poems and revisions of poems, essays, drafts of novels or scenes from novels or character sketches. The kind of writing it is very hard to squeeze into the cracks of crevices of a life filled with other things I need to do and want to do and yes, have to do. The kind of writing I tell myself, if I were truly dedicated, I would get up two hours earlier a day to do, only I'm often so tired from having to work late the night before, I just can't. Nor would it always be wise, because I need to be cogent and patient that day, not bleary and growly as I tend to be when I don't get enough sleep.

I'm truly not complaining. I know not all of it is because I'm a parent -- lots of folks are much busier parents than I, who only have one child. I know if I had gone on to have another baby back when we had real insurance, or if we'd been in good enough financial shape to adopt, I would likely still be up in the night with a baby or chasing a toddler, and those seasons, in particular (the infant/toddler seasons) are so good but exhausting on very different levels.

Back when the sweet girl was a baby, and I was still in that wonderful though challenging season, I remember reading very wise words from Debra Rienstra, in her lovely book Great With Child. I can't recall the exact wording (nor find the quote right now) but the image has stayed with me now for almost eight years. She talked about the season of intense, active mothering of very small children, and imagined it as a bottle with a very slender neck. There's only so much you can pour at once into a small-necked bottle, she said, and so you have to be very careful what you pour, choosing wisely how to spend your energy. But she also encouraged mothers to remember that not every season of life is a bottle with such a slender neck. Value the precious slender-neck bottle time, and remember that one day, that bottle will widen and you will have more room to pour.

I remember feeling so encouraged by that, both in the hope it held out (my horizons will widen again, and my energy deepen) but in the timely reminder that the time I was in right then was precious and fleeting. It helped me to value that moment, yet look ahead for other moments.

And I think it's a very true image. Except...here's the thing...I'm pretty sure most of life is filled with season upon season of slender-necked bottles. Not in a bad way, but because we choose how to narrow our focus, where to spend our strengths and gifts, and we're finite, we can only do so much at a certain time if we want to do it well.

For me, the season where the bottle expands and I will have time to truly write the things I want to write has just never come. The snippets I've started spill out of notebooks and drawers, but they never seem to get anywhere. And I'm realizing it's partly due to choices I've made, and partly due to where our call as a family has taken us. We are a family involved in mission and ministry. I homeschool. I need to help bring in very necessary income, so I also work -- I teach online courses, I edit, I write, I do whatever I can to help bring in what we need. But somehow I have never found a way (never found the time) to do the kind of writing I most long to do, mostly because it has never been feasible for me to invest that kind of time when there is no guarantee of a concrete return. And given how broke we are (really) that has simply been a wise decision and a necessary one.

So I try to squeeze the time in, here and there, and most of the time that's okay. I see the value in it, and I tell myself to wait because another season is coming, at the same time that I love the season I'm in and value it.

But then I have days when I get frustrated. This is where I think talking to other moms-who-write sometimes helps. The frustrating moments are the ones where I find myself having a wonderful idea for a story, but being almost too afraid to get it to paper because I know I won't have time to really help it unfold, no stretches of writing time when I can just lose myself in the joy of writing, no writing space where I can just shut the door and write. Right now I am almost constantly on call to do other things. But I don't know what I'm afraid of -- that it might take me months? years? to write a story the way I want to write it? Consciously I know that's not a very good excuse, but it seems to stand in my way of starting or moving very far past the start of a project.

And then I have what I call the "odious comparison" days. The days when I see what other writers have accomplished (some moms too, though not all of them). I see their books, or beautifully crafted essays, or brilliant poems, and I look around at the piles of read-aloud books and at mountains of laundry and I think "hmmm...and what I have accomplished this week? Well, I made two loaves of banana bread."

Those are the moments where I have to start laughing. Laughter is better than despair any day. And who knows, in this particular season of life, maybe the making of really good banana bread is just as important as the crafting of a good story.