Part of the life, or psyche, as a writer is riding highs and lows of creativity.
Sometimes I have so many ideas that it’s painful to not have more hours in the day to explore and poke at them. Other times, I have the luxury of free time, but zero ideas percolating. And then there’s the force of motivation, which is fickle to say the least.
Managing the internal pushes and pulls is one thing. Then you have to send your ideas out into the world. For me, that usually means crafting a pitch letter for an article idea to see if a particular editor is interested. Sometimes it means writing a whole piece before pitching it. More often than not, my pitches do not land.
All that is to say I can get down on how little I’m “producing” on the editorial front (to say nothing of book development). Months go by and I’m so busy with ad work that I haven’t invested in ideas I want to pursue. Or if I don’t sell a piece, I can easily persuade myself it’s not worth the bother.
But once in a while I re-read pitches or essays that I’ve written and think: okay. Not bad. This is one such essay that I pitched to a couple outlets last year and didn’t place so I figured I’d share it here.
Parents are doing so much more every day, suddenly basic skills are forgotten. For me, it was communication.
By Amy Thomas
Sometimes you think you’re doing so well. You’re so proud.
“Honey, there is no more school,” I said to my five-year-old daughter in my quarantine-onset singsong voice while slicing onions for dinner. We had wrapped our home schooling, indulged in Sesame Street, and squeezed in drawing time. It was Day 53 of sheltering in Brooklyn. A Monday. Or Tuesday. Thursday?
“No more school? What do you mean?”
I put my knife down, watching the confusion in her chocolate brown eyes become engulfed by emotion. “But you were supposed to be the chaperone on our field trip,” she said. “The good field trip. The one when we take the bus.” Then the tears started.
Suddenly, I was having an out of body experience: watching myself, blithely telling my five-year-old that, no, she wouldn’t be able to see all her classmates and teachers again. We weren’t going back to school because of the virus. I said this out loud, in the most soothing voice I could muster while screaming at myself inside my head: You idiot! Why didn’t you prep for this conversation? Why didn’t you know this is a big deal for her?
But I knew the answer: I hadn’t prepared for her reaction to the news because all I had been thinking about was my reaction to the news.
I’m one of the tens of millions of working parents figuring out this work-from-home-schooling on the fly. I endured a husband sick with Covid-19, quarantining in one of our two bedrooms, while I doused the remaining 800 square-feet of our apartment in Pine-Sol (I haven’t been able to secure wipes for months). I learned to prop my daughter in front of the TV in order to take calls for my freelance writing projects, smiling through video conferences with the clothes dryer spewing laundry as my “professional” backdrop. I mastered new technologies and created ever more passwords to learn how to homeschool my kindergartner.
That was the first two weeks.
After my husband’s recovery, things got moderately easier. We found a groove with class assignments. A friend told me I could choose a fake backdrop on my video calls. I could sleep in my own bed again. As I and others in my privileged position of being safe and employed were saying, this was the new normal.
I thought I had been doing magnificently well, so my fail really blindsided me.
“Young children generally benefit from receiving concrete information from someone they love and trust about what is happening,” explained Jessica Dym Bartlett, Co-Director of Early Childhood Research at the national research organization, Child Trends. She pointed out that kids want that information framed in a reassuring way. “They need to know someone is in charge and taking care of it.”
As I cradled my daughter on my lap on the kitchen floor, I was doing my best to be reassuring. But in terms of delivering that concrete information, I felt more like an inept politician: on the defensive. Placating, instead of proactive. Was I really in charge here?
Throughout the crisis, I’ve been my daughter’s playmate, caregiver, teacher, and security blanket. While I’ve always been in awe of parents with multiple children or kids with special needs, having one child is its own special level of intensity. She’s had no one else to color with, play hide-and-seek with, to make her laugh and feel loved. Especially after having her world upended, she’s wanted non-stop attention and affection. I had felt I was doing a pretty good job, being extra empathetic, maintaining discipline but also letting things go. Being a goofier version of myself in the hopes of channeling sparkle energy.
And in doing so, I had overlooked the fundamental importance of communication.
“Parents often worry they’ll have to get into scary details,” Dym Bartlett shared. “Most children are actually in search of information that answers the question, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’” Which is true. After all, I had been doing the same thing: tuning into news conferences and studying articles to try to understand what my future was going to look like. If I was going to have to continue balancing my work and daughter’s homeschooling indefinitely. If I should consider not taking additional projects so as to not be stretched thin and stressed out. If she’d ever get to play with a kid her age again.
Luckily just as young children are quick to cry when overwhelmed, they’re also quick to get over it. After a couple minutes on the kitchen floor, the smell of acrid onion hanging in the air, my daughter dried her eyes and went to the other room to resume drawing a unicorn. It had been a traumatic moment for both of us, but also strangely benign.
Since then, day-to-day life has remained stuck on a spin cycle of sameness, while the bigger picture is ever unclear. Is it safe to use child care? Will school resume in the fall? Are children really safe from this virus?
The communication I’m receiving is still not terribly concrete. But at least I can share what I do know in a clear, reassuring way—for her sake as much as mine.