Finding Balance
One of the toughest challenges I face these days is finding balance: school obligations, job obligations, family obligations, personal writing obligations (not necessarily in order of priority). I spent last weekend alone, the wife and kids were visiting family, no work-related stuff, no yard work, no errands, I just sat and I wrote... and wrote... and wrote.
Which gave rise to some serious thinking about the drain my job has on my writing life.
So I put this out to the list: Tell us how you balance your writing, both personally and for school, with your employment obligations? Do you have a boss who is cool with you taking what amounts to a month of vacation each year (and are they hiring?), are you self-employed, do you have a spouse who works hard to free you up for your true calling, or do you just slug it out however you can?
Which gave rise to some serious thinking about the drain my job has on my writing life.
So I put this out to the list: Tell us how you balance your writing, both personally and for school, with your employment obligations? Do you have a boss who is cool with you taking what amounts to a month of vacation each year (and are they hiring?), are you self-employed, do you have a spouse who works hard to free you up for your true calling, or do you just slug it out however you can?
posted by David Gresham at 10:36 AM
8 Comments:
I'm fortunate that I can work part-time and off shifts and weekends, if I want or need to. (I'm an RN). When I used to work in publishing, it was strictly M-F 8 to 5. Yuk. I don't know how I'd manage everything with that type of schedule and hats off to those who do! I guess I should be thanking my husband for making a good living so I can work part-time too, eh? :) Even with all that "free time" (my kids are in school all day), I usually end up slugging it out anyway. I know if I was still working as a copywriter, I'd had no desire to come home and write in the evenings if I'd been writing all day. I think I've got a pretty good balance on it all at the moment. Come summer, when the kids are here 24/7, well ... let's not go there just yet.
I'm bustin' my butt to ship my next packet to Roger, so it doesn't wreak havoc on him for our Tuesday phone conference. I am my own worst critic. There are submissions I'd rather take back; but, I'm thinking, if I send in something in a different vein, I could call it a "revision.
I am most fortunate about my work situation. I work in a print shop, half a day in shipping; lots of lifting, but other tasks don't require a lot of thinking, which frees me up for thinking about what I am writing. The folks at the print shop are remarkably supportive about my starting grad school. I broke them in when I returned to finish my BA. I informed them of my decisions at both levels, and not only am I afforded the time (though some of it unpaid) to take off for the residencies, but also a day off periodically just to catch up.
My partner nudges me periodically to get me "to come up for air." Our two cats have no problem getting my attention, tails whisking my face when I am most on a roll, or a flat-out protest on the keyboard. Then I put in a CD, a mix perhaps, or Four Strings' "Breathe," and one of them positions herself for a nap behind my IBook lid.
So, that's my writing story, with wife and the kids.
Really, the balance I am trying to find is moving some of the coherence settling into my poetry to my essays. I figure I'll probably end up writing a solid critical paper by my final packet.
Writers with kids . . . ages five or fifty . . . whiskers or bare. Go figure.
Sooner or later, we all have whiskers. ;-)
Finding balance? Is that a trick question for unbalanced people?
I'm lucky in that Georgia is very supportive of my efforts. She reads those drafts, makes those comments on the drafts like, "Precisely which brand of crack were you smoking when you thought this was a good idea?" or "No, please, I'm begging you . . . delete this." She's involved in many way and has been since a long time ago. She has picked up extra hours at her own nursing job to help with the billing. She helped my build and decorate my office. She's such a blessing and I'm a very lucky, grateful man.
The triplets seem to accept the whole thing pretty well, though my daughter accused me once of doing nothing but, "Being on the computer and laying on the sofa and reading." Sigh. Thankfully there's a Dairy Creme four houses down the street to mend, or at least redirect the conversation about these things. (Dairy Creme IS my cowardly plan for all those other hard questions kids will ask.)
I spoke with Thomas Fox Averill after a reading at UNI a couple years back and he writes in the living room at a card table with the family all around him, TV blaring and conversations raging. He decided he wasn't going to give up family or writing and by gosh he'd combine them. Seems to work for him. I agree with this somewhat, but I'm not up to his level. I don't close my office door very much and keep an ear out for what's going on in the house jumping into the fray for pleasure, for avoidance.
I'm lucky in that I work in a place where what I'm doing is valued, my bosses and colleagues ask me occasionally what I'm doing and how's it going. They let me step down to 70% time and pay to have more time to write. They laugh at me when I come in, full of piss and vinegar, ready to burst and say, "Good writing day, eh?" They leave me be when I'm just showing up and doing my thing.
I dunno where this fits in to the balance aspect, except that it seems more in the unbalanced side of things. Wherever I go I'm reading and jotting the odd note. I've taken to wearing cargo pants because you can jam a book in one pocket and a notebook in the other. Remember, I'm in Iowa, so nobody nobody cares about the fashion statement much.
Good luck to anyone that can find balance. It may be an elusive ideal, it may be always be present. I don't know that there is any right way to do this, other than how it works for the inidvidual. Clearly more writing time is better, but plenty of folks have done fine juggling and running and eking. Maybe it's enough to simply WANT balance.
RE:
LisaLove said...
Sooner or later, we all have whiskers. ;-)
It's a quarter to five in the morning, and I scared our smaller cat Tina off, with my laugh out loud burst!!!
Lisa, darlin', LOVE the whiskers line!! Sometimes my L follows me around with tweezers, when the light reflects just right, on a pinky-nail length blond hair from my chin -- well, maybe not blond, but white. And, that "pinky-length nail" on my hands is about the size of a twelve-year old girl's.
Ending a sentence with an apostrophe -- is that acceptable? And, isn't my life somewhat, (well, here I go again, reinventing a word) "apostophebic"?
Roger tells me it's okay to bend the rules a little.
I know at times, a painful editing process reinvents an occasional poem of mine. But, lately, a poem reduced from a page or two to a stanza hits me deeper than the original.
There's a concept: Melody reading SHORT poems at the next residency!
I am new to internet shorthand (what's the word?) but, Lisa: :-)))
Resounding.
Mel
My husband and I are voluntarily poor, so we can try to have it all -- lots of time with the kids, time together, writing. We are lucky in that where we live, there is a lot to do with kids that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Larry is supportive and also a poet, so we carve out time for him as well. So Larry works part-time and I do freelance work, and together we make do. Each of us could be making more money, but we choose not to at this time. If I had my 'druthers, I'd work less freelance work, and in fact, have been turning it down lately because I feel like my creative work has been shorted. Plus, I got really overwhelmed last week, so this week I said "F**K it" and took time off to do whatever I wanted to do. Yesterday we had a spring party for some little girlfriends of Olivia's, and I've been taking the kids on field trips. Yes, and I wrote some -- because I wanted to.
Come Monday, I will re-mount my horse and crank out some prose. Wish me luck.
I wish you luck, Anne. I love the idea of voluntarily poor. I mean, you're referring to getting the Lexus without the navigational system, right? Or is that voluntarily lost?
Seriously, saddle up and climb up. The caravan's moving out and the dogs are barking.
Peace be with you all,
mc
You're right, MC. And I know you didn't say this, but it made me realize that talking about being voluntarily poor smacks of a privileged world view. Coming from middle class America, it's a lot easier to "volunteer" to have less, to choose to work less and earn less to have more time -- it's another thing entirely when you work from dawn to dusk to sustain yourself. I am richly blessed, a fact I often forget.
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