I blew up my life at 35, leaving behind a decadelong career as a corporate lawyer to pursue my newly discovered passion for creative writing. When I graduated from my MFA program, I expected to have a completed novel. Instead, I had hundreds of pages with notes in the margins, showing me what could be.
Determined to finish my book, I took a job with reduced hours. Around this time, my girlfriend and I also flirted with the idea of having a child. We agonized about being older parents, but we were also excited about expanding our family. I met with a fertility doctor, who told me I should start trying right away.”I was hoping to wait, maybe a year,” I said.
Writing a book is often compared to birthing a child, and I knew I wanted to devote all my energy to my book baby first. But the doctor looked at me, puzzled, and then recited some terrifying statistics about how few eggs I had left.
I felt like I was losing something
Afraid to miss out, I took his advice and became pregnant soon after. As my body changed shape, my interest in writing waned. I couldn’t help feeling that even as I was gaining something, I was losing something, too.
Shortly before my due date, we turned my office into the baby’s room. I packed my novel draft into boxes and asked my wife to bring them up to the attic. I’d made my choice and thought I would have to shelve my creative ambitions.
The early days of parenting left little brain space for anything but taking care of my newborn son. Breastfeeding didn’t come easily, and, like all new parents, I was exhausted. One night, I even Googled “having a baby” and “buyer’s remorse,” just to see if other mothers felt the same.
What kicked me out of my funk wasn’t a trip to the attic to revisit my novel. Instead, it was a trip to day care. We visited one that we loved, with an advanced curriculum, bubbly director, and bucolic setting. Then there was the one we could afford, a more modest program located in the basement of an old hospital.
I looked for a more lucrative job
That night, I searched online for a more lucrative job and found one on the communications team of a global company in New York City. I worried about what taking it would mean for my writing, but I worried more about what not taking it would mean for my son. I applied and got an offer.
For months, I worked and pumped breastmilk and mothered. As I bonded more and more with my son, the characters in my novel slipped away like old friends. One day, I commented on this disconnect to another new mom.
She shook her head in a self-satisfied way. “Becoming a mother is the best thing I ever did.”
I nodded as if I agreed — I’d often heard that sentiment — but inside, I recoiled. I loved my son, but having him didn’t fulfill all of me. I still wanted my book baby.
I started writing again
That revelation changed something inside me. On my long commute, I skipped naps and started writing again. I felt like a female Don Draper, with breastmilk emanating from me instead of vodka as I jotted down notes on the back of a napkin.
What surprised me was all the ideas I had, many of them new preoccupations. One was a romcom based on my experience of getting pregnant; another was a series of parenting essays.
In graduate school, time had moved slowly, but now I felt a sense of urgency. As my son progressed through developmental milestones, I could feel my own development as a writer. I took my creative projects more seriously and found a coach who helped me move past old roadblocks.
My son became a toddler, and I could feel my creativity expand with him. We went to music classes and I sang out loud for the first time in years, a joy from my own childhood that I’d long forgotten. Reading to him reminded me of the building blocks of storytelling. And, like all children, my son’s imagination was unencumbered by the judgment of whether work was “good” or “bad.” I took this freedom into my writing sessions, along with the understanding that writing a book was only a small part of my creative spirit.
For so long, I was focused solely on finishing my novel, but now I see that the practice of writing helps me stay balanced, the same way that running and eating well do. Writing also allows me to be more present as a mother.
When I look back, it’s hard to imagine life without my son or my creativity. It’s obvious now that they were both always part of me.
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