Letting it hang out

On paid work, unpaid work, and showing our work

Early in Covid lockdown, I discovered that my child thought I had no job.

The inciting incident occurred one afternoon when we were sitting at the kitchen table together, looking over June’s school assignments. June asked me to help them¹ do some research for a report on ancient Egypt using the Seattle Public Library’s online resource portal — Britannica for children, etc. But I’d already been parenting, helping them with school, for most of the day. I needed some time, I explained, to do my own work. I needed to respond to an email from my publisher, who was trying to figure out what to do with The Fixed Stars, which was supposed to be published — and promoted with a cross-country book tour — that May. Surely it would sink like a stone.² Shipping was stalled; bookstores were closed; the economy was in chaos. That book had been the culmination of two years of writing, a nearly full-time job for that period, and now its future was in limbo. I must have said some drastically condensed, parent-talking-to-child version of the above. June heard just one word. You have a job? they said.

They knew that I was a writer. Of course they did. June knew that I had written books. They knew that, in the previous year, I’d even gone away for a few weeks to write intensively, one week at a time, hammering out the first draft of the manuscript. But it didn’t add up to a job, a real job, a paying job, a job-job — not in the sense that June’s dad has a job, or that Ash has a job: some needy and exacting off-screen creature that demands that its humans put on clothes, say goodbye to their family, drive somewhere, and do some nebulous something for hours of each day.

I could mostly tend to my job in my bathrobe, right there at the table. I was tending to it all the time. It didn’t look like anything unusual, or anything at all — just me and a screen, doodledeedoo. It was functionally invisible. And as I sat there with June in that first spring of our lockdown, trying with words and waving hands to show them the omnipresence of my job, willing them to see it, the way a guy in a horror movie tries to convince another guy that there really is a ghost, man, there is a ghost RIGHT there, I realized that not only was my job hard to distinguish from my just being, but also that I had actively hidden it. I had hidden my job from June without intending to: by compressing my paid work almost entirely into the hours when they were — pre-Covid, at least — at school.

This was a good thing, right? — that for most of June’s conscious life, I had managed to cram my professional life into the hours between 8:30am to 2:30pm, so that I could then run carpool, cook dinner, read aloud, put them to bed? It was an excellent thing, really, a lucky thing, a position of indisputable privilege, that I could be available that way for my kid.

But it also ensured that June only ever saw one dimension of me. It also offered them a wildly skewed vision of what life as a real live adult mother-person looks like. I should clarify that June was seven at the time, and I knew that they would have plenty of years to understand what adulthood looks like and where money comes from. This was not a crisis. Maybe if I liked my job less, or if my work were less indistinguishable from my being, I wouldn’t have cared. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared if I weren’t always striving to be great! at both my paid job and my unpaid job as the co-chair of our family. But I did care. I felt like rising up on my hind legs — that’s the feeling that came to me: I was an animal with hind legs, an animal with hind legs and, let’s not forget, a job — and roaring, OH CHILD IF ONLY YOU KNEW

I decided to start showing my work. I would make my various jobs more visible, noisier, less tidy — my paid work, but also the unpaid domestic work of cooking, grocery-shopping, making sure June takes the right coat for the right weather, walking the dog. The point was not to teach them that adulthood blows, though it sometimes does. I like very much being an adult. The point is also not to enforce gratitude or pry out some thank-yous. I like thank-yous, but I do not need my children to thank me for their being born, or for the emotional and financial sacrifices that parenthood requires. I agreed to those before they were even born.

What I do want is to pull back the curtain on Oz, the Great and Powerful — I am now a wizard with hind legs and a job — and let my children see more of what goes into making what, to them, is normal life.

I mean, hey-o, there’s an entire person back here! Adulthood contains multitudes. I am a mother and a writer and a wife and an ex-wife and a friend and and and and.

This seems like as good a moment as any to tell you that I started this post intending to write about cooking, about the recipes and not-really-recipes that have gotten our household through the past few months. I will do that next week. Because when I started to write about cooking, I started to think about an interview published in The Nation last week with the writer Camille Dungy, by my friend and fellow writer/mother/wizard Sara B. Franklin. (You might remember Sara for this interview with Ross Gay.) Dungy has just released a memoir called Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, which I’m in line for at the library. While I wait, I have been thinking for days now about this part of Sara’s exchange with Dungy:

SF: Before the pandemic, most of your work was done before your daughter woke up, when she was at school, or when you were outside the home. During the pandemic, she saw you vying for time to work. Have you noticed any shifts since your daughter was most actively watching you do that?

CD: I think that what Callie understands is that the way artists are artists is that they are fed, and somebody’s taking care of cleaning of the house and the shopping and all of those other things that make it possible for the artist to have the space to create. But for women artists—unless they’re insanely wealthy and have a particular set of decisions which often mean not partnering and not having children—[we] tend to have to balance the space-making with all of that doing. There is significantly less room for this fantasy of untethered thinking. I have become disinterested in reifying or reaffirming that fantasy of untethered thinking. And I want, more and more, to make space for people—not just women—people to be artists while also engaging with the realities of living a life. My daughter has witnessed that and she’s not taking for granted the fact that cooking has to be done and cleaning has to be done and shopping has to be done and the art has to be done. She understands that there’s some way that she either needs to find a team who can help those things happen around her, or she has to create a balance that means less time given to art and rest. I think at 12 years old, she already understands that the fantasy of creating art separate from living is constructed. Just like the fantasy of landscape in this country. It’s a fabricated sense of reality, not what really happens in the world.

In the last three years, I’ve made a bunch of changes, small and large, to make my work — my paid work, my unpaid work, my life’s work — more visible. I now have an actual office, for one thing, a place with a desk and a door. In the summer of 2021, we took our savings and converted the downstairs (not technically a basement, but it felt like one) from a catch-all into something more useful. Where there was once a dark and drafty rectangle of poorly used space, there are now two separate rooms: an office for me, and a sewing-slash-craft-area for everybody. We also added insulation! Now, when I go to work, I have somewhere to go.

And though I have a dedicated work space, I also let evidence of my writing life sort of strew itself around the house: a stack of books on the kitchen table, sketched-out workshop curriculum on the counter, a book about craft³ left open by the TV (four months now and counting). I don’t rush to gather it up. June sees it and asks what I am reading or what I did while they were at school, and I decide to answer like they actually want to know. To be honest, I don’t know if anybody but me notices any of it. But when I look around our days, I see more of myself.

I’m curious: if you have kids — or young people who look to you for guidance in any capacity — what is something you want them to understand about adulthood? Comments are open to everybody today.

1. June uses she/they pronouns.

2. We wound up pushing the pub date from May to August, and I did a “tour” on Zoom, which strangely, I loved? But people don’t buy books at Zoom events, not like they do in-person, and a book’s success depends disproportionately on how it sells in its first weeks of life. Though I believed, still believe, that the book was my best, its sales don’t reflect that.

3. Both book links in this post are affiliate links.