This post is about exactly what the title says: I wrote a book on parental leave.
And it sucked to do it.
Managing Time
Time management has never truly been a challenge for me, in the sense that I’m very good at it. The problem, more or less, has always been that I’m overly ambitious. I always think I can get more done than I can. As a result, I tend to bite off more than I can chew. In turn, I end up with a never-ending to-do list, which just runs on and on.
This problem has gotten worse as I’ve gotten older because I’ve taken on more and more tasks as an adult. When I was younger, I deep cleaned my room and cleaned up my computer and organized all my files monthly.
Now, I don’t have just one room. I have a whole house, which is also packed with a bunch of stuff that isn’t necessarily mine. That means I need to consult people before I simply purge stuff. Today, I spend more time sorting through things and moving them around, versus actually reducing the clutter.
I also bake and cook now. I have more bills to pay, which means more time doing admin work. Workouts are important to me, so I try to get one in every day. I run this blog, and I try to publish books. Today, I have more friends than I ever did when I was younger. I have a pet. I have a car that needs care (and, actually, now we have two vehicles). And, on top of all of that, I have work.
Replacing the Work To-Do List with Baby To-Do
Or at least I did. When Baby arrived, I started a year of leave. And it has been nice, not going to the grind and dealing with the frustrations of work (clients not paying, people … being people). I have been working, at least part-time, since I was fifteen.
For anyone trying to play along with my age, that’s over two decades now. (I had about six weeks of unplanned downtime in 2023, which was the first time I’d been “unemployed” since I started working, but I was still working.) Needless to say, I was ready for a kind of break.
Parental leave was not the kind of break I thought it might be. I’d been warned, repeatedly, but I don’t think that having a baby is something you can really understand until you’ve lived it. Unless you have been the primary caregiver for an infant, you can’t possibly understand exactly how demanding they are.
All the people who have been in that situation are nodding their heads. Those who have not are currently dismissing this theory. You might agree that it must be difficult and demanding, because everyone says it is, but your imagination fails you. There is nothing that prepares you for how all-consuming it is.
Nursing Exacerbates Caregiving Loads
Now, some people do find it easier. Perhaps they have an “easy” baby, or they’re more able to relax into a routine with their child. They don’t find it “demanding.” And, of course, some people bottlefeed, rather than nursing. Nursing creates an attachment between nursing parent and child that increases the load on the nursing parent.
Of course, I chose to and was able to nurse. That decision, in turn, led to increased demands on me, my body, and my time.
Nursing is time intensive. Right now, Baby is being weaned, which means we’re reducing the number of feedings and the time spent nursing. The time we spent nursing had already fallen off into the autumn months. It feels like a bit of a haze now, but at the peak, I was spending up to twelve hours of my day nursing.
I don’t regret that, but I do think it meant I had less freedom to, say, multitask. I was able to read during nursing sessions, but I didn’t quite figure out how to write. (Baby was prone to overstimulation, so I couldn’t even watch TV.)
Grief Compounding All
So it wasn’t until the fall that I was able to get back into writing. Baby was reducing nursing hours and getting into a more regular nap and bedtime schedule. (I say more regular, because Baby is still a baby. We have our good days, our bad days, days when we get lots of sleep, and days when we refuse to sleep at all.)
This also coincided with moving forward from my father’s passing. He died in the early summer, and the first three months were spent trying to find the time to process that, in between being a new parent with an infant. I was—and am still—a mess. Time is the only thing that softens grief, but it is still very present in my life. I think it always will be, but it will continue to become softer and more muted as more time passes.
Thus, it took me a fair bit of time to be able to have time and space and the mental/emotional capacity to write.
Finding Inspiration while on Parental Leave
Perhaps an even bigger challenge—or maybe just one that goes hand in hand with time management—was finding the inspiration to write. Between grieving my father and caring for a newborn, I felt like my brain had been disconnected. There were no stories in my head. My creative well felt like it had run dry.
The Issue of Emotional Energy
That was likely because of what was going on in my life. I spend a lot of emotional energy in engaging my child each and every day. I need to be happy and play. Yet I also need to be sympathetic and calming when Baby is upset and crying.
