Packing a Forty-eight Hour Life into a Twenty-four Hour Day

It's impossible, you know. Which is why you haven't heard much from me lately. And though writing is one of my essential priorities, one of the things that makes me soar and sing, my hopelessly disorganized brain combined with a twenty-seven-ton to-do list has kept me from it.

Sometimes I wax metaphysical on the thorn in my intellectual side that is daily life: how does one fruitfully combine the mundane with the lofty? The world of men with the world of ideas? Dishes and diapers with novels and the Big Bang? The easy answer: double the hours in a day and learn to live on no sleep. Unfortunately, the easy answer requires fundamentally different universal laws. Which is not so easy.

As I age, I more thoroughly grasp that you really can't do it all. You must choose where to devote your energy, what merits your attention. The rub is that some things are high in the pecking order through no desire of your own, or at best, as a corollary to things you value: food must be bought, cooked, eaten, and cleaned up; floors must be vacuumed, clothes must be washed, children must be ushered through morning and evening routines. Perhaps some people find enough time for their lofty pursuits afterward; but I do not. And it kills me.

I'm not whining, mind you; I chose this life of husband, children, friendships and family ties, and it fulfills me in many ways. I did not choose a life of independent solitude and freedom in the ivory tower. But there are days when I wish I had.

It's the ultimate catch-22. I don't for a second believe my ivory-tower life would be better; on the contrary, the lack of children and husband would be a black hole, unfillable, unerasable, unbearable. Yet those divine darlings ensure that my intellectual self has only snippets of time in which to think. And that, of course, doesn't work at all. No days lost in a story, theorem, program, idea, invention; only carefully carved blocks, an hour here, two hours there. I haven't even gotten started when it's time to stop. And as any artist or scientist can tell you, creative inspiration isn't some kind of faucet that patiently holds your budding ideas, right where you left them, until you turn it on again. Twenty hours' brilliance is reduced to at best a dull glow when served up in ten disjointed chunks. As Melissa Harris-Lacewell wrote,

Writing is an essentially selfish task.  It requires uninterrupted stretches of time. Some of those hours are spent actively putting words to paper, but sometimes you just need to wander around the yard and let the ideas knit themselves together in your mind.  You cannot rush writing. You can't just schedule it into 3 hour blocks while the kids are at daycare or wrap it up in time to get dinner on the table. Writing requires the freedom, agency, and resources that allow you to close your own door, set your own hours, and make your own rules. 

That said, there seem to be people who have managed it. Scientist Marie Curie raised two children while conducting phenomenal physics and chemistry. Dutch writer Hella Haasse penned masterpieces of literature in the evening hours, after her daughters' bedtime brought her ordinary housewife's day to a close. Perhaps I'm not trying hard enough.

Then again, Curie was a lousy mother; she herself said, "It can be easily understood that there was no place in our life for worldly relations." She was so consumed by her work that she often didn't see her children for months at a time. Uh, no thanks.

Haasse appears to have done better; her autobiographical writings reveal a how-did-I-get-so-lucky wonder familiar to every mother in recounting ordinary events. But then, these are her words, describing selected nanomoments in the span of a lifetime. I've penned many similar words of motherly wonder. Was she, like me, an irritable crab when her children called "Mommy" as she was daydreaming a storyline? Did she, like me, bang around slamming doors, muttering foul epithets while she cleaned the toilet? Did she, like me, feel that motherhood turned her from a literate, creative, interesting individual into a terrible nag, constantly hounding her children to pick up their clothes, brush their teeth, hurry up and eat before they were late to school?

Or perhaps Haasse mastered a skill I've only sporadically had a grip on: seeing herself as a writer who also has a family instead of a housekeeper and nanny who happens to write when she gets the chance. In those rare moments when I've managed to see myself as the bright and creative writer, mathematician, and scholar-of-nearly-everything that I want to be, I'm paradoxically a better wife and mother, and I get more household drivel done.

Which, of course, solves neither the forty-eight-hour-day dilemma nor the disjointed-chunky-faucet conundrum, but it's a step in the right direction.