what is the work?

a post-bedtime pep talk to myself, okay?!

Tonight while I was carrying Tommy to sleep (walking a little labyrinth around his dark bedroom, like I have done multiple times a night for the last almost-two-years of nights), Bobo kept barking. My husband, who usually deals with Bobo while I’m doing bedtime, was out of the house, taking some needed time away, so there was no one else to quiet him down. Nothing makes me feel more rage than this: having a toddler right on the edge of sleep, and hearing my extremely loud dog bark on the other side of the door. Big rage! I felt it rise in me immediately! The kind of rage that has surely been simmering quietly on the back burner—it was too quick, too hot. I was so, so angry, wanted to rush out of the room and yell at the dog or something irrational like that, but I kept walking the labyrinth, Tommy managed to stay sleepy enough to not try to leap out of my arms, and Bobo eventually gave up his loud barking. And, in my mind, I calmed enough to gently notice myself amongst the rage, say to myself what I might say to my child if he were expressing rage: Wow, you’re feeling really angry, and not just about this thing with the dog. What is that about?

I have been so quiet lately, so head-down, low-output, nothing-to-say quiet. This is unlike me. I’m an artist, I definitely move through the world as an artist, but the ideas, or the motivation, or the energy, or something isn’t coming. Even with friends, I don’t know what to say, or don’t feel like myself when I’m talking. Most days, it feels like the most meaningful, special, useful, poetic thing I do is walk the bedroom labyrinth holding my child while he falls asleep. A large percentage of the poems I’ve written in the past two years have their origins in that awake walking night time. Weirdly, in some ways, it feels like the only part of my day that my feeling-self is awake. My feeling-self has had to get smaller, quieter, allowed to feel and sense and be only in the weird wee-hours, when I feel both proud of and sorry for myself. When I take a look at myself, my life, my little universe of my family, and find it all both to be beautiful and inscrutable to me, unrecognizable from any plan or expectation I had for where I would be at this point in my life. The rest of the day, I don’t do this looking-inward. I try not to think too hard. I just go through the tasks of the day. The trouble is, the artist needs the feeling-self to be out and about in the world. Why is she trapped in the bedroom at 3:13 am? Why is she only ever there right now? What is that about??? Why can’t she show up in conversations with friends, in my basement studio, at dinner with my husband, or just generally during daylight hours?!

I have a little piece of printed cardstock I got in a playbill from a play at The House Theater in Chicago (RIP!) years ago that reads: “What is the Work?” That piece of cardstock is a treasured possession, and I think about that question a lot. What is the work? And, I guess, by extension, “what isn’t the work?” Right now, I feel like I’m setting ideas and goals aside left and right. So many ideas don’t even get the chance to become ideas in my exhausted and busy mind. Right now, appropriately, I think my most important work is caregiving. That hunch about the night-walking is right, I think. That is the work. The core of it. The truest thing. The inspiration, or vocation, or whatever you want to call it, for right now. But what grieves me is all that that leaves out. The sewing patterns I’m not designing, the quilts I’m not making, the books and poems I’m not writing, the online classes or workshops I’m not devising, the MONEY I’m not making, all of it. The friend/spouse/thinker/human I’m not being, or not to the fullest, I feel. It’s difficult to sort that out for myself.

I suspect that this is the origin of the rage, or an origin. Probably the origin of rage (or very-complex-emotions) for lot of creative-leaning mothers, as I find I’m never alone in these feelings that come to me as personal revelations. We’re all alone and not-alone. All borrowing each other’s public words for the same private dramas. It’s as if the ideas are dog-barks as I’m trying to walk my baby to sleep. They unsettle me, pull me out of my careful work. That isn’t the work! But I need to go deal with them! And, unlike the barking dog, I want to! It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think the barking dog alerted me to how divided and chaotic I’m feeling inside myself, now very many directions I want to be racing in while what my body really needs and wants to be doing is taking care of my baby. It’s biology. I want to be here now, in the slow everydayness, with my kid. The other things can wait, but him being this small and needing me this much can’t. I couldn’t have expected how that would feel until I got here. It’s so surprising to me, but maybe shouldn’t be, that motherhood feels so clearly like the most important thing, so much more important than the other things that I can barely access them. My child is always the most beautiful thing in the room. But that makes me no money. And it isn’t art. So, as an artist, it’s complicated to feel that way, to drop back and say that, even maybe for right now, this day or week or month, the “work” is caregiving.

