The Mommy Writer: Months 12-14

This post is part of an ongoing series I’m doing about trying to work from home with a child.  As always, I don’t think this information will work for you unless you are me, trying to parent my particular child at this particular time, but I could have used this information to give me hope of future productivity before I had kids, so I’m imparting it anyway.  Enjoy!

When my baby hit one year old, she became obsessed with my laptop.  She had to touch it.  She had to push the buttons.  And most importantly–very most importantly–it had to show her pictures of “baby!” constantly.  This was, naturally, its only function.

This hit at the same time that I hit a slump, and did not want to be writing.  Oh, the very last thing I wanted to be doing was writing.

So writing all but stopped.

Since I couldn’t have that, I made an appointment with myself that I had to write during nap time.  This was hard, because I wanted to do about a million other things while my daughter was asleep.  I wanted to clean the house and go to the store, and fiddle with the internet, and fold the laundry and generally not be interrupted.  Every day I would think of all the things I would rather do with nap time.  And then I would go write, because if I didn’t do it then, I wouldn’t do it at all.

I don’t have a picture of this.  I was too busy writing furiously, lest this be the day of the short nap.

I was sad, because up until this point, I’d been able to write while my baby was awake, and I wanted to continue doing that.  My experience has been that if I don’t like something about my child’s intersection with my life, I should just wait a month and it will change.  This habit took three months, but my daughter did finally stop crusading to touch the laptop every time it entered her sight.  She still likes it, but she will now play with other things while it’s around, again, and she will now sit sweetly on my lap without touching it while I work (sometimes), so this time is past.  I still think of these three months as a dark age in my writing time, but I lived and my daughter lived and, though less important, I still got work done.  So I’m going to call that a win.