Stealing Time: On Being a Mother and a Writer

Being a mother has made me a thief. The time I spend writing is stolen – either I’m stealing my husband’s time when he’s home from work or I’m stealing time I should be asleep,  doing hygiene, or housework. Something always suffers if I choose to write, so most of the time, I don’t. The writing I produce is thus choppy, half-thought out. I rely much more on drafts. I have notes everywhere – ideas on receipts, on my calendar, scrawled into the margins of the novel I’m reading. A lot of it is writing I plan on doing, not writing that actually exists in a physical form. 

My notes app: 

• cnf piece about consumption, desire, satiability with life, and parallels to weight. 
• am I enjoying the baby enough/time is running out/I’ll be 80 looking back on this in the blink of an eye and disappointed I didn’t enjoy it to its fullest

Sometimes I find a half-scrawled story like the one above months later, and forget where I was going with it. I no longer connect with the character, so it is abandoned to the center console or the glovebox. I’ll let my future self-rediscover the story again in hopes that she has more capacity to tackle fiction. When I do return to the page, it is with the unfamiliarity of reading a book for the first time. It’s refreshing and frustrating. When it works, I bring a new take to the story. When it doesn’t, it’s usually because I am returning in the middle of the night, with a baby monitor whooshing sleepily in my periphery. The story can only partially inhabit my mind; my son is always at the forefront. Trying to imagine any other mode of existence feels impossible.

Writing in motherhood is a juggling act, which is a cliché for a reason. You have to set something down in order to pick up writing. And I don’t love writing more than I love sleeping or taking a bath. So, when I choose to write over taking care of myself in other ways, the writing reflects that urgency and I return to it after some time and see my mind working in ways it didn’t before. Studies have found that the postpartum brain has a reduction in gray matter, cortical thickness and white matter density. Between that and going on 16 months of breastfeeding through the night, my brain can handle cranking out blips for my notes app when a spontaneous thought arises, but not much more. Thus, my creative process is rushed and disjointed. Often I feel like my writing is too. After careful pruning, there is sometimes a good story or essay hidden beneath the murk.

I am of the mind that I should embrace the writing I am doing. If it is frantic, ill-conceived, then I allow the character I am creating to inhabit those traits. I’m saving drafts for later, when I have the time and energy to really immerse myself in the fog of a created world. 

On the back of my child’s well-check visit summary from his doctor:

• She hadn’t been here since 1976 but I could feel her feet on the carpet. Could smell the powder she applied to the grease coating her forehead. Ever since they tore the carpet out, I can’t remember my eldest daughter’s name

Writing exists in the cracks of my life: in between sleep and awake, between time spent at work and at home, in a stolen hour away from the baby when he isn’t crying in the other room for “boo” (his word for nursing). Motherhood has pushed writing from the central focus of my life to the realm of occasional luxury, like a pedicure or a workout. I have two hands but five glasses to carry at once: one is going to have to be left behind, otherwise I risk spilling them all. 

I wrote one of my favorite stories in the waiting room at the dentist’s office on my phone, as an email to myself so I could continue it later on my laptop. When I go back now and reread the scene where the ghost is disappearing into the afterlife, I imagine the ghost superimposed on the backdrop of the dentist’s office: Tuscan 2000’s wallpaper and ugly metal wall hangings behind her ghoul head. Were these monotonous details what I needed to create something entirely new? Having escaped the routine of feed baby, play with baby, bathe baby, nurse baby, the dentist’s office was like an Italian writer’s retreat. 

In the early days of motherhood, while up periodically throughout the night, I would write in the notes app on my phone. These lines would come to me on the edge of a dream and might’ve disappeared back into that dream space if I went back to sleep. But, I was awake nursing a baby, so I’d write them down, trying to remember the exact smell of my son’s head, trying to memorialize the baby that was rapidly becoming a new person. I, too, am rapidly becoming a new person. 

A journal entry from 2/20/2025 (my baby was two months old):

• Motherhood without support is to have your contributions be invisible. Mothers suffer a silence that explodes into a scream when a pebble tips it off the careful balance she has crafted each day. Though she is full of a burning, primal rage, she also has within her a deep overflow of joy that extinguishes the flames of anger

Is the prose the most beautiful, organized that I have written? No. But I wrote it, completely mystified by exhaustion and postpartum hormones, and I think that matters. Making time to write, even at the expense of the dishes getting done, or the baby having to look at his dad’s face instead of mine, is important. If I hadn’t written this down, I wouldn’t have immortalized that in-between space of postpartum, where I wasn’t fully my old self, nor the experienced(ish) mother I am now. Writing solidifies experience into a tangible, re-visitable space. If I continue to write, I can come back to these exhausted baby days through my writing and briefly re-inhabit the consciousness of my early days as a mother. 

Just now, I am hiding in the storage room of my in-law’s house to compose this field note while my baby plays with his cousins in the other room. The mild smell of mildew and the muted silence is a solace, in this entirely separate world where I am not only a mother. And I will remember this feeling, because I wrote it down.