Writing & Parenting

New website designs are springing up like bridge tolls around the Bay, first Small Press Traffic’s, then venerable navigator that is SPD. One victim of the improved onlinism is SPT’s paper journal, Traffic, which just went the way of all print and decided to stay trees. The double issue, 3/4 (doubles always mean danger), would have held between an original “Boykoff” cover Sharon Mesmer’s review of The Anger Scale and Musee Mechanique, along with a forum on Writing & Parenting. Paul Hoover’s already posted his contribution; mine was this:

The most obvious thing to say about writing and parenting is that once you’re a parent, you don’t have time to write. Being a parent is a miraculous exercise in the obvious, the tedious, and the banal: all the things you don’t want your writing to be. I have a new affection for the obvious since we had Auden. My life’s flattened to the contours of a toddler’s world, it’s more dependent on small variations in a limited scale, more Stanzas in Meditation than The Cantos.

I don’t fight that so much anymore, as a writer; I’m closer to being at peace with the extra-literary, or anti-literary, nature of parenting. It’s hard to push the experience of having kids into language without falling into sentiment and commonplace, a problem with trying to put anything into language—that artifice for holding experience in common, flattening it into the names we exchange—but in writing about parenting the problem looms larger, because the pre-made shapes for pouring the experience into are so insistent, well-worn, and policed. The most obvious thing to say about writing and parenting is that whatever you say about parenting in writing is obvious.

Once you’re a parent, you don’t have time to write. Every writer I’ve talked to who’s a parent says the same thing. Parents always say the same things: parenthood is an exercise in the obvious. There’s a narrow range of delights and concerns the role imposes, which is one reason it’s so annoying to be around one if you’re not one. There are writers who aren’t parents who say they have no time to write, too; writers, like parents, live in a circumscribed zone of pleasures and glooms which also makes them annoying to be around if you’re not one. The huge number of manuals on parenting and on creative writing suggests that there’s money to be made in soothing the makers of children and texts with the obvious: parents are as anxious to know their problems are “normal” as writers facing a “dry spell” are.

If parenthood itself is a dry spell, which it’s been so far for me, that’s a different order of problem, or two different problems pushed together and compounded. The problem of writing and the problem of parenting. Time considered as a writer: the stuff I always needed more of—to waste, to socialize, to bore myself with all the excuses there are for not writing. Time considered as a parent: the stuff I never have enough to give, to Auden, to writing, to relationships outside the tight boundaries of the family. The time I used to burn, find, spend, or steal for writing was always mine. Now it’s held in common: what I take for myself, for my writing, is time taken away from someone else. The things I used to do for inspiration now seem selfish, what used to be dedication—to a community, a tradition, an experiment in conducting a life in poetry—can feel like irresponsibility. Considered strictly as a writer, being a father so far has been disastrous. Considering a writer strictly as one who writes, being a parent is being a disaster.

As a writer, I’ve never enjoyed being a technician of the discourse, even to critique it. What I wanted was invention, imagination, originality: the countertop appliances of the soul. As a parent, I’ve learned more about what it means to be, or to want to be, common. To hold concerns in common with other parents that have nothing to do with being a writer; to know that the most powerful and unique thing that’s likely ever to happen to me is among the most common happenings in the world. Parenting is absolutely unique for everyone in approximately the same way. I don’t want anything wildly different for Auden than anyone else who loves their kid does. I want him to be a normal, happy child, I want him protected and loved. I admire originality in poetry, but I can’t picture clearly what it would mean to be an “original” parent. Being a parent is an exercise in always having something in common.

When I do start writing again, really writing, it won’t be the same I that writes. I don’t belong to myself, or to my writing, in the way that I did before. I don’t have the same relationship to time, or the old worshipful feeling about writing. I think having a kid has done for me what many writers describe poetry as doing for them: it’s taken me out of the word and into the world, but a world scrambled and reassembled for having its presence—Auden’s—within it.

What will Auden think of this when he’s old enough to read it? I’ve never loved any living thing so much; I cry (but don’t write) with ease when I consider it. But what parent wouldn’t say the same thing?

—Rodney Koeneke
February 2, 2007