Motherhood & Mind-Fallow Times

Note: I finished writing this with my 4-year old standing over my shoulder and badgering me, “Are you done yet? How about now? It’s not fair! Play with me!” Case in point.

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Despite living on a farm, I rarely get enough quiet time to myself to think — to put myself inside the conditions necessary for me to be able to write.

Motherhood often feels like an albatross that refuses to let me rise beyond my exhaustion to my higher and more intellectual self — keeping me trapped in the minutiae of day-to-day life: the endless cooking and dishes and laundry and cleaning up crumbs; the relentless emotional labor that runs from 7:00 am to 10:00 pm most nights.

Motherhood may be one of the only jobs on the planet that requires 16+ hour days every day, with almost no breaks to take care of our own physical and mental wellness.

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The worst part is how I feel like it steals my words by not allowing me the space and the time to think deeply without interruption. My words are one of the few things I’ve been able to depend on in my life, and now they arrive sluggish, stymied.

The things I crave most in this life are priceless and the hardest to come by: a morning where I can wake up slowly and eat breakfast and drink my tea before I feed anyone else, literally or metaphorically. The freedom to just walk away whenever I feel like I need fresh air or inspiration. The guarantee of uninterrupted sleep. My mind feeling like my own again instead of being everyone else’s warehouse for their calendars and reminders and shopping lists. The assurance that if I forgot any of these details, someone else would pick up the slack.

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I’m trying to look at this as a temporary situation, like winter when the fields go fallow. Someday when the kids are older, people tell me, there will be ample time to go on hikes and sit outside and think and write. I’ve been warned that someday I’ll miss these days. I just wish there was a way to be all of myself in the meantime — to still be able to harness all of my thoughts without this constant physical and mental exhaustion making them scatter before I can even enter the stable holding the rope.

There’s a pressure to be grateful for the way motherhood forces us to self-sacrifice, and I resent it. Because surely, I believe, there must be a way to sacrifice a little less than the brain that makes me who I am — the mind that defined me before I had kids. The one that’s still turning its rusty gears haltingly in the background behind this week’s dinner menu and what size socks everyone currently wears.

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I’m not going to wrap this up with a falsely tidy conclusion, because frankly I don’t have one. I’m also not going to wait until I have the energy or insight to come up with a tidy conclusion, because that could take a while. And I’ve decided that despite all my own nitpicking tendencies, what matters in my work these days is not whether it’s perfect, but whether it’s honest. In fact, it’s probably more honest to allow my work to reflect the imperfections of my life by remaining imperfect in its form, rather than dressing it up in a smug veneer of put-togetherness.

The only thing I'll finish by saying is this: I continue to struggle to find my own space and time to think because I still believe my words are worth picking my way through the brambles to find. Though it all feels impossible at times, I won’t allow motherhood to keep me wholly away from myself.

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Postscript: I wrote the majority of this piece (before being relentlessly badgered) when the boys got preoccupied playing the drums and electric guitar and I managed to sneak outside with my notebook.