WRITING LIFE: From a Stay-at-Home Mom, Where Being Interrupted is a Way of Life by Sheena Stimpfl

When I was young, I had an idea about what being a writer looked like. It did not involve being interrupted every few sentences by one or both of my small children. There certainly wasn’t mom-guilt attached to the dream. It didn’t look so unstructured, pieced together by stolen moments throughout the day.

The Notes app on my phone became a catch-all for my random thoughts, usually spoken through talk-to-text while navigating school drop-offs and doctor appointments. Putting it all together at the end of the day, often when my children were asleep, was at times, well, frustrating. I’d be left with disjointed ideas and thoughts, trying to build something out of missed moments of inspiration and clarity. At some point, I began to wonder if it should all be so hard. Maybe I should wait until I have a desk with a dedicated space, with dedicated time to dive in. Structure, my Virgo, Enneagram 1 self pleaded. I need structure!

I held off for some time with writing, pushing ideas and thoughts away where guilt and exhaustion settled in, often taking their places. But, just as my toddler’s tantrums prevailed, so did the urge to write, the ideas coming to me often at night, when I was so desperately trying to sleep. Don’t ignore me, they’d persist. I read once about an author that would get up hours before her young children and make time for writing. A dedicated two to four hours, every single day. Imagine that. I respected this, but I also valued my sleep.

So, I tried the opposite — nighttime, after I put the kids down to sleep. But, even then, the tiredness pulled at me, mingling with my guilt, asking me to put my valuable time into other things, like spending time with my husband, a little self-care, the stack of books on my shelf, all calling my name.

It’s not always convenient, and writing often feels as though I’m working on inspiration’s timeline, not my own. Ideas will come seemingly out of nowhere. Divine inspiration, if you will. Insert the Notes app on my phone again. I’d wonder how much of these ideas and thoughts were my own vs what “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert describes as some magical force, wandering the universe, just waiting for some open and willing person to catch hold of it. This idea, as much as I love it, frustrates me sometimes. What I write about is an accumulation of all the experiences and daydreams from childhood, all the ideas that stayed with me and held on while I lived my life. It’s as if they were waiting patiently, un-punishing.

The problem I find with Gilbert’s idea is that it feels as if I’m being punished for not being at the right place at the right time. I mean, can you blame me if inspiration is floating toward my face and I have to turn away because my child needs to use the bathroom or someone wants a snack? Does choosing to be a mother of two obliterate my openness to receiving? What makes me any different than the mothers out there who have published novels, who continue to write, day-in and day-out?

For many years, I convinced myself that I couldn’t. Exercising my own creativity somehow felt selfish in my early motherhood. How could I possibly give to something else when these two small humans needed so much from me? And when I’d give it my all, as I often do, I’d barely have anything left. There were errands to run, laundry to do, meals to be cooked, keeping up with my self-care, maintaining a marriage, and friendships and relationships with my family … Well, you can imagine how these things go. Somewhere, something or someone is suffering. I had choices to make and writing was not one of them. Journaling for my mental health sufficed. I guess. But there was always something missing. A big piece, as it turns out.

As my children grew, I was able to take more time for myself. I replaced things like watching TV and scrolling my phone for sitting in front of my laptop and typing out whatever came to me. The more I showed up, the easier it became, the more ideas flowed to me. Good or bad, it felt like a dam had opened. It was brilliant and beautiful and extremely emotional. I had reconnected to a part of my childhood self and she was thriving. Still is.

Some days, I don’t write at all. I either don’t have the time, I’m too tired or I just flat out choose something else. Sometimes it’s the TV. Go figure. I know now that my creativity, the inspiration, it’s always there. It doesn’t leave. It lies dormant and it pokes through sometimes in other mediums. And when we’re ready, children interrupting or not, it’s there, ready and willing. It may take some elbow grease, as my dad likes to say, but I like to think that this part is the actual magical force — the doing, the willingness to show up, again and again. Whether it’s terrible or absolutely blissful remains to be seen. After all, that’s what life is really about, I think.