I also spend a good deal of time playing “guess the problem” when Baby is upset, which means I’m using up even more of my mental energy. And on top of that, I am grieving. That takes a lot of mental and emotional energy as well, even if we don’t always recognize it.
It’s little wonder I didn’t feel like there were any story ideas left in the ol’ noggin. All my energy—the energy I’d used to tell stories before—was being diverted.
You Aren’t Blocked; You’re Burnt Out
I don’t think we acknowledge this reality quite as much as we might otherwise. Sometimes, when we’re experiencing what’s termed “writer’s block,” it’s actually “writer’s burn out.” We simply do not have the energy to devote to our stories, because our energy is being depleted elsewhere.
I will say this was a frustrating experience for me. Stories provide me with an easy route for escape from frustration. I will often lose myself in a narrative if I’m dealing with frustration at work. Part of my “mental meditation” during workouts is often wrapping myself up in a narrative. I use workouts to bust stress, but they also give me time and space to play mentally. I hate focusing on my pacing or the burn during a run workout, so I’ll simply try to immerse myself in a story so that I do not even notice the hard work my body is doing.
At some points during my parental leave, I wasn’t even finding time to get workouts in, so I’d lost that outlet. And I wasn’t taking long soaks in the bath either—another place I will meditate on stories.
Refilling the Creative Well
So, as I mentioned, I spent a lot of time reading while on parental leave. Reading is far more passive. It was also less intrusive for Baby during nursing sessions. I could quietly read, especially on an eReader, while Baby nursed and (often) took a little nap. Reading still requires effort and energy—don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t take the same amount of energy writing does. Writing requires creativity; reading allows you to enjoy the creativity of others. You have to labor to share in the world, but you don’t have to choose each event, each sentence, each word. You are simply decoding them and accepting what is there—someone else has already made all the choices.
Yet reading is an important part of writing. It can help inspire us. It helps us refill our well. We can study craft while we’re reading. And, perhaps most important, reading can spark inspiration. Maybe we love a story, but we wish it had gone in a slightly different direction. Maybe we were dissatisfied with a story we read. Or maybe we read something and think, “Oh, there’s an idea. There’s the way I can solve this narrative problem I’ve been having and get the plot in this story working again.”
Reading didn’t precisely send off those sparks for me, but I do think taking the “reading vacation,” if you will, helped. And as much as I’m saying, “Oh, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t get anything done,” I read a lot. And that has to count for something, I think.
Breathing Room in the Schedule
After Baby turned six months, as I said, I was able to get some more time and space. Baby now has a fairly regular nap schedule, which is allowing me to stay on top of the household—the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and the like. I’m slowly chipping away at a longer to-do list as well.
And Baby is also sleeping through the night, which is allowing me and my husband to get some shut eye (at last). Finally, I’m beginning to find space for things like workouts and baths once again, which is freeing up time and space for me to work out narratives.
In short, I’m finding my rhythm again—and with it, my inspiration. All just in time for parental leave to end, and work to throw a wrench in it all.
The First Book I Wrote after Parental Leave
I titled this “I wrote a book on parental leave,” which isn’t precisely accurate. At the time of this writing, I’ve written four now—two novellas and two novels.
I did a novel first, and let me tell you, it was like pulling teeth. Maybe I was a bit rusty. Maybe I simply wasn’t inspired by the idea. But it took three months to finish drafting this thing, even though I was getting more time and space.
The first novella was a lot easier; the second followed hot on its heels. Now I’m knee-deep in a manuscript I was working on early last year, which I wrestled with. It no longer feels like a chore, and I’m inspired. The story was not going in a direction I wanted it to originally, but now I have a direction and a destination in mind.
And that’s making it much easier to write. Baby is still throwing wrenches into everything—and that will be true from now on. But the writing flows; the words and the ideas are there, whereas when I jumped into my first novel draft after Baby, they weren’t.
I suppose all of this is to say if you’re experiencing writer’s block, it will lift. And if you’re finding yourself in a time crunch or mentally or emotionally tapped out, a break might be the best thing you can do anyway.
The words will come back. You will get back to writing. You will create again, even if it takes time.