But I also could be writing so many more poems, and patterns, and essays, and classes, and I do need to make money (our admittedly thrifty expenses still outnumber a single income, unless Isaiah got a significant raise), and I love to make things. Doing any work at all right now takes so much convincing, so much cajoling and and coaxing. Whenever I’m away from the toddler, my body and my mind both want to shut down and go into recovery mode, not suddenly become productive and creative. If I can manage to do it, it takes a significant transitional time of messing around/resting/not-actually-getting-work-done before I can get started, and by then it feels like the nap or childcare time is nearly over. My creative work is so slow right now, which might also be inducing rage. It’s hard to work and work and work on something and feel you have little to show for it.

Is this secretly an essay about burnout? It might be. I don’t know you guys, I’m just really tired, and feeling pretty used-up in lots of ways. I have to remind myself that I’m capable of meaningful creative work and mothering, both at once, that the scale and focus shift back and forth, that over the course of the first year-and-a-half of my baby’s life, I co-wrote a WHOLE SEWING BOOK (which can now be preordered!), a big and intense one, and I wrote a whole poetry manuscript while I was pregnant, and I’m sitting on 30k words of a novel that is hard to write but creatively-exciting, and I’m still slowly working on sewing patterns that feel like things I want to contribute to the world, and I’m still trying to carve out space and time to sew/knit my clothes and home goods because I like to do so and it’s kind of my job, and I’m fricken cleaning my house, the same million baskets of toys everyday, vacuuming, wiping up half-chewed apples, making so many meals, and I am someone’s mom, someone’s partner, someone’s sister, and many people’s somewhat-absent-in-late-days-but-still-devoted friend. I’m allowed to be really mad if the dog barks and messes up my sacred work of putting the baby to sleep. I’m allowed to call that work sacred and just as meaningful as writing the fancy sewing book I got paid to write. I’m allowed to feel rage that is unfocused, that is blurry and forceful and irrational. I’m allowed to feel divided, to have no clear answer to what is the work: it’s everything, it’s nothing, mothering my child isn’t work but it is work, love is work, art is work, gardening is work, cleaning my house and cooking is work, my labor is my love, my time is valuable, my art is free, etc.

How do I cope? By channeling my creative energy into taking pictures of my kid and hunting online for a vintage runner rug for the bare hallway that doesn’t cost a fortune, and by doing my job work (mostly sewing pattern stuff, but also calling writing the novel work), albeit slowly and with great clumsiness. There is so much time to do the other things that aren’t flowing at the moment. So many years. Life is long. Right now I have a young child — I won’t forever. I remind myself of that. If the too-many-ideas invade my mind like a dog-bark, I can feel angry and then I can wait, keep walking, hope it all settles again.

I ask myself — is all of this surfacing now with even more force because I’m playing chicken with the idea of a second baby? We are ready, but not ready. I want more children. I don’t particularly want them especially far apart, at least not at this point (though I’m not opposed to a later-in-life last hurrah baby, that sounds pretty lovely imo). So weird how we can plan and not-plan these things. How it is in our power and not in our power. It was so easy to jump in with two feet the first time around. Now, knowing all that being pregnant, giving birth, having a newborn entails, on top of my high-needs beloved toddler, I am frankly terrified. But I want it. All of motherhood has been embodied paradox, and this is extremely in that realm. So I feel rage, because I feel tugged in both directions. I want nothing to change, and I know all that will happen is change on top of change on top of change. Change wearing a hat that is also change. I crave that change as much as I fear it. I crave the feeling of power, of revelation, of transformation, of growing our family and multiplying the love. But I know that also invites more rage, more powerlessness, more struggle, division, fear. What will happen when I have TWO sleeping babies and Bobo barks? What then? I don’t know. I don’t have the energy to plan that far ahead. Thank goodness we aren’t there right now, that the dog stopped barking, that the baby fell asleep, that everything is still afloat and I am still me. What is the work? Walking the labyrinth all night, keeping my insides awake.