9 AM
I always get excited for Wednesday. It’s my day off and I always plan on getting shit done. I make coffee. I take out the garbage. Every Wednesday, I plan for lots of writing. Lots of book promotion stuff.
This week is even better because my daughter is sick and I don’t have to take up 45 minutes to walk her to school and walk back with my toddler. This week, I got to sleep in, but I still woke up at 6:30 (pesky internal clock and all), so I got to start my morning laying in bed for half an hour, watching a YouTube video that I’d saved to my Watch Later list well over a week ago.
My daughter is keeping herself busy. She’s making pom-poms. She really likes making them, ever since she found my long-neglected pom-pom makers yesterday. My son is playing video games, which is screen time, yeah, I know, but if he wasn’t playing video games he’d be trying to make pom-poms too, and his motor skills aren’t good enough to make pom-poms, and I don’t wanna deal with a meltdown while I try to get a simple hour of writing in.
I have so much I wanna do today. This newsletter, for instance, which I’ve realized at this point is going to be an all-day sort of project.
And promotion! So I post a book excerpt to Instagram! I’m done! One thing is done!
10 AM, SOMEHOW?
My daughter’s having such a great time making pom-poms that I make the horrible mistake of suggesting she make a craft instead of buying something for the birthday party she’s attending this weekend. We spend a few minutes online, and she finds a Baby Yoda pom-pom craft she wants to make. But now I gotta dig out supplies. The right-coloured yarn! The felt! The fucking craft eyes! The glue gun! The glue sticks!
I forgot to eat breakfast. My blood sugar drops while I’m searching because I have diabeetus. I make myself a glass of iced tea so I won’t fucking collapse and die. Then I return to the search for supplies the chaos of clutter that is my house.
I can’t be a writer and a good mom at the same time.
Instead of the supplies, I find two boxes full of old documents I should have shredded years ago. I also find a random shoebox full of mismatched socks. I ask my daughter to take to the stairs and add it to the OTHER box of mismatched socks so I can sort them later. And in my panicked, sweaty search for craft supplies, I realize yet again that I can’t be a writer and a good mom at the same time. These two things are absolute polar opposites.
This is why I published my first book in 20151 and why my second book comes out this year2. A fucking gap of EIGHT FUCKING YEARS.
Sometimes this number pains me. I feel useless. I’ve procrastinated. In 2015, I published a book, and then I did NOTHING with that momentum. I mean, I wrote a novel, but I didn’t commit enough to my novel after two rounds of querying, and it’s now sitting in the depths of my computer, never to get an agent because I just can’t open it up and fix it.
Why couldn’t I commit to writing more last night when I stayed up late?
Why was I watching Rob Zombie music videos, living in nostalgia instead of writing in the small chunk of the evening that I carve for myself?
10:44 AM
I find the craft eyes and eat some food, but then my daughter starts cutting away at the pom-pom without checking the instructional video on how to actually cut it. She insists that she’s doing it right, but she massacres the absolute fuck out of the pom-pom. I try to point this out to her, but she’s sensitive. Now she’s curled up on the chair, upset with herself for not doing it right the first time.
She is my daughter.
She takes too much after me.
I’m trying to reason with her. It’s not a big deal. Just try again. It’s yarn. We can just try again. But she’s already in her thought spiral. I’m getting grumpy.
In the meantime, my son comes running up and slaps my knee: “MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM!”
“WHAT?!” I scream.
Now they’re both upset.
I apologize. I explain myself:
“Mom is frustrated. Mom is attempting to juggle her own tasks between the both of you. Please be patient. I see that you’re hungry, but you can’t just run up to me and yell like that.”
He nods. He’s four, but he understands. I offer to cut up an apple for a snack. Thankfully, this offer also gets my daughter out of her funk. I make them toast, too. They each want a slice of raisin toast AND a slice of regular toast. I entertain this insanity because I feel bad about my freak-out.
Now she’s curled up on the chair, upset with herself for not doing it right the first time.
She is my daughter.
She takes too much after me.
Then I explain to my daughter why she should have watched the video instead of trimming the absolute fuck out of her pom-pom. “Do you know what ‘Measure twice, cut once?’ means?” I ask.
She doesn’t know.
I explain, cutting an apple while also making toast. I gotta make sure that I put the butter on it as soon as it pops out, otherwise, the butter won’t melt nicely. Because I live in Canada, where butter is less spreadable. And my son with sensory issues won’t eat his toast if the butter isn’t entirely melted on it.
A minor task complete, I feel better.
11:34 AM
Now they’re both playing video games, the craft long forgotten, which is fine. I’ll just buy some fucking Star Wars Lego from work tomorrow.
It’s almost lunchtime though. How the fuck is it almost lunch?
My son wants chicken strips. My daughter wants noodles. I microwave some leftover soup for myself.
I should probably do laundry, too, right? I’m just gonna do that. I still gotta shred the documents, too, right? I’ll feel good if I get a couple of tasks done.
12:18 PM
Laundry’s going. The washer’s still leaking and I’ve no idea why.3
Kids are eating while I watch this video from a therapist who watched Breaking Bad after watching Better Call Saul.4
12:40 PM
I get sleepy and caved, deciding to nap, only my kids stopped watching TV and were having fun, so I chase them around for a little and then lay down on the couch in my son’s room.
I suck at playing with kids, so letting them climb all over me while I’m half-awake is one of my favourite ways to interact with them. They each “read” the same book. My son screams and makes vomit noises the entire time. My daughter get sleepy and falls asleep on me while my son just runs around screaming.
I get maybe a solid ten minutes of restful sleep because my son wakes me up. He took a dump in his potty and now I get to deal with it.
A classic mom nap.
1:31 PM
I move the laundry to the dryer and my daughter rediscovers the pom-pom maker. We discuss the incident from the morning and I remind her that she has to take her time if she wants to do things right.
“Well, sometimes I forget and I get carried away, and you can’t blame me because you weren’t supervising me.”
She’s not entirely wrong, but I was trying to write, dammit.
All I can do is laugh.
She tries to do the project again but gets overzealous with her trimming. I try again to explain that she needs to slow the fuck down, using the analogy of when she gets her hair cut, that the hairdresser trims off small amounts at a time, but she just…can’t do it, because she’s a kid.
I end up doing it by myself, which I’m not sure is the right way to go about this problem. But the choice is either facing another tantrum or throwing away a half-finished craft later, I choose the half-finished craft while she distracts herself with a snack break.
She and her brother end up playing nicely anyway, so it’s not the wrong choice, is it?
IS IT?!
3:22 PM
I shred one box of documents, and then figure I might as well deal with the rest of it, considering I’m on a roll.
Then I throw the kids’ bedsheets into the washer.
Then I wash the bathroom floor. It’s needed it. Badly.
Sometime after 4 PM
I start making dinner and do laundry at the same time. Time fades entirely because I’ve neglected to make my afternoon coffee. My mood slips because I keep putting it off in order to make dinner.
Dinner is annoying because my kids don’t eat anything that my husband and I eat. They never want to eat the same thing, either, so I make three dinners. Then my husband comes home and he takes over dinner because that’s just how things naturally go when he comes home and I decide to finally make my fucking coffee and I chug it down.
He showers.
I prep the plates. We eat.
I have a bath afterwards. I always have a bath every night. It’s the only way I stay sane. Sylvia Plath would be so proud.
The rest of the night is fucking blur.
The rest of the night fades into obscurity.
Then, finally…
8 PM
The kids go to bed. My daughter is still sick, so I give her her Squishables Plague Doctor and Nurse to help her relax. She says they helped her feel better the night before. She smiles. Then she stares at them and asks, “Are they alive?”
I tell her that it’s the love that helps them work. I bought them for her, spent too much money on them for her, but they make her happy and it’s the love that gives her comfort at night.
I have to fight back tears because that’s just the way it is, even when you spend your entire day pretending to be a cool hipster edge-lord mom online, you sometimes come up with this kind of sappy stuff and it feels good when you hug your kid and tuck them in at the end of the night.
Their night, anyway.
Sometime after 9 PM
I sit in front of my computer, finally alone again.
I open OpenOffice and stare at my novella-turned-novel. I am happy about this because I didn’t think I could write another novel in under a year, but here I am, exhausted AF, staring at the beginning of my third act, where my protagonist finally shows her family how she really feels about all the sacrifices she’s made.
Of course, I don’t get a lot of writing done before exhaustion drags me back to bed. But there is a fleeting moment or two where I roll over and reach for my phone. I jot a note or two, taking my late-night inspiration into another day.
Footnotes
It’s called Vile Men and it’s hard to find, unless you want Jeff Bezos to have some of your money.
It’s called Ending in Ashes and you can pre-order it now!
A year ago, my husband bought a new gasket seal to replace the old gasket of our front-loading washer that’s been leaking for longer than has been okay. We replaced it, but it’s still fucking leaking, but I figured out that the leak is coming through the front of the door and not the gasket. I dunno. I’ll probably tell him this later and we’ll just keep procrastinating this house issue for another year or so…
I woke up and watched some of this, and felt compelled to watch more because I do enjoy the amount of insights one can get from fiction. This guy’s also a therapist, so his insights on Walter’s character in Breaking Bad are actually kinda helpful with the characterization of the characters in my WIP. The YouTuber’s channel is called What’s Therapy? and he uses his insights on television and all sorts of other stuff. It’s perfect idea fodder for a writer like me.