A Kind Of Mercy
It is Saturday morning, and my desk belongs to me again.
To the right of me is a 50-something-year-old sliding glass door, which might as well be glorified seran wrap. You can feel heat and cold when you’re standing next to it, and if there are children thirty feet away screaming their heads off on the trampoline, you can hear that, too. Which, I suppose, is a blessing in case of an emergency, but not so helpful when one is trying to write meaningful words on the other side of the glass.
Every Saturday morning, I write here. I pull the sheer white curtains across the rod, a cocoon of sorts for my workspace. Like a poor attempt to separate church and state, this is how I separate family and work—with cheap glass and a see-through curtain.
The kids play outside, as they’ve done every morning for the past 130 days without complaint. I keep waiting for them to fall apart, to explode, to retreat in tears, for their emotions to finally boil over, but every day is more of the same, and every day they are fine. As soon as they finish breakfast, they gallop barefoot across the grass with hoots and hollers, smiles stretched across their carefree faces. Another day in wonderland.
I just finished reading Jeanne Murray Walker’s essay, “Alice Munro: A Quiet Grace,” where she writes:
“ … I know from experience how children bounce back, how they tend to take whatever is given to them and make the best of it. I think now that the persistent health of young things is a kind of mercy.”
A kind of mercy. That phrase stops me in my tracks, rolls over my tongue a few times, rattles in my brain for days. I think of my children, happy and innocent, how they’ve been locked up here for months on end, haven’t seen their friends, have barely left the house, and couldn’t care less. They have snacks and books, bikes and each other, and somehow, by the grace of God, it is enough.
A kind of mercy, indeed.
My daughter toddles back and forth in front of the glass while I fire up my laptop. I can see her out of the corner of my eye peering at the window, but the reflection makes it seem like we’re perched between one of those two-way mirrors: I can see her, but she can’t see me. This is another kind of mercy.
It’s 9:06. I light my grapefruit candle, take a deep breath, and open a folder of documents I haven’t touched since last week. I remember a line from Bird by Bird, which I just finished reading for the third time.
“Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.”
My husband teases me when I kick him out of our bedroom at 9am sharp on Saturday mornings, but this is the arrangement we’ve made. Whether I write 50 words or 3,000 words is irrelevant—my butt will be in this chair for three hours. This is my Pavlovian conditioning in action, the dog drooling at the sound of footsteps, Jim offering Dwight an altoid every time the computer chimes. If I show up here every Saturday and pull the curtains closed and light the candle on my desk, the words will surely follow. Right?
Ritual, check. Unconscious: it’s showtime.
The baby wobbles by. Her bangs are in her face and she’s carrying a sippy cup in one hand and half a granola bar in the other. These days, she is rarely spotted without something in each hand. Her favorite thing to do is dig through my nightstand with her little paws, grabbing anything she can reach. I caught her in the kitchen the other day clutching a bottle of pillow spray and an old Nordstrom gift card that I’m pretty sure has $22 on it. At least she’s got good taste.
She stares at the glass for a minute, frozen in place, as if she can sense someone on the other side. I resist the temptation to grab a clip from the bathroom to pin the hair away from her eyes. If she sees me, the jig will be up.
I didn’t intend for Saturday mornings to be my only dedicated writing time, but, as the world would tell you, these are unprecedented days. There is no coffee shop to escape to during the week, no library to work from, nowhere to go, no summer camps for these children to attend. I am simply here, with the laundry and the dishes and three small children, every second of groundhog day, doing the same things over and over and over again. Making waffles. Changing diapers. Wiping toothpaste off the counter, pee off the floor. Reheating coffee and leftovers and checking e-mails on my phone while I wait for the microwave to ding.
It’s summertime—quarantine edition.
Our schedule is nonexistent and our boundaries are gone. My husband and I both work around the clock from our bedroom, bartering time at a single desk five steps from our bed. His new job is flexible, a gift, but also extends past normal working hours. It’s not uncommon for him to work from 8-11pm, sometimes on the phone during that time. It’s not uncommon for me to work from 8-11pm as well, wearing headphones to drown out his phone call.
Last week I told a friend we are considering putting an outdoor shed in our backyard and turning it into an office.
“I’m not sure how long we can keep this up, both of us working out of our bedroom like this,” I tell her.
“I couldn’t do it,” she says, “I’ve always marveled at your ability to work in the margins.”
My friend is a genius, a literal scientist. Of course she can’t work from her bedroom in fifteen-minute increments throughout the day, and one three-hour slice of time on Saturdays. I don’t know how anyone works like this, myself included. I just … do.
In some ways, I always have.
Some seasons have afforded more childcare and some have afforded none, but either way, I work and write and create in the margins. It’s either that or give up, and I’m not ready to give up yet. Something inside me, a force that could only be God himself, propels me to keep going. To write a sentence down before I crawl into bed. To grab my camera anytime light flickers on the floor. To get out of the shower and type every idea I can remember. To write on index cards next to the bathtub, while the baby splashes water on fresh ink.
The fact that I have worked this way for eight whole years and managed to turn these efforts into anything at all, is, certainly—only by the hand of God—a kind of mercy.
Directly behind me, 103 of those index cards are taped to my bedroom wall. They are the start of something terrifying, haphazardly attached with blue painter’s tape. The perfectionist in me is irritated at how sloppy it looks, but then I remember another section of Bird by Bird:
“So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend.”
Sometimes when I look at this wall of cards, I see a three-year-old idea finally taking shape. Other times (most of the time), I just see a mess.
Today I’m supposed to be organizing the cards into something more substantial. I already feel panicked and overwhelmed. I’m trying to make sense of what’s here, but it feels like I just dumped half a puzzle on the dining room table with no box lid in sight. I’m not even sure what I’m making yet.
I stare at the cards.
Not knowing you’re supposed to cut grapes in half
Imposter syndrome
Baby letting go of the furniture
A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle
Kids hammering dinosaurs out of rocks
If a stranger walked into this room and looked at my wall, I wonder what they would think. I wonder if they would think a crazy woman lives here. Maybe she does.
I remember another gem from Anne Lamott: “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.”
These cards might not make sense to anyone else, but they are a small culmination of something I’ve become conscious of. I used to think motherhood and creative work were opposing forces—that my mothering was in the way of my creative work, and my creative work was in the way of my mothering.
But, as it turns out, creating among chaos is part of this job, this calling, this gift, this thing I offer back to the universe. I love to write, and I love my children. I love to write about the way I love my children, and, for me, the only way I’ve been able to do that for eight years is by accepting the way these two parts of my life are forever intertwined.
This, I think, is what it means to be a mother who writes.
I don’t want you to think I sat down at my desk on a Saturday morning and wrote these words from start to finish in one sitting. So, here’s the truth. I was given the prompt for this essay on Sunday, and started thinking about my answers on Monday. I let the words swirl in my head for a while and catalogued ideas away in a few mental filing cabinets. Tuesday, I jotted down notes in a notebook. I started the Google doc on Wednesday at 4:25pm while the kids jumped on the trampoline. An hour later, I put the baby in front of the PBS app and worked on it some more, and then again at 9:14pm once all the kids were asleep. On Thursday, I picked at it while the kids ate dinner.
By Friday—yesterday—this essay didn’t suck (my favorite part! the day the essay no longer sucks!). I read it again at 10:12am, and then wrote between 3:24-4:58pm while the baby miraculously napped late. I thought about this essay some more in the shower last night, how I would end it, as I watched a tiny translucent spider climb up the shower wall. I remembered another quote from Bird by Bird while I massaged orange blossom soap into my loofa.
“There is ecstasy in paying attention.”
To be clear: I did not feel ecstasy watching a spider in my shower, but I did feel something just by remembering the quote. The spider was small and not bothering anyone, so I decided to leave him be, extending my own kind of mercy.
(That paragraph you just read? I wrote those lines in the shower and typed them out wrapped in my towel, water droplets still on my shoulders.)
Last night I opted out of family movie night to work on this essay some more. The boys forgave me, as they always do. I missed Space Jam, but, thankfully, they gave me a thorough recap afterward.
And here I am, on a Saturday morning, with the curtains drawn and the candle lit, putting the finishing touches on these very words you’re reading. The edits are small and minimal at this point, mostly serving as procrastination before I face the index cards. It is 9:56 and any minute now, that baby will appear on the other side of the glass and I will finally open the curtain for her, not because my writing time is done but because she is ready to take a nap and I am the one who will lay her to sleep.
I am grateful for the interruption, for the five-minute nursing session, for the way I’ll trace her eyebrows with my finger while she plays with the hair tie on my wrist.
She is an instant source of inspiration, my favorite muse. This 10am interruption is part of the ritual, and when I come back to my desk, I will have just under two hours left before I rejoin my family for lunch, the dishes from lunch, you know the rest.
The clock is running out and the index cards are taunting me, but I press on. Not because I’m confident or fearless, but because God gave me these children and these words, and I believe He’s called us to be good stewards of everything He places in our hands, and everything He places in our hearts.
For the next two hours, the baby will sleep in her room, and I will write in mine.
Both, I think, are a kind of mercy.